SEVENTIES POP TENDS TO BE DATED EITHER PRE- OR POST- PUNK. IT WAS A REACTION AGAINST THE DISTANCING OF THIS OR THAT REMOTE GROUP - "SUPER" OR OTHERWISE BUT FOREVER IN THE STADIUMS OF NORTH AMERICA - FROM THE CRUCIAL TEENAGE MARKET.
"Why should young kids have to listen to the music their older brothers listen to?" Tommy of the Ramones would ask after his group plus the Shirts, Blondie and other "trash rock" acts surfaced from clubs in the Bowery, the same run-down district that had given birth to the New York Dolls.
The Dolls, T Rex, Lou Reed, Gary Glitter, Roxy Music and other glam-connected stars were among precious few older performers acceptable to punk rockers - the "blank generation" - possibly because "the glam stars were punks", opined Glitter, "but we were a different kind of punk". In Britain, new punk festered initially beneath the "street level" acclaim accorded to "pub rock" performers like Dr Feelgood and Ian Dury who, almost despite themselves, would be swept from the nicotine clouds of bars and clubs and into the Top 40, though, strictly speaking, pub rock as much as trash rock precluded stardom and its isolation from the everyday.
The punk (or new wave) storm broke in 1976 when "radical" pop journalists became evangelical about it via fawning saturation coverage, and toadying to someone called "Johnny Rotten", chief show-off with the Sex Pistols. It was a fierce time and no mistake. More than rockabilly and skiffle, anyone could do it. As punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue elucidated, all you needed were three chords. Not a week went by without another "hot" new wave ensemble ringing some changes and drawing gobbets of appreciative spit from the audience. Somehow, most of them looked and sounded just like Sex Pistols: ripped clothes, short hair, safely-pin earrings and those three chords thrashed at speed to machine-gun drumming behind a johnny-one-note with a self-denigrating name like "Kenny Awful", ranting against the old, the wealthy and the established.
Thrillingly slip-shod though its aural debris was, punk lacked the musical strength of both the Sixties beat boom and psychedelia. It was always doomed to be ineffectual artistically - and, after the pathetic drug-related demise of Sex Pistol Sid Vicious in 1978 while awaiting trial for the murder of his girlfriend, it had run out of shock tactics.
Following punk in Britain was a hyped craze for "power pop" - punk minus the loutish affectations and "revolutionary" message - of which the great white hope was the Pleasers, blue-eyed propagators of "Thamesbeat", who wobbled their moptops and went "oooooo" into a microphone. Then came a resurgence of rockabilly, notably by the Cramps - "psychobilly" - and the Stray Cats, both US outfits.
As it had been with old-style rockabilly, the grubbing show business industry stole punk's most viable ideas and persuaded its more palatable exponents to ease up, grow their hair maybe, talk correct and get ready to rake in the dollars. As his face was his fortune, Generation X's Billy Idol, for instance, was groomed as an undated Ricky Nelson while some of his Generation X colleagues were to form the over-publicized Sigue Sigue Sputnik for a crack at mid-Eighties glam after Adam and the Ants had ruled 1981 with Dave Dee-type dressing-up. By 1986, the Damned had gone smooth enough to score their biggest hit with 'Eloise', lovingly copied from Barry Ryan's string-laden original dating from 1968. In its way, this volte-face was as much the apotheosis of blank generation nihilism as the self-immolation of Sid Vicious.
With one of his songs absorbed into Linda Ronstadt's gooey canon, one of the first British new wave ambassadors to gain tangible success over the Atlantic was a weedy young man in glasses and uncommunicative stage persona with the nom de guerre Elvis Costello. Others who used punk as a springboard to greater things included the Police, the Pretenders, Tom Robinson, the Jam and Wreckless Eric, whose Len Bright Combo was to preside over England's Medway towns scene in the mid-Eighties as self-contained in its own way as Merseybeat.
Musically, punk left its mark on a new strain of heavy metal that combined frantic energy with eardrum-bursting sonic assault as administered by such as Van Halen, Bon Jovi, Guns 'N Roses, Iron Maiden and Def Leppard. Punk outrage lived on more discernibly in death metal, an acute exaggeration of the more bloodstained preoccupations of Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper. Among its brand leaders are Megadeth, Carcass and Revulsion.
Certain death metal entertainers were not above the same old publicity stroke that everyone from Presley to the Sex Pistols had pulled - that they were nice lads when you got to know them. Pacifist and vegetarian Carcass, for example, consisted of two medical students and guitarist Bill Steer who was almost apologetic with his "I'm intrigued by mass murders and that, but I think people take all the gory lyrics with a pinch of salt".
