RAMONA

Probably the greatest song ever written about the Ramones is R.A.M.O.N.E.S. by Motorhead, originally on the album 1916, later covered by the Ramones themselves, which rolls through, with vision and thunder, a flash of images of the Ramones urban knucklehead milieu: “Black leather, knee-hole pants/Can't play no highschool dance”

Then there's Guitar Wolf, who bite the styles of Motorhead and the Ramones in equal measure, Japanese noise superheroes in black leather, everything louder than everything else, cramming words together in a sort of impressionistic punk rock fuck you, where you can tell exactly what they mean, but also are incapably of explaining exactly what they’re saying, heirs to the ultimate cool of the Ramones, black leather jackets and simplicity, crunching out the surf-garage throb of the song Kung Fu Ramone Culmination Tactic.

Ramones tributes often come at their subject from the same sort of angle, with the same sort of shimmy, careening around in a 100mph coming together of that black leather, ripped up jeans, speed and noise, jukebox romance, communal shouts of the backpatch-cool stupidity slogans "GABBA GABBA HEY!" and "HEY! HO! LET'S GO!", an emphasis on the Ramones as a combination of teen heartthrobs, dangerous herberts and cretinous goobers. And an overwhelming desire to be joined with them somehow, to imitate, to hang with that crew, like on The Migraines I Wanna be a Ramone, which packs 40-odd Ramones references into its 3 minutes, going deep beyond the pinheads and the beaten brats, managing such lyrical feats as rhyming Mama's Boy with Animal Boy. There are also at least three other songs with the same title.  

A similar desire for assimilation exists on I Wanna Be Like Dee Dee Ramone by The Parasites. “I Wanna Be a Blitzkrieg Bopper/Wanna Be a Real Punk Rocker.” It's pleasingly reckless in its fuzz and scramble, but it does have the problem of focusing wholly on the punk rebel icon at the expense of the series of life experiences that defined Dee Dee, The Parasites never mention their desire to be a rentboy in 70s New York, have a lifelong heroin addiction, play in GG Allin’s band or release an unbelievably bad rap album that demonstrates all the flow and lyricism of a cartoon moose on barbiturates.

 The Spazzys have the song I Wanna Cut My Hair Like Marky Ramone, about wanting to cut your hair like Marky Ramone, but acknowledging "It's gonna look dumb, but it's gonna be fun." For the Spazzys, they don’t care if it means they can’t get a boyfriend, looking like Marky is way more important. A shitty momcut as being part of something greater, cheap self-mutilation to join the cult. Kinship with this group of impossible freaks.

 This is in the subgenre of songs specifically about minor Ramones. Generally the songs that focus on the Ramones revolve around the main core of Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee, Tommy, Richie, CJ and Marky kinda gets kicked to the curb or just short shout outs, though there is Tommy Ramone by The Vapids, a two minute biography that follows their first drummer from his awkward teenage years, "TROUBLE ALL AROUND!" is its repeated refrain. Elvis doesn't even get one song to my knowledge, but then again he only played two shows, whereas Marky was in the band for 12 years and even gets the indignity of usually being left off the iconic logo shirt in favour of Tommy. (Also, when the Ramones covered R.A.M.O.N.E.S. they changed the lyrics from “Hear Marky kick some ass” to “Marky takes it up the ass”)

Even Kung Fu Monkeys' I Miss the Ramones has to add "Let’s not forget Marky!" almost as an afterthought. I Miss the Ramones was penned around the Ramones break-up, serving as  framing them in a larger cultural narrative, running through post-war music history from the 50s onwards heralding the Ramones as heroes arriving in the nick of time “to save the day and take back radio” from the turgid indulgence of classic and prog rock. An idea which does have some merit, though the implication that the Ramones were also somehow responsible for exposing the Watergate scandal is probably a bit farfetched.

