First New Year resolution: read a new book every month. Starting with this: from early r’n’b, through the home made speaker sound system clashes of the 40’s and 50’s, Ska,Rocksteady and more. More evidence that whilst punk embraced the DIY ethic, it didn’t invent it. Expect the resolution to be broken on Feb 1st when I’m still half way through it.
Book 4/12: April’s Tome.
Our Johnny; A bit of a Marmite character, vilified and sainted in equal measure. Musical heritage-wise he’s up there with the best. Sex Pistols were my Beatles/Small Faces etc. PiL at the start were groundbreaking, whilst updating Lydon’s influences such as Can and Beefheart, playing to a new set of open minds. Not Sex Pistols Mk2 as The Professionals ended up being, he was free from the (literally) cartoon band that the Pistols became.
Contradictory but honest, just a little too earnest with the working class diatribe though. You might have been up until 1975 but then mixing with the future Dame and middle class Malcolm and wearing the designer clobber which would cost a month’s wages for a real working man.
I envisage this to be an entertaining read because that is what he is, he entertains, whether you like him or not.
Month 5: Book 5
This is the first of a trilogy of drummer’s auto/biographies over the next 3 months.
The Cure were part of the foundations of the bridge built between punk and what came next for me. Those first 4 albums; Three Imaginary Boys, Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography soundtracked the difficult ages between 15 and 18 like no other band. I was leaving school and casting out into the whole wide world with all it’s trials and tribulations.
Lol was never what you’d call a technically gifted drummer, his playing on the first album was almost childlike but it added to the charm of what was a bit of a ramshackle affair. Seventeen Seconds was minimal and robotic, Faith minimal and Gothic, Pornography was minimal and tribal, but all throughout those records, it was Lol’s drumming that underpinned those moody, claustrophobic songs.
Soon after Lol was relegated to keyboards and became a peripheral part of the band he’d started. His demon’s started coming to the fore with his hands increasingly idle. It’s no coincidence that once The Cure started to use top class drummers they became stadium material.
But those early records still hold the best and worst memories for me, and Lol was part of and deserves his place in many other people’s musical histories.
