punk
Thomas H. Green
It has been said that Dan Treacy (b. 1960) is the TV Personalities in the same way that Mark E Smith is The Fall. Certainly he has been the sole consistent member since they appeared in 1978 with the single "14th Floor" and subsequent cult hit "Part Time Punks". The early Eighties incarnation of the band, which included "Slaughter" Joe Foster and Ed Ball (later of The Times) has a claim to laying down the blueprint for British indie.Treacy's recurring themes of childhood, Sixties culture, and lo-fi, punky psychedelia became scene staples as Creation kingpin Alan McGee has acknowledged. The Read more ...
howard.male
It’s hard to believe that it’s 30 years since the release of The Clash's London Calling, an album that sounds as vital, immediate and relevant today as it did then. Yet there are probably people who remain more familiar with London Calling’s iconic cover than the music contained on the two discs of shiny black vinyl that came with it. Perhaps that’s one reason a new exhibition inspired by London Calling is about the cartoonist and illustrator Ray Lowry, rather than The Clash or the album itself. Lowry, who died in 2008, designed the sleeve, and the curators have come up with the excellent Read more ...
Peter Culshaw
We have lost one of the great cultural catalysts of our time, a brilliant provocateur, a different kind of artist. Malcolm McLaren was a dear friend, who will be painfully missed – we spent, for example, Millennium Eve together with a few friends in France. When Malcolm hit on the “serious joke” of running for Mayor of London in 2000, he roped me into being his agent. It was a lost cause, of course, but at times it was a surreal and often comic adventure. But then one of his favourite sayings was “Any fool can be a benign success, it takes real courage to be a failure”.He was 64 when he died Read more ...
fisun.guner
Billy Childish claims to think only in pictures. But since writing forms as big a part of his creative output as painting, that can’t be quite true. In fact, he’s written a number of autobiographical novels as well as collections of poetry. What’s more, he’s a hugely prolific musician, so I’m sure he means only that he feels a little more comfortable expressing himself through imagery rather than abstract concepts – though obviously, being human, he must do that as well.Alongside these many activities, Childish also co-founded the Stuckists, that rather silly anti-conceptual art Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Purists would have it that punk rock was but a brief explosion in first New York then London, and was all but spent by the end of 1977. Irish photographer Niall O'Brien, however, was born in 1979 and has no truck with purism. Instead, taking the role of anthropologist for his exhibition Good Rats, he has befriended and spent time with groups of young punks, from skaters in Kingston-upon-Thames to homeless teens in Berlin and Tel Aviv, and documented the noise, chaos and sense of belonging that comes with the subculture more than three decades on from its inception. Click on the images below Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
The death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain in 1994 has provided a densely populated field of daydreams for conspiracy theorists, several of whom hotly insist that the troubled avatar of Grunge was murdered. Conversely, he may be playing in a ZZ Top covers band in Peru with Elvis and Jim Morrison. Whatever, playwright Roy Smiles has pursued a more original angle.Picking up on a rumour that there had been somebody with Cobain on the night of his suicide, Smiles exploits Cobain's well-documented fascination with deceased Sex Pistol Sid Vicious, and wonders aloud what would have happened if the Read more ...
aleks.sierz
Is youth wasted on the young? Well, precious few grown-ups who watch Simon Stephens's new drama, Punk Rock, will develop a sudden urge to be a teenager again: his portrait of a group of middle-class youngsters is every parent's nightmare. They are either foul-mouthed and aggressive bullies, or deeply troubled neurotics - and the gradual escalation of their conflicts ends in the kind of mindless violence that stays on the front pages for days.Set in a Stockport grammar school, on the eve of A-level exams, the play starts off with the tender encounter between two 17-year-olds, local fantasist Read more ...