The Mr T Experience End of the Ramones says goodbye to the Ramones with a transcendent final show, everything coming together for a last 1-2-3-4 where the pang of goodbye is temporarily obscured by the blazing exit in spite of, or maybe because of, the beating life has given the four not-brothers “Joey is a vegetable Dee Dee's going bald Johnny got kicked in the head but the kids still love them all” 

They do and they still miss them. The loss is often palpable. Punk Rock Club RIP is mournful, the passing of a venue where good times were had, the Ramones were seen, friendships were made and jaws were broken, it's as sad as a song that bubblegum can really be and you can read the grieving for a show space as grieving for the Ramones also. Their mention is often punk rock shibboleth, a touchstone, like in The Queers anti-hippie anthem Granola Head, “I’d rather be at home, listening to the Ramones.” or in Screeching Weasel’s I Need Therapy as the painful result of this obsession lamenting the fact that he’s "O.D.'d on The Ramones cause I just sit around at home"

MTX, The Queers and Screeching Weasel being the Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee of the 90s Ramonescore revival, simplistic sharp catchy punk cuts on love and isolation and loss. Buzzpop barbs of that inspired the likes of The Transgressions with Baby I Love You (But I Need Someone to Talk to About the Ramones), in this, as in (The Huntingtons Jeannie Hate the Ramones, and The Creeps My Girlfriend Hates the Ramones) adoration for the Ramones is a relationship acid test. It’s probably Ramones-worship at its most juvenile, which is pretty fucking juvenile in a field which is an endless shambling parade of four-chord arrested development. Stylistically not amazingly interesting, the The Transgressions at least get out in 40 odd seconds of screaming, the Huntingtons and the Creeps rely on a mix of terrific pace and sloppy vocal collisions between dry whoa-ohs and snotty scrapes, to sustain themselves, until the Creeps song gets kinda slower and a bit boring. What it really points too though is that sort of teenage shortsightedness, music taste over all, judgemental punx exclusivity, a ridiculous shiteheaded personal integrity over compromise and happiness. How many people are there out there suffering just cos some girl ain't into. Is it really as common a problem as these bands make out? Similarly dumb but coming from the other directions are The Come Ons with She's Ugly But She Likes the Ramones (though that does put the Spazzys fears of loneliness to rest).

It might be these sort of bands which are put on blast by the goofball iconoclasm of Boris the Sprinkler’s Kill the Ramones released on a double A-side single with the song Kill the Sex Pistols, by a band that clearly loves the Ramones as much as anyone, once recording a whole album cover of the Ramones’ End of the Century. The Ergs! offer a less drastic solution pleading over a ripped off and muddied-up Teenage Lobotomy riff Xerox Your Genitals, Not the Ramones.

Of course, Kill the Ramones was written before the main three Ramones had actually died. Since the end of the century Dee Dee, Joey and Johnny have all bought it. My favourite version of Motorhead’s R.A.M.O.N.E.S. is on the 2005 live bootleg Stagefright where Lemmy introduces the song with a growl of "I was gonna stop doing this song last year, but then another one died, so I had to start all over a fucking again.”

Since then Ramones songs have leant even more towards the mournful, dug further into the loss, it works as well as the kisses and adoration, because the Ramones weren't just about the teenage bounce and gangs, Joey's voice was always capable of an edge of sadness in stuff like Danny Says and She Talks to Rainbows

 Joey Had to Go, a mid-tempo stomper, from Nomeansno ramonescore side-project, The Hanson Brothers, draws a vivid portrait of Joey as a sort of braindead intergalactic traveller, "He couldn't count past four. But he didn't need a whole lot more. He was weird all spindly and tall. Standing in his leathers up against the wall.” an impression probably fostered by their most famous on screen appearance in the Roger Corman classic Rock and Roll High School where the entire band comes across like spaced-out weirdos struggling to grasp the fundamentals of human interaction, Dee Dee endlessly baffled by the prospect of eating a slice pizza. Here Joey’s an alien being passing through, bestowing his wisdom and then he’s gone, more worlds to tear up, more galaxies to get hoppin. 

The Sloppy Seconds, still aren’t at that stage of acceptance yet, with the tightly-rhymed slamdance denial of You Can’t Kill Joey Ramone, “NO! NO! NO! JOEY DON’T GO!” it screams, “Save your prayers for Dee Dee” it pleads.

Not all of the songs deal with love and loss, imitation and destruction, for instance,  Frenzal Rhomb explicate the art/artist division in the song Johnny Ramone was in a Fucken Good Band But He Was a Cunt (subtitled GABBA GABBA YOU SUCK) but that’s an outlier. Most of them get their kicks in romance and pinhead longing.

