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His angular freneticism is lost in a narcotic haze. He's fucked up on grass. Time warps. Trembles of hallucination. Paranoia. Too much weed. He attempts to sing a social attack with a head full of Tolkienian reverie. I fight my desire to walk off, held by the drum-kit, held by my drunkeness. I throw my anger at the skins. So passive a victim. Ignorant turns to me in confusion.
"Too fast, fuck you, too fast."
"fuck me Ignorant. I'm too fast or you're too slow. Which? Do you really know? Shit-head. The dream is over. Right?"

Middle-class taste has, with it's infinite ability to adapt and to consume, accepted punk as a music and, encouraged by neat commercial packaging, has been able to totally ignore the real issues from which it originated. The political and social aspects of punk have been swamped by commercial considerations. Too eagerly, too quickly, too neatly have the young revolutionaries been sold the party line..........
Play as you earn.
The green-back dream.
The Beatles are dead, the Stones are dead, Dylan is dead and so are the Rolls Royce Punkers. A torn sweatshirt is a statement, not a fashion. No one would have believed that fashion could buy the line, but it has. Punk has become Manhattan radical chic, encouraged by its super-stars who bought their ticket, but never got on the plane.
Yes, they talk of revolution, but it's from the back of a limousine and all the time some uncle Tom changes gear for them and sees that the wheels are turning. They talk of revolution from the safety of the stage, protected by their position, their privilege, their armoured minds. Well, they climbed on my shoulders to get there and right now I'm moving away.
Wham...See?
And the limousine rus on cash and the cash flows and the record sales grow and I don't see Radio Ethiopia free anyone in Harlem, no way, the words of revolution resound across the pinewood furniture of Americas dream, dissent and Bacardi on the rocks, and no one cares a fuck. Not one of those mrddle-class consumers would dare-show their face in the Roxy, even if now the Roxy is a tame commercial rip-off where tired ex-blues bands pump out timid and sterilised versions of what they think punk might have been. Posers. What kind of revolution is this? Everyone's living off the brief six months of Roxy revolution and imagining the battle over. It is in one sense, the generals have retreated behind the lines, but ther's still an army out there and they'd best not forget it. Everyone's waiting to see it happen, well it ain't going to if we're waiting on orders from above. Johnny Rotten had his legs and arms cut off by Tin Pan Alley, so he won't be back, nor will the rest of the elite, they're all hanging about for a slice of the meat.

The perfume of her corpse, rich in the idle light of dawn.

Ignorant has delivered his first song like a sick sloth, he hangs on the microphone as if it were the universe, the only universe and its slipping away from under him. He leers out at the audience.
"Right? Right?"
The shiny metal of the mike-stand seems to bend beneath his halitosis. The guitars were flat, my drumming was out and, artistically, the whole number, which is usually one of our best, has been a total fuck-up. The Roxy audience is not at the best of times disposed to overt shows of generosity, after the rendition of our first song there is a solemn silence. What do they want? Music? Musak? But it ain't about music, is it? Yes? No? Right? Fuck 'em. They've got to learn sometime.

Punk ain't music, it's a way of thought. Punk ain't a fashion, it's a way of being, it's anarchy in the U.K. the U.S.A where ever, and that is'nt tuned guitars and clever vocal lines any more than it's limousines at the stage door of CBGBs. Oh you Monroes, how you line the corridors to the morgue.
: I : . :: If the first-wave punkers, concorde anarchists, velvet zippies, have sold out and become property in some wanked out economic system, it is up to the second wave to fight a hard battle, this time it's against an army wearing the same uniform.

I wonder whether we look and sound as bad as we feel, I can't decide whether to throw up the last drop of wine or throw down another one. Ignorant does'nt look possible, he waves about like a wind-caught feather, swaying against the universe-mikestand. Crash. The whole lot collapses on the floor. Ignorant climbs to his feet again, his eyes are a desperate parody of a freshly skinned dog. Andy, who noormally pumps out a wild aggressive rhthym on the guitar and a wild aggressive energy with his body, has fallen against a speaker cabinet and seems to be doing a bad impersonation of Elvis's last public performance, dead in Memphis.

Yes, it's a value, a burgeois standard, yes, there should be no standards but your own, who else can set them? But this evening my standards are being stretched to a wavery limit. What we play is always shit, very fast, very plain, very heavy and direct S.H.I.T. but this is'nt even shit, it's slurred messy crap and deep inside, beneath the alchohol, beneath that social me that is displayed here, something says 'no'. That's the ultimate freedom. Yes? The right to say 'no'.
Yes?
Ignorant decides that he deos'nt want to do the next number, it's too fast for him, he feels he can't crack through the dope. Well, tough shit because this is meant to be a band and that does mean a kind of shared responsibility, even if in our case it's a pretty frail one.
"Fucking do it Ignorant or I'll do you."
"Piss off Rimbaud."
The ultimate freedom. Right?
Half way through the next number I realise that he's decided to do it after all. I try to slow down, speed up, whatever it is. I cock-up. Completely blow the whole number. I don't recognise a thing, don't know what we're doing, don't remember what we've done. Where am I? Major Tom, here I come again. The ultimate freedom, the NASA negative.

If the record companies, the club owners, the press and the public think that they've got us trained, WHAM,I've got news for them, I might not get invitrd to their next party, but I do know that it's them that's got it all wrong. If you suck too hard there's a chance you'll get piss and that's precisely what's beginning to happen.

So, they bought up the pedigrees, they forgot that pedigrees suffer from in-breeding, they come out with fucked up heads and weak knees. Yes, they bought~up the pedigrees and neatly pressed their sound onto vinyl and their minds into the money bag.
Punk originated as a statement..................

'Make your own'
'Do it yourself'

This website was originally produced by Southern Records in the 2000s. It has been reconstructed as part of http://theartofcrass.uk