Dead Dreams Fly Flags

 

Daniel Quasar's Progress Pride Flag juxtaposed to form a swastika 

and Jamie Reid's cover for the Bow Wow Wow single W.O.R.K.

(N.O. Nah, No No My Daddy Don't)

 

 

I have to admit, I'm rather ambivalent about posh English actor turned political activist and free speech campaigner Laurence Fox. For whilst I don't particularly wish to decolonise and diversify, pull down statues or take the knee, neither do I worry about reclaiming British history and culture, or care if certain idiots wish to declare their pronouns or virtue signal on social media.

 

Having said that, the provocative image he recently tweeted of a swastika made from four LGBTQ+ Progress Pride flags certainly captured my attention, reminding me as it did of Jamie Reid's final piece of work produced in collaboration with Malcolm McLaren; namely, the vividly coloured sleeve for Bow Wow Wow's 1981 single 'W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah, No No My Daddy Don't)'. 

 

As can be seen in the image above, Reid used lyrics from the song to form a swastika, a symbol he and McLaren often co-opted not just for shock value, but to also critique the zen fascism peddled by the record companies. It's a fantastic sleeve which stands alongside any of those produced during the Sex Pistols period. 

 

Obviously the image of a swastika made from Pride flags is going to be highly offensive to some (and misinterpreted by many). Flags of all description are magical objects and their denigration or misuse often causes outrage and sometimes leads to violence - although, as a vexiphobe, I find displays of love and loyalty to a coloured rag depressing. 

 

I've said it before and I'll doubtless say it again on this blog: the obsession with identity and identity politics is the problem today and just as I hate those who wrap themselves in a flag, so too do I despise those who take pride in new forms of essentialism. For fascism begins with the verb to be ... 

 

 

Note: for a related post to this one - on why I'm suspicious of Pride - click here. 

 

          

Insouciance Über Insecticide (Another Moth Post)

 

'I've always preferred moths to butterflies. They aren’t flashy or cocky; they mind their own business 

and just try to blend in with their surroundings and live their lives. 

They don't want to be seen, and that's something I can relate to.' 

- Kayla Krantz, The OCD Games (2020)

 

 

I. 

 

And so ends National Moth Week; an annual (and global) event designed to celebrate 'the beauty, life cycles, and habitats of moths' and to collect much needed data about these fascinating (mostly nocturnal) creatures, which are among the most diverse and successful of all organisms, ranging in size from as tiny as the head of a pin to as large as an adult human hand.

 

I have to admit that I didn't officially register to participate in the event. However, I did take some photos of the moths in my backgarden, including the one above (don't ask me what species it is, as I've no idea, but it was about an inch big and reminded me of the moths I used to regularly encounter as a child, but which now, sadly, are hardly ever to be seen). 

 

 

II. 

 

Readers familiar with this blog will know that I've written before in praise of moths and why they appeal to me more than butterflies, which, in evolutionary terms, they long predate (some moth fossils have been found that are thought to be 190 million years old); they just seem to me so much more punk rock in comparison to the latter. 

Readers might also recall that I recently published a post on the necessity of killing carpet moths, in which I adopted a Lawrentian argument to justify why it was the right thing to do to reach for the insecticide in order to safeguard one's clothes and home furnishings from the hungry mouths of moth larvae. 

 

Some readers will be pleased to know, however, that, in the end - even though I bought a spray - I didn't have the hardness of soul needed to use it. Ultimately, it transpires that moths mean more to me than even a relatively expensive pure new wool carpet: I simply don't care if they eat holes in it.

 

Insouciance über insecticide!

 

 

Welcome to Essex (Notes on the Dagenham Idol)

Michael Landy: Welcome to Essex (2021)

Ink on paper

 

 

I. 

 

By referring to my stay in Essex as exile, I may, perhaps, have given the impression that this ancient county - once home to Anglo-Saxon kings and fields of bright yellow cowslip - is the kind of place that one is only ever banished to involuntarily.

 

But that's obviously not true and it would be grossly unfair to portray Essex in the same negative and stereotypical manner that it is often portrayed in popular culture. It may not be the garden of England, but it's far more than merely the dumping ground of London and I'd still rather spend the day in Southend than St. Ives.

 

One artist who has done more than most to explore and celebrate the history and culture of Essex - and to challenge the pernicious myths and snobbery that this county seems to inspire - is Michael Landy ...  

 

 

II.  

 

Born and raised in Essex, Landy rose to prominence as one of the Young British Artists in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But it was his performance piece Break Down (2001) which really brought him to the attention of a public more easily impressed by the showmanship of Damien Hirst and his pickled shark, or Tracy Emin's unmade bed.

 

In 2021, a new exhibition of work - Michael Landy's Welcome to Essex [1] - was born of his love for the county and featuring (amongst other things) his reimagining of the Dagenham Idol; a naked figure made of pine wood, unearthed in Dagenham in 1922, but thought to date to the Late Neolithic period or early Bronze Age [2].

 

Landy's idol is cast in bronze, but finished with gold leaf in order to give it a more ostentatious look, thereby challenging (or perhaps simply reinforcing and perpetuating) the stereotype which thinks brash and blingy is the only aesthetic appreciated by the good people of Essex, when they also like cheap and cheerful.     

 

 

Michael Landy: Essex Idol (2021)

bronze, with 24ct gold 

thomasdanegallery.com

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Michael Landy's Welcome to Essex was a free exhibition at the Firstsight (an art space and community hub in Colchester), which ran from 26 June until 5 September, 2021. Click here for further details. A short documentary film about the work and Landy's perspective on Essex can be found on YouTube: click here. See also the interview with Landy and another Essex-based artist, Elsa James, on artfund.org: click here.   

 

[2] The Dagenham Idol was found in marshland close to the north bank of the River Thames, during excavation for new sewer pipes. Eighteen inches in height, the armless figure of indeterminate sex, was buried in a layer of peat ten feet below ground level, next to the skeleton of a deer. Carbon dated to around 2250 BC, it is one of the earliest representations of the human form found anywhere in Europe.       

      Anyone interested in seeing (and paying homage) to the Idol, should visit Valance House Museum, in Dagenham, where it has been on indefinite loan (from Colchester Castle Museum) since 2010. Or, if more convenient, there's a copy of the work residing in the Museum of London. 

 

Last Clown Standing

Last Clown Standing (SA/2022)

 

 

There's a certain irony in the fact that the only soft toy to have survived from my childhood is the one I never really cared for and used to treat with astonishing violence: an 18" clown figure with a rubber painted face and a harlequin style outfit. 

 

It wasn't that I was scared of clowns, although coulrophobia is, apparently, a fairly common fear and many people - particularly young children - find clowns disturbing.*     

 

In fact, I was enchanted by the sad little clown (or pierrot), who turned the roller displaying captions and credits at the opening and closing of Camberwick Green and was a big fan of the Joker as played by Cesar Romero in Batman. 

 

But, for some reason, I was never very fond of my clown companion, although I now have a new-found respect for his endurance, outliving a much-loved Teddy Bear and even a hard-bodied Action Man.   

I suppose it's a case of he who laughs loudest lasts the longest.

 

 

* Note: if this phobia is mostly related to their bizarre - sometimes grotesque - appearance, the unpredictable behaviour of clowns can also be unsettling; no one likes to be invited to smell a flower only to have water squirted in their face.  

 

 

How Things Protect Us From the Void: Some Further Thoughts with Reference to the Work of Michael Landy

Exhibition leaflet produced by Artangel

 

 

I'm still distressed about the material disappearance of my childhood, which I wrote about here. 

 

Someone commented that the above post reveals me to be both superficial and sentimental and suggested that I abandon the world of things and learn to cultivate spiritual peace and happiness; "when you discover inner fulfilment, then you realise just how ridiculous it is to cry over spilt milk or lost teddy bears and school reports".   

Someone else, rather more sympathetic, wrote to remind me of the case of Michael Landy, the Young British Artist who, in February 2001, famously destroyed all of his possessions in a performance piece he entitled Break Down: 

 

"Perhaps, ultimately, we all need to find the courage to destabilise our lives and stand naked, as it were, in the middle of an emptiness or void, so as to feel ourselves 'on the verge of being drawn into its terrible depth'" [1]. 

 

Perhaps ...

 

However, it's interesting to recall when thinking back to the above work by Landy, that he couldn't resist cataloguing the thousands of items he had acquired during his lifetime, thereby essentially reducing them not to nothingness, but to information [2]. 

 

Thus, arguably, he didn't quite let go and stand naked etc. 

 

And, of course, it was his decision to destroy his things, whereas, in my case, I had no say or control over the destruction of those things close to my heart. And nor do I have a detailed inventory of all the toys, games, and other treasures that my mother binned and my sister took and gave to her own children (without my knowledge or consent). 

 

And so, whilst I do kind of admire Landy for gathering together all of his things - including his clothes, stamp collection, artworks, and car - and sytematically smashing, shredding, and pulverising the lot (with the help of several assistants) in a laborious two-week orgy of destruction [3], I don't draw any real solace from his work and still insist that we need things to ground us in being and stop us becoming ghosts. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] My correspondent is quoting Yoko Ogawa, writing in The Memory Police, trans. Stephen Snyder, (Vintage, 2020), p. 14.  

[2] The philosopher Byung-Chul Han would perhaps view this as anticipating precisely what is happening today in the digital age, when things vanish from the actual world only to circulate forever as Undinge in the virtual realm, not as memories, but as data. See his work Non-things, trans. Daniel Steuer, (Polity Press, 2022).

[3] This act of artistic potlatch took place at an empty store space on Oxford Street and attracted around 45,000 visitors. It produced nearly six tonnes of waste material, which was either recycled or sent to the rubbish dump. Nothing was exhibited or sold by Landy and he made no money directly from the event, although he did of course gain a huge amount of publicity and establish his name as an artist of note. 

      To watch a 16 minute video documenting the event, posted on YouTube by the London-based arts organisation Artangel, who - along with The Times newspaper - commissioned Break Down, click here. 

 

 

How Things Protect Us From the Void

Pupils at Bosworth Junior School (Harold Hill) c. 1972

 

Rather like Sebastian Horsley, I have always been happy to have my existence confirmed by official documentation: police files, medical reports, tax returns, etc. are, as he says, for many of us, our "only claim on immortality" [1].

So you can imagine my distress when I discovered that my mother and/or sister acting as self-appointed memory police had thrown away my school reports, neatly handwritten by my teachers in royal blue fountain pen ink at the end of each year and offering an assessment not only my academic ability (limited), but character (flawed) [2].  

 

It is, as I say, not simply that these things had sentimental value; they had also existential import and their disappearance from the world matters to me more even than the disappearance of the schools themselves or the disappearance of old school friends.

 

Of course, my mother and/or sister didn't simply dispose of my school reports; toys, games, letters, and assorted treasures from the past that had helped ground me in being, were all brutally shoved into bin bags. 

 

In the name of tidying up and making space, all traces of my childhood which I had lovingly sought to preserve, were casually eliminated; "replaced by an emptiness that would not be filled" [3] ...  

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld, (Sceptre, 2008), p. 102. 

[2] From memory, I can recall that the consensus seemed to be that whilst I was capable of producing good work, I was too easily distracted, too chatty, and too keen to amuse my fellow pupils by playing the class clown. No doubt they would simply stamp the letters ADHD on the reports were they written today.  

[3] Yoko Ogawa, The Memory Police, trans. Stephen Snyder, (Vintage, 2020), p. 14. 

 

 

For further remarks on this subject, with reference to the work of Michael Landy, click here.

When Even the Flies Leave You Alone: Ernest Becker's 'The Denial of Death' as Interpreted by Sebastian Horsley

 

The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else. - EB

It's only death; it's not the end of the world, is it? - SH

 

 

As a thanatologist, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I still haven't got round to fully reading Ernest Becker's seminal - and Pulitzer Prize winning - text The Denial of Death (1973); a psychological and philosophical examination of how mankind has attempted to deal with (and disguise) the fate that awaits. 

All forms of human culture and civilisation, argues Becker, constitute an elaborate defence mechanism against biological reality. That's what we, as symbolic animals, are extremely good at; defiantly creating a world of meaning which allows us to transcend the fact that we end up as worm food or a few pounds of ash.

 

Becker seems to find this ability heroic, but that's not the term I'd use. For a fantasy of immortality remains just that and, ultimately, no life matters and no great work will be remembered. 

 

In other words, in the grand scheme of things, there is no grand scheme and Becker's privileging of religious illusion in which our animal and mortal nature is given spiritual significance - over what he dismisses as hedonistic pursuits and petty concerns - is just conventional moral prejudice [1]. 

 

It's surprising, therefore, that Sebastian Horsley - a man who loved taking drugs and admired those who delighted in their own triviality - should claim that no book, before or since, has had such a powerful effect on him as The Denial of Death. 

 

I'm not sure, however, that Horsley carefully follows the thread of Becker's argument. Does the latter, for example, really want us to admit that we are merely "doomed and defecating creatures"? [2] I don't think so. His project is founded upon man's dual nature as he understands it and wishes to affirm that we are so much more than simply animals that eat, shit, and die. 

 

One can also see from the quotations above, that Becker and Horsley have a radically different attitude towards death; the former's existential anxiety is amusingly negated by the latter's dandyesque insouciance and flippancy.

 

And, finally, I very much doubt that Becker would endorse Horsley's scatological and masturbatory attempt at terror management: 

 

"I was so affected by [The Denial of Death] that I felt I had to respond. [...] So I locked myself into my own flat, stripped myself naked and sat there listening to Beethoven's Ninth. After a few hours I defecated in a neat pile on the floor and scooped it up in my hands. Running it through my fingers, like a gardener assessing the friability of the soil, I examined it. It was slimy as wet clay.

      It would do. I used my shit to swipe the word MAN on my chest, and then PIG on the walls. Then I covered the rest of my body in ordure until no flesh was visible. Beethoven swelled through the room. I sat there musing. Sex, I decided, returning to a favourite subject, was interesting. But not as important as excretion. [...] My philosophical insight gave me a hard on. I had a wank to quieten the imperious urge." [3]

 

Horsley remains, so he tells us, lying on the floor, eating and sleeping amid his bodily waste, for three whole days, until he finally felt able to crow like a cock on his own dunghill:

 

"When the whiff got a bit too much - it was high summer - I opened the patio door. I was a little concerned about the neighbours. And slightly worried that my landlords [...] would stage one of their impromptu checks. But I needn't have worried. Even the flies left me alone." [4]     

 

 

Notes

 

[1] In an essay on The Denial of Death, Daniel Podgorski comes to a similar conclusion and describes reading Becker's celebrated work as an unexpectedly disappointing experience. For concealed behind "the parade of theorists and the solid analytical prose" is an "old-fashioned, moralizing, pessimistic set of theses: that humanity is in denial of mortality because of a 'necessary' denial of the human body and reality; that humanity can only exorcise the dread of death by embracing blind faith and rooting out 'aberrant' thoughts and behaviors; and that death can only be truly faced by those who approach the study of humanity and society through a (reductive) structuralist lens".

      Like Podgorski, I think all three of these notions deserve to be critically examined and that, upon such an examination, they reveal themselves as misguided and false.  

      Podgorski's essay - 'The Denial of Life: A Critique of Pessimism, Pathologization, and Structuralism in Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death' - can be found on The Gemsbok (22 Oct 2019): click here.

 

[2] Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld, (Sceptre, 2008), p. 94. 

 

[3] Ibid.

 

[4] Ibid., pp. 94-95.  

Get It On and Punk It Up With Marc Bolan