 The crush of Helen Love’s Joey Ramoney, which portrays a long-distance desire over a sweetly skipping keyboard riff, sampling Joey’s hey-ho’s and running away with its own silly love. “There’s a girl who loves you on the other side of the world” it reassures Joey, perfectly capturing that bedroom-poster closeness you feel towards your teenage idols. Certainly more pleasant than The Maxies’ Sandy with its promise of “For you, Sandy, I’d dig up all the dead Ramones.”

 Amy Rigby’s Dancing with Joey Ramone, is, at least at first, mellow dancefloor seduction, with a possibly spectral Joey, who keeps his distance, as she copies every move he made. On the initial listen you get caught up in the gentle shuffle, and it comes across as resembling the adoration of Joey Ramoney, but on relistens it gets weirder and more aggressive ("I tried to say something/He said "Girl, shut your mouth, they're playing Papa Was a Rolling Stone") and besides, if you're copying every move he makes, Joey Ramone’s main move was leaning forward and looking scary as he shook his head about arrhythmically so really the scene’s less romantic than it might appear. At the end the unreliable narrator finds herself alone, but still stuck with those warm gluey memories as the song suddenly speeds up into Ramones pastiche.

 Sleater-Kinney’s I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone focuses on this heartthrob idea, usurping Joey’s place as an idol, with a rebel yelp. It's equal parts that imitation and destruction. Joey's a god, but one to kill. "I wanna be your Joey Ramone/Pictures of me on your bedroom door/Invite you back after the show/I'm the queen of rock and roll."

Delay’s Everything You Hate brings together that metaphorical power together with the complex interpersonal relationships, the tension and loathing that characterised the band for most of its existence, synthesising their place as icons with their reality as humans. “You say you don’t like the Ramones/But I think we’re a lot like the Ramones/Cos we look good together but we don’t get along/We’re a lot like the Ramones.”

Modern Life Is War's D.E.A.D.R.A.M.O.N.E.S. similarly mixes the reality with the fantasy. It's got that assimilative desire, but it's also from a point in time when the Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee are in the ground so it's way darker and more tortured in its cry of "Now I just wanna go back home and turn up my stereo/Until the rhythm melts my bones 'cause I'm a Dead Ramone"

Shonen Knife, known also as the Osaka Ramones, who have also released full albums of Ramones covers and played entire Ramones cover shows. The song Ramones Forever, tells the tale of a life lived through the medium of Ramones. It’s a simple process that has played out all over the world for the last 35 years. Day 1, hear the Ramones on the radio. Day 2, buy a Ramones album. Day 3. Start a fucking punk rock band. 

 The song triumphantly climaxes with a scene of Shonen Knife supporting the Ramones, which actually happened. This is one of the ultimate attractions of punk rock, that you can start a shitty band in your shitty town and then be sharing the stage with your heroes not long after, but, more than with any other punk band, the Ramones lend themselves to hero worship as much as best-friend fantasies the Ramones are definitely on pedestals. 

The inclusive/exclusive balance, the build-it-up/tear-it-down counterplay, where you can be part of something, you can change your last name to Ramone, but you're not a RAMONE-Ramone. You can wish to obliterate every idol, but you still need heroes somehow, that impossible thing to aspire to. You can get close, but you still got that gap. You’ll never quite be one of those four sloppily uniformed thugs, leant against the wall looking cool, but almost trying too hard to look badass and disaffected and ending up like some weird broken simulacra of teenage cool, all the more desirable for its sliced and mangled take on that languid adolescent pose. The Ramones are gone, whether you think them benevolent aliens or just a bunch of fucked-up dudes from New York, they're gone, but when  Shonen Knife sing “RAMONES FOREVER! MUSIC FOREVER! RAMONES FOREVER! PUNK ROCK FOREVER!” you don't really feel like they are, you feel like they're just around the corner, something eternal and drawn in the stars and much as their etched in brick and scrawled on toilet doors and commemorated in a thousand bad tattoos, a couple hundred sloppy punk rock songs. They meant something, they did something, yo, cuz 13 human beings have walked on the moon, but only 8 have been Ramones.

Not all of these songs are available on youtube, but you can track most of them down somewhere online. For a more complete detailing of songs about the Ramones, see this excellent list which I stumbled across while editing this piece.

Cülo - My Life Sucks And I Could Care Less

"I feel that the future is hopeless and that things cannot improve." - Sarah Kane, 4:48 Psychosis

Metal-umlauted buttpunk played at nosedive rates. Cülo smashed their way in with a series of fucking great demos and seven inches which were collected on Life Is Vile and So Are We. This is their first real full-length, My Life Sucks (And I Could Care Less). Opening with the chirps and bloops of synths on Gestapo Boots of a Mutant, the album quickly tracks into its hazardous hardcore pace, running out this song in a punk instrumental, thrashing onwards with tension, setting the scene for this album's snarling confrontational stamp, which is anti-most shit.

ANTI-SOCIETY: Societies Claws, Dominant Farce. Lives lived in serried rows, proceeding down the same paths. Cülo ain't down with that.

ANTI-COP: On the Streets: squealing in and speeding up. Cops sharpen society's claws. Cülo ain't down with that.

ANTI-WAR: Down in Equador: dry vocals through a weedy death haze, like the jungle madness of Lucius Shepherd's Life During Wartime. Weird kid in a bad way soundtracked by soldier boot speed trampling. DOA In My Head twirling around in guitar tightness like sanity down a plughole.



ANTI-NOT BEING ON HEROIN: On the Nod. Cyanide Slug.

ANTI-LIFE: I Was Supposed to Be an Abortion. A longing for nothingness that goes beyond wiping out today with drugs. A time-travel reset wish so this could've never been. There's a line like this in Dead Milkmen's Nutrition too but they're it's played for fratty laughs, here it's painful.

ANTI-LOVE. Sick Sick Sick replete with organ stabs like The Misfits's Cough/Cool or the sharp urban throatcut of Hank Wood and the Hammerheads. "I GET DRUNK, I SAY SHIT/RAZORBLADE LOVE BABY, SICK, SICK, SICK." A take on companionship as bleak as The Mountain Goats's Alpha sequence. Cülo want no part of good, or they just feel like all the hate swilling about inside them that they don't deserve it.

ANTI-NOW: Modern Depressions (plural, that's important) with its bludgeoning drums and , that tears up suburban ruts ("I'M TOO BORED TO LIVE, TOO LAZY TO DIE!" rings out this death-to-monotony screed, this take is also present in It's My Life Sentence. ("IF THIS IS FREEDOM WORK OR DIE I WAS CURSED WITH A WORKING BRAIN!") There's a sadness ramped-up into anger here, as there is on Cyanide Slug.

ANTI-ART: Your Art is Getting All Over Me on the ickiness of nice things. "It's beautiful, you can be so boring and trite." Well maybe not anti-art. Anti-beauty, definitely. Anti-cool kid cos this punk trip is some nerdy undone shit (for people with working brains they want to break), maybe echoes of New Bomb Turk's classic takedown of artistic exceptionalism, Born Toulouse-Lautrec, but without the come-together chorus of that song, just the outrage at the self-satisfied poses, shooting with a dropout buzz and burn.

ANTI-EVERYTHING: "FUCK YOU! DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO! DON'T CARE ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES! DON'T CARE ABOUT THE RULES!" is the chorus of My Attitude. Adolescent fury unbound.

But while Cülo share some of the obsessions of similarly fantastic current hardcore band Wild Child with their monomaniacal devotion to the dirty scrapings of lives lived on the wrong side of trackmarks and brains in rebellion, they don't share that bands chaotic imprecations. Cülo are fucking tight. They burn with the impetus of live Ramones with the junkfed streetcurled obsessions of dead Ramones. They're a band for whom the vast majority of their itching being can probably be traced back to non-studio versions of the song Wart Hog (or maybe the terrific kiddy deathwarble Lolita No. 18 version of it), both in speed and slurred words and in lines like "Death, death, death it's the price I pay/It's a sick world, what can I say?" and "I wanna puke, I can't sit still/Just took some dope and I feel ill/It's a sick world, sick, sick, sick/It's a hopeless life, I hate it, hate it"

There are a million bands that have been influenced by the Ramones, you can find Ramones covers from every corner of the globe, but often they stick to the poppy simplicity of I Remember You and, while I love many pop-punk bands, that sort of unchanging Ramonescore can get pretty damn tiring because the Ramones were so much more than just the goofy teenage love scenes Oh Oh I Love Her So (not to shit on Oh Oh I Love Her So, that song is one of my all-time favourites). They were so much more (they were rappers and movie-stars), they were fucking dirty and weird. They were Sol Yurick thugs singing love songs, they were poppy, they were fast, they were fucked-up dysfunctional individuals capable of writing tragic dirges, beautiful soaring dreamy daggers, and yeah, two minute punk runners that can cut through everyday problems for a second like a bomb. People who say every Ramones song sounds the same are people who've read more shitty articles about the Ramones by ill-informed narratively-limited nostalgiafucks than listened to Ramones albums.

"And yet, these DORKS who have more or less devoted their life to cluelessly ripping off the Ramones have never noticed this, and are generally hard-pressed to come up with a good reason why they're so goddamn boring. I always get the impression bands like these leave the stage muttering things like "Hmm, I THOUGHT I had the right kind of U.S. pin on the lapel of my black leather jacket! Maybe if I get a better one, we will be considered more exciting!")." - Rev. Norb, ripping apart Ramones-clones in his Rules for the 1997 Punk Touring Season. Okay, I'm taking it out of context a bit and here he was actually talking about the tight adherence to two-measure chord changes that the Ramones didn't ever do that much by these sort of bands, but the sentiment probably applies to people who make every single Ramones rip-off song they squeeze out some trite shit about talking to girls or not talking to girls, combining the sweetness of Rockaway Beach with the lyrics of I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.

Anyway The Ramones's dirt is what Cülo feeds off of, the self-destructive street Dee Dee of Chinese Rock, the hate between Johnny and Joey of The KKK Took My Baby Away, the abandonment of straight life from It's Not My Place in the 9 to 5 World, freak self-identification laments on Pinhead, looking cool while feeling burnt out in druggy need like I Wanna Be Sedated and just the fuck-it nihilism: WART HOG, the Cülo ur-text.

So while in their hardcore punk mess there are inevitable echoes of a slew of greats: D.O.A., 76% Uncertain, CIA, Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers, Terveet Kadet etc, you've also got real pop-punk touches, like the guitar lick of Cyanide Slug, or the closing title track, whose opening is like a viperous sharpened take on the wistful little guitar whips of fellow-Chicagoans Screeching Weasel's The Girl Next Door (or Texas ramshackle-punk Stymie's How to be an ASS). Cülo hate most things: but they love the Ramones because the Ramones are as weird and as fucked-up as they are. Cülo are pro-Ramones. Cülo are pro-some shit.

PRO-MUTANT: Radiation Mutation's sloppy Troma punk. Swampmouth speed, an overworked tongue kicking one word into another in a feverish fury, like Bad Brains at their highest ebb on How Low Can a Punk Get?  "Eins! We radiate! Zwei We mutate" snapping over each other, lyrics ruined in acidic mush until only the anger remains.

PRO-BEING ON HEROIN: A song about how heroin is good is pretty much indefensible on a number of levels, but in the obliterative hunger of On the Nod and Cyanide Slug there's a lot of Cülo's essential appeal. On The Nod with its closing cry of "GIMME GIMME JUNK! GIMME GIMME JUNK!" like a waygone version of the "Na-na-na-na-na I need a cigarette!" shouts that close out Fancy Pants and the Cellphones I Love Fags. Cyanide Slug: "I self-medicate because I can't get out of bed. I'm an addict, a faggot, with something wrong inside my head." might just be the key lyric on this album. A sense of otherness. A pain to dull with something. A pain to scream at someone. Drugs get done for a reason.



PRO-PUNK: Maybe that's the same as pro-mutant in Cülo's distorted world strung together from Nick Zedd movies and telling your minimum-wage boss to fuck off. The lyrics booklet is a ramshackle road-trip through the awesome truths of immaturity. Doodles that gets you sent to offices, sentient sandwiches giving birth to bits of bread, eyeballs falling out of irradiated heads, wolves with rifles, and the ultimate punk rock record insert: the arrest form for a band member, complete with the Received Clothing Receipt which read "Leather Jacket, black. Shirt, black. Jeans, black." Don't Care Part III rolls with the "I'm weird, I'm a cunt, I'm a freak, I'm a punk!" as a boast before sticking on "I'm a punk! I'm a punk! I'm a punk! I'm a punk!"

(There's also some 50s language in I Don't Care, a "Hey Daddio" probably cribbed from the Ramones' I Don't Wanna Go Down in the Basement. There's a playfulness of language in the booklet too, like the peculiarly prim: NO NINNIES, NO TWITS, copped from Devo's squawking herbert anthem Through Being Cool, which works in the same smiling way as Lumpy and the Dumpers "NITWITS!" call.)

Being a punk is what Cülo are ultimately about, and their conception of punk as outsider art. It's seems weird to talk of 'natural' punk topics, given how blatantly punk is a construct, but there they are: anti-society, anti-cop, anti-everything, anti-love, anti-most shit, pro-mutant, pro-drugs, pro-punk. All the bits of adolescent edginess that might just get rewired out of you at some later point but while they obsess you they crush and define.

I read Cülo described as 'refreshingly un-PC' by someone. What would be genuinely refreshing would to not read the phrase 'refreshingly un-PC' in a punk review ever again. I like a lot of music that is just concerned with its own obnoxiousness, but I never think that there's some sort of brave stand being made I just think the artist is expressing their self as artists are allowed to do, and that self is a bloody unfit-for-life dickhead, like a lot of artists are, like a lot of listeners are. I love Cülo, because they're angry and uncomfortable, and I've felt angry and uncomfortable a lot. But that's not a good thing, it's just a thing I can't avoid. It's not something to be praised in itself, it's something to be looked at maybe, definitely something to be struggled with. STOP TREATING PUNK MUSIC LIKE IT'S A FUCKING RICHARD LITTLEJOHN COLUMN. FUCK THOSE "TELLING IT LIKE IT IS!" SUPPORTIVE ARSEHOLE GRUNTS. It's dumb shit like this that makes me angry and uncomfortable enough to want to listen to stupid Cülo songs of unsustainable nihilism about how heroin is great.

Yes, there is a point in your life when you find yourself in a record store thinking "Yes, £5 is a great price but I really don't think I hate myself enough anymore to own a Spider Babies LP." but that sense of misfit rage, disconnection and loathing still resonates for a long time after you're moved into a headspace where you probably can't too often work up all the rage that's present on Your Art Is Getting All Over Me at shit empty art, but you still find that sort of attack to be something you can see being something you want to thrash along to. Cülo's essential appeal is that hearing people as fucked-up as you are, as fucked off as you are, torn between anger and angst in the same way that you've always been and articulating this bonedug obsession with infandous places and desires through songs equally catchy and furious is something fucking immense. It's not refreshing, it's definitely not comforting, it's just an acknowledgement of sorts of the bad bits inside you, the bad places that you're in, that can be twisted into this, twisted into something you can mosh your bedroom heart out to ignore the walls closing in. Sometimes you can't see a way out of this, and oftentimes that feels amazingly painful and upsetting and depressing, but sometimes you just don't give a fuck and it's liberating to be dumb and pain-gored and fronting like a Poison Idea badass in your untethered punxitude. You're a tormented imp but a king of punk.



"I might be getting too old to be called a problem child" is a line on My Life Sucks (And I Could Care Less), the song that plays this yellow spitting thing out. It's possibly the only sign of growth exhibited on this album (emotional growth, not cancerous growth, that shit abounds). It momentarily touches on the fuck-up poetry of a D4 or Johnny Hobo song, where everything is ruined forever. "I didn't mean to take your drugs. But I had to take your drugs." it goes in such a flatly elegiac self-hating non-apology that it would slip right into a Dead Mechanical song. The only sign here that there is consequence beyond hangovers, "I can't help but feel like It's all a waste of time/I'm waiting for a future that I know I'll never find."

And how do Cülo feel about this? Through the highs and the hate and the thrashing and the crummy stuff. Ah, fuck it. This is what they signed up for when they snorted morguechemicals off their copy of Too Tough to Die and picked a fight with a wall and started a shitty amazing punk band. Aaaaah fuck it. They could care less.

The Holy (Jeans) Trinity

So after a triumphant manifesto for how I would never give up the fight of excavating and sharing new music, I promptly found myself kinda burnt out on writing long pieces on how punk music is the best shit ever, and now with my triumphant return, I choose not to focus on some new brave one-chord wonders, but write some brief bollocks about possibly the three most famous punk bands in the history of ever. Great work, Joe!

I remember some years back, on a forum I was on, someone asked for advice on how to write a presentation for school on 'the history of punk rock' and this was followed by a flurry of music nerds (myself included) all scrambling to show off how much they knew about lineage of this bastard little musical form. New York Doll mentions were trumped by MC5s which were trumped by Stooges which were trumped by Velvet Undergrounds. People mentioned the stripped down rock and roll of Who tracks like My Generation. Early heavy metal was namedropped. Some people obviously swinging for the fences drew a think between the philosophy of punk rock and that of free jazz. It was chaos, until one clear thinker, one wise prophet whose name remains lost in the mists of time and my less than perfect memory, came into the thread and posted the words that I will never forget. "Fuck this noise," they said, "All you need are The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash."

And they were completely right.



So yes, yet again I am going to dance around that eternal question of "What is punk rock?" as if you weren't already bored of a thousand discussions of it, alright sick of me myself repeatedly saying "Yeah, it's kind of a stupid question and there's no real answer to it because what punk rock means to you is as personal as the pimples on your arse but I'm gonna try and answer it anyway."

Punk rock, in all its forms, can always trace something back to these three bands. That punk band you like, yes that one, think about it. Does it have right-on left wing lyrics? Does it play fast and loud? Does every member of the band seem constantly pissed-off at the world? If so, then it owes something to these three groups. Simply speaking: The Ramones defined the style of the music. They codified the fast, short, simple, aggressive rock songs. The Sex Pistols' essential attitude is the template for the fuck-you swagger of a lot of punk rockers, swearing on TV, generally looking like a tabloid writer's wet-dream of moral decay. The Clash politicised punk, gave it a purpose beyond the cheap shock tactics of swastikas and spit, channeled that energy into a progressive mold. Look at any punk band and you'll find at least one of the three, sound, soul and speeches. You're gonna get at least one, probably two, possibly three. (This is basically my FUCK YOU! GET PUMPED! idea traced all the way back)



Now this isn't all they did. The Clash also were one of the first bands (along with the Damned and The Jam) to move away from that rigid musical template and bring in other influences while retaining that essential punk energy, The Ramones also expanded their sound although to a lesser degree but are mainly unfairly recalled as stylistically monotonous and uncompromising. The Sex Pistols enshrined self-destruction in the punk toolset for good or ill, but right at the generally recognised year zero, the pissiness, politics and pure adrenaline noise are the most important foundation for all that follows.

So when people say "Where did punk come from?" and that scramble starts again, to equate it with the amphetamine thrill of the beats, the anti-authoritarian simplicity of Woody Guthrie, it's cool if you just wanna say "Fuck this noise. All you need to know is The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash." and from there you can go wherever you want.

Like I said, the the sound, soul and speeches, three different types of posturing, three different types of progress, all twisting round each other, interacting with kisses, bites, gunshots and frottage, linking in perfect and smooth and tearing apart with great fleshy rips. Kids angry, packed with snot, music fast, noisy grot and fuck you if you think if this is our lot.

So Scratched into Our Souls #2: Ramones - Love Kills

The Ramones. I have a fair bit to say about them but I'm focusing on this particular song at the moment. Love Kills. It's off Animal Boy, which I always associate with Too Tough to Die, the album that preceded it, but was actually closer in time to Halfway to Sanity. Like all those 80s Ramones albums, it's not an entirely cohesive affair, but it has some great stuff on there. It's got Richie's finest hour in the angry swirling shout of Somebody Put Something in my Drink, my favourite Ramones song in My Brain is Hanging Upside Down, possibly their finest pure pop song in Something to Believe In, a classic simple Ramones number in Crummy Stuff, and this song, Love Kills, a Dee Dee sung ode to Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Punk rock's very own star-crossed lovers.

