Put on a Little Makeup and Make Sure They Get Your Good Side: A Brief Note on Positive Punk

The Class of '83 ... Photo by Mike Laye

 

"Consigned to a foul demise by the forces of cash and chaos, punk broods alone in its dark tomb. 

Its evolution away from the light has been a cruel and twisted one, from guerilla assault on the media 

to ghost dancing on the bones of Red Indian mysticism, from glue to Gothick. 

Naturally, unattended for so long, its hair has grown. So have its aspirations." [1]

                                                                                                                                      

  

What is so-called positive punk? 

 

I'm not sure I knew back in 1983 when the movement was first identified by Richard North writing in the NME [2] and I'm still not sure I know even now, although, if North is to be believed, it seems primarily to involve the internalisation of punk's energy in order to produce a new gothic sensibility. 

 

In other words, it was punk - but this time with feeling - as reimagined by the art school crowd and drama students who looked on in (Rocky) horror at the antics of those for whom the word Oi! was invented (by yet another music journalist, this time working for Sounds; the loathsome Garry Bushell).  

 

And, in a sense, that was my crowd; the crowd who danced the night away at Le Phonographique to the sounds of the Southern Death Cult and the Sex Gang Children [3]. And yet, at the same time, it was never quite my crowd and I never quite followed them into the night. 

 

I don't know why: perhaps it was because the gloomier-than-thou fanaticism of Killing Joke meant more to me at the time than any form of positivity. Also, I quite liked a lot of the three-chord rubbish that North dismisses, if ultimately conceding that this can become a bit boring after a while and that a soft-centre is often more seductive than a hard core.          

        

 

Notes

 

[1] Marek Kohn, 'Punk's New Clothes', in The Face (Feb 1983): click here to read on punkrocker.org.uk

 

[2] Under the pen-name Richard North, the interesting figure of Richard Cabut - bass player with Brigandage - wrote his positive punk manifesto in a piece entitled 'Punk Warriors' for the NME (19 Feb 1983): click here to read on punkrocker.org.uk

 

[3] Musical bonus: Southern Death Cult, Fat Man (1982): click here / Sex Gang Children, Sebastiane (1983): click here.  

The Bats Have Left the Bell Tower: Reflections on Graveyard Poetry and Post-Punk Goth

Love Among the Gravestones (1981) 

Photo by Kirk Field

 

 

La Rochefoucauld famously suggested that people never would have fallen in love if they hadn’t first learnt about it in works of art. And one wonders if something similar might also be said of the morbid and sometimes macabre fascination that many young lovers have for skulls, coffins, epitaphs and worms, i.e., all the trappings and paraphernalia of death. 

 

Would, for example, the two teens pictured above have spent so much time smooching in cemeteries were it not for the influence of the Graveyard Poets upon the erotic imagination?

 

It's doubtful. 

 

For whilst their post-punk queer gothic sensibility was primarily shaped by Bauhaus, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and the Sex Gang Children - along with numerous other bands from this period (early-1980s) - we can trace their love of the uncanny and the occult all the way back to these 18th-century poets, whose mournful meditations on mortality and the love that tears us apart foreshadowed the work of songwriters like Ian Curtis and Nick Cave.   

 

There is - perhaps not surprisingly - much debate within critical circles about what constitutes a graveyard poem and about which authors should be classified as belonging to the Graveyard school (and it might be noted that the term itself was not used to refer to a style of writer and their work until coined by a literary scholar in 1893). 

 

What we can say, however, is that the following four poems remain crucial to our understanding of it:

 

Night Piece on Death (1722) - Thomas Parnell

Night-Thoughts (1742-45) - Edward Young

The Grave (1743) - Robert Blair

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard  (1751) - Thomas Gray

Obviously, none of these works have the pop brilliance of songs by the above bands and artists, but readers who are interested in melancholic 18th-century poetry to do with life, death, ghosts and graveyards should certainly check them out. 

 

Be prepared, however, for a tedious amount of Christian moralising; for it's an unfortunate fact that didacticism and piety often detract from the delicious decadence and horror of these works.    

 

 

Musical bonus: Public Image Ltd., 'Graveyard', from the album Metal Box, (Virgin, 1979): click here.