Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace (front cover photo)
The rapid evolution of popular music and youth culture in the wake of punk continues to fascinate many commentators, including some who weren't even born in the wildly exciting and experimental period between 1979 and 1984.
Despite their non-being during this era, Andi Harriman and Marloes Bontje have lovingly assembled a visual and written record of the time when some wore leather, some wore lace, but all of us - with a greater or lesser degree of success - wore eyeliner and adopted a somewhat gothic sensibility (transforming from punks to pagans and swapping safety pins for magical amulets).
Why things mutated in the manner they did - why kids who started off pogoing at the 100 Club ended up posing at the Batcave - is a question that the above authors don't really address in a book which, although rich in photos, is disappointingly light on theory. But it's not one I pretend to know the answer to either.
I've heard it suggested, however, that the nihilistic energy and almost childlike joy in destruction of punk was not only impossible to sustain, but quickly became emotionally unsatisfying for those sensitive and creative individuals interested in developing a more sophisticated and glamourous aesthetic that would allow them to express feelings other than anger, boredom and hatred.
I suspect there's something in this argument. At any rate, better Siouxsie and the Banshees than Sham 69 ...
See: Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace: The Worldwide Compendium of Postpunk and Goth in the 1980s (Intellect, 2014), by Andi Harriman and Marloes Bontje.
Note: those who are interested in knowing more about the above authors and their work should visit the Postpunk Project by clicking here.
For interested readers, the former Melody Maker writer Simon Reynolds' 'Rip It Up And Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984' (Faber and Faber, 2006) would likely supply an intelligent theoretical lens on the material.
ReplyDeleteHowever, and despite my respect for my namesake's erudition and/or critical pretension (delete according to taste), I'm not sure that 'post punk' is an especially illuminating term here, any more than it's quite right to say that one constituency 'mutated' into another. Goth was much more of a subcultural break with punk, being an essentially peaceful, cultivated, neo-Romantic, self-consciously literary/artistic musical movement that had little or nothing to do with scaling the walls of Buckingham Palace. Germany's 'Gruftis' would sooner lie on gravestones and converse about Novalis.
(And I'd be with them, in spirit if not now in body, blackening my lips and swinging incense.)
Joy Division, of course, are a fascinating interface in this context - Curtis's depressive rage, purity of heart and epileptic alienation twisted into musical seizures of monumental melancholy and pain in post-industrial late '70s Manchester - but bands like All About Eve and Shellyan Orphan looked back to 19C poetics and the flower-crowned idealism of 1960s love, while fashioning distinctively modern fires of melodic pop.
All the same, I strangely miss the irrepressibly English likes of Sham 69! (Hurry up 'Arry, come on!)