When I was about 17/18, I was really anti-Sex Pistols. I was on a forum at the time and that was the dominant opinion of them there and I agreed with it, and not just from a desire to fit in. On this forum there would be a lot of polls about the best punk band ever, or the best punk album, or the best punk bassist, or the best punk song about domestic violence. That sort of timewasting Hornbyesque listmaking that is a fun way to find new bands and have good arguments about the differing scrappy slapped-together ideas of a canon, to immerse yourself in the scene and history and find your place within it. It's a pastime that I of course completely reject in my old age (Hickey, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, Dave Blood, The Toy Dolls' My Wife's a Psychopath or Chumbawamba's Stitch That). One of these polls was for the bottom eight punk bands, which came out as Crass, The Germs, Sex Pistols, Rancid, Pennywise, Anti-Flag, GG Allin and The Casualties. Some controversial choices there. Some glaring omissions. But who cares, it was what about 50-60 teenagers thought of the shape of shit about six years ago. The point is, in summing up the bands on the list, this is what I wrote at that time about the Pistols:

The Sex Pistols are often revered as the greatest punk band ever. Well if making crap music, having a murdering idiot junkie as a bass player and putting your 'shocking' image ahead of your music are measures of greatest then they are. The Sex Pistols are to blame for every idiot punk band talking about 'anarchy' and 'the antichrist' just because they sound cool. They're too blame for every idiot punk wearing stupid shirts for shock value. In the few years before they imploded with the bitterness and spite that comes with being a bunch of crap musicians who make it big due to having an extremely smart, manipulative manager they put forward the idea of punk as talentless, undeducated music that still lingers today.

I was not a fan, but I've mellowed. Just as someone who spent this period of their life obsessed with The Exploited and The Casualties who now rejects the sloganeering street-punk spit of their youth and embraces the more positive community activist aspects of the culture, I have softened my stance on the dumb shock games of this music and culture that I love. I like a few Sex Pistols songs. Pretty Vacant is fucking great. I've also come to accept the live fast, die young rock and roll tradition which I used to constantly fall in and out of love with because even though I thought a lot about dying young, I was acutely aware that a combination of rereading Catch-22 for the sixth time and fantasising hopelessly about a girl in English class I was too scared to talk to was in no way living fast. I would leave a geeky awkward corpse.

Lately I've seen a lot of people, mostly of the age I was when I penned that little rant, react in that fashion to Sid Vicious and his sad addict ilk, and I'm not going to say you can't feel that way, it'd be horrendously patronising to do so, but I'm gonna try and argue the other side. The side of people who didn't cheer as I did when they first read the Nothing Nice to Say strip 'Sid Vicious is So Punx' because someone totally got their distaste with him.

So I say this from a position of sympathy towards the Vicious-haters, but the fascination is pretty obvious. Sid and Nancy were dumb and pretty and fast kids who lost themselves in the old and slow way of the dulling gnawing of junk. No-one wants to be them, except maybe that brief moment as a 14 year old with morbid fascinations because you don’t have anyone to crush on and a conviction that there is nothing punker than Never Mind the Bollocks, no-one wants to be them, but everyone would die for a Ramones song written about them, and one sung by fucking Dee Dee no less. Another punk rock junkie growling glib Shakespearean allusions and deeply ironic handwringing anti-drug lines over the simplest of riffs. Because that’s one of the attractions of punk rock, the notion that if you invest yourself in the love, the cool, the look, in the self-destructive unsustainable chaotic mythos of the thing then you’ll get an anthem of your own, a eulogy penned by your own cultural heroes. There are dozens of punk songs dedicated to the weird acquaintances of punk bands, the arsehole friends and dumbass scene kings and queens, from The Bouncing Souls singing about Johnny X bound by only six strings to this world, to the seemingly endless selection of Less Than Jake’s oeuvre about people they’ve got drunk and shot the shit with. It’s like an infomercial, INVEST NOW AND YOU TOO CAN HAVE POP-CULTURE HISTORIANS AND PISSY PUNK NUMBERS PRESERVING YOU AS A SNEERING HERO, POURING OVER YOUR SHORT RAMBUNCTIOUS BEING, YOUR BREATHLESS STUPID PASSING THROUGH. Like I said, I’ve never really given much of a shit about the Pistols, whether it was Matlock or Vicious on the bass, and I never didn’t think that the outcome of Vicious and his girl was fucking horrendously pointless, but fuck, a Ramones song. To get a Ramones song, I’d do a lot of dumb shit.

In discussing this matter with my friend Tommy, we came upon an even simpler explanation for the appeal of Sid Vicious. Sid's cool because the Ramones wrote a song about him. The Ramones are cool because Motörhead wrote a song about them. Motörhead are cool because Motörhead wrote a song about them. Quod erat demonstrandum, punks and punkettes.