9. As a site for cultural production, all aspects of the middle classes would be deemed toxic, if not radioactive.
10. By the year 2000, Call Centre Britain would be firmly established. The rhetoric of advertising and retail – the slogans of the Benign Corporation (‘Because Life’s Complicated Enough!’, ‘Every Little Helps!’, ‘What Can We Do to Make It Happen?’) would be based on an idea of intimacy, empathy and personal contact with the customer. The reality behind the rhetoric would be a culture of endlessly deferred accountability, in which there was no one, ultimately, whom the consumer could challenge as responsible for the fair running of The System. Translated into the dynamics of a family, the consumers became children (remember the Trojan Horse of Infantilism a little earlier on?) to the parents of the Benign Corporation, who promised comfort but handed out abandonment.
11. The end result of these ideas would be the feeling that, we, the consumer democracy, were in fact post-political – and afflicted with a Fear of Subjectivity.
The lost young men of Campbell and Wisniewski just didn’t seem hip to the Attitude of the Nineties – they were too awkward, too obscure, too strait-laced, too fey. As culture-vulturing city slickers, all they could do was carry on sitting there. Sighing, perhaps. Fairly soon, all the elitist smarty-pants twiddly bits of Eighties post-modernism – Style Culture, atria, nouvelle cuisine, Jeff Koons – would be declared (in public, at any rate) An Enemy of the People.
The culture of self-conscious artifice had been replaced by a culture of self-conscious authenticity. And as the margins of culture were fed into the conservative, market-dictated flow of the mainstream, it would take some fancy footwork to remain oppositional. But oppositional to what? What did the term mean nowadays? In many cases, the only way to become culturally confrontational was to make a choice to cease your cultural production – to culture strike, as the writer, punk historian and activist Stewart Home would declare and demonstrate.
Howard Devoto
Of all the icons assembled in the pantheon of punk, Howard Devoto could most probably lay claim to being the most enigmatic and the most revered. He was described by Pete Frame (the creator of the Rock Family Trees) as ‘the Orson Welles of punk’, and pronounced in a tribute song by Momus to be ‘The Most Important Man Alive’. Morrissey stated that it was Devoto whom he had in mind when he wrote ‘The Last Of the Famous International Playboys’, while Paul Morley claimed that Devoto introduced a ‘new literacy not just into punk, but into rock as a whole’. He has also been cited as an influence by novelists as different in style as D. J. Taylor and Jeff Noon.
And yet Devoto himself remains mysterious. His guru-like status has been all the more respected for the dignified manner in which he has allowed his body of recorded work and published lyrics to represent him. Having co-founded and founded, respectively, two of the most influential groups of the punk period, the Buzzcocks and Magazine, he then went on to record a solo album, Jerky Versions of the Dream, before forming his third and final group, Luxuria, in 1986.
He ceased recording professionally in 1990, preferring the anonymity of a day job to some kind of honorary position in the music business as an elder statesman of cultural revolution. He could therefore also claim to be ‘the T. E. Lawrence of punk’. With regard to his current employment, Devoto has little to say. ‘I am the manager of the archive at a leading photographic agency in central London. I also receive royalties from my recordings.’ He is neither open nor defensive about his working life beyond music, except to say that his work with Luxuria did not deliver the support he required to proceed.
‘There was something very limiting about punk,’ he states, in a tone that is both assertive and measured – Alan Bennett without the soft edges – ‘and in the early days that was punk’s strength. You knew your themes, you knew how to look and you knew your musical style. And there you were, for a while. But I’d loved all kinds of other music up to that point. There was some big elemental thing that happened with the Sex Pistols, but in terms of music there was a whole gamut of other stuff which I had liked, and which, in the realm of ideas, were not totally different tins of biscuits – Leonard Cohen, Dylan, David Bowie. With the Pistols and Iggy Pop, it was the anger and poetry which hooked me in, really.’
In the spring of 1976, in Manchester, Devoto co-founded Buzzcocks with guitarist Pete Shelley. They recorded the massively influential Spiral Scratch EP, and a highly collectable official bootleg, Time’s Up. Heard now, these recordings have lost none of their fizzed-up, self-aware energy, driven by Shelley’s sublime reinvention of jagged, high-speed pop guitar playing. On machine-gun-tempo songs such as ‘Friends of Mine’, ‘Boredom’ and ‘Orgasm Addict’, Devoto delivers his smarter-than-smart lyrics with an edgy petulance that disguises their wit and biting acuity as a kind of pantomime of dumbness. ‘You’re making out with schoolkids, winos and heads of state,’ he lashes out on ‘Orgasm Addict’, ‘You’re making out with the lady who puts the little plastic robins on the Christmas cake.’
Artistically, the young Devoto was responding to influences from Alice Cooper to Camus. Having studied philosophy as a student, and having been interested in meditation, his lyrics on Spiral Scratch and Time’s Up were fully intended to be carefully posed, self-questioning philosophical statements about the problems of existence. Interviewing himself, when Spiral Scratch was originally released in 1977, Devoto wrote of the song ‘Breakdown’, ‘“Breakdown”’s hero is in the position of Camus’ Sisyphus – “To will is to stir up paradoxes.”’ Punk rock had thus been a personal and creative catalyst for Devoto, offering him a means to conduct nothing less than a biopsy on his own soul.
‘I think that punk rock was a new version of trouble-shooting modern forms of unhappiness,’ he says, ‘and I think that a lot of our cultural activity is concerned with that process, particularly in our more privileged world, with time on our hands – in a world, most probably, after religion. My life changed at the point I saw the Sex Pistols, and became involved in trying to set up those concerts for them. Suddenly I was drawn into something which really engaged me. Punk was nihilistic anger, not overtly political anger. Political anger could have been the radical Sixties.
But going back to what I was going through, personally, and all of the stuff that you do go through as a student, I remember – before punk even – pursuing Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty; I had pictures of the Baader Meinhof on my wall, and all of that hunger strike stuff was going on. It was that struggle for commitment which you have as a young person. And where did you put all that when you’re a young person like me, who wanted to play a “Yes, but –” game with everything?’
Since 1990, Devoto has given the whole punk reunions circuit an extremely wide berth, as well as being highly reluctant to offer up his recollections to what has become the major academic industry of ‘Punk Studies’. An example of this reticence could be seen in his contribution to the commemorative documentary, which was made in 1996, about the two Sex Pistols concerts held at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in the summer of 1976. Despite being the man who actually arranged these concerts – with his own first group, the Buzzcocks, supporting at the second – Devoto chose to be represented on the programme by a reel-to-reel tape-recorder, playing a recording of his few comments about the occasion.
Person to person, he can give a meticulous account of his involvement in punk, often using factual information and chronology as a means of avoiding generalized statements about punk’s ‘attitude’.
‘Can I just say,’ he states, ‘that what I don’t buy are things like a piece which I read by Caroline Coon about punk a few years ago, which said how desolate the mid-Seventies were, culturally and politically. And I don’t buy John Lydon’s line, either, in this new film The Filth and the Fury, where he’s going on about “the system being really oppressive in Britain, and that’s why punk rock happened”. I just don’t accept this stuff, really. In myself, I can’t say that I was feeling particularly great at that time – but what’s new?’
Having left the Buzzcocks almost as soon as they released their first record, Devoto formed Magazine as a way of expanding the possibilities that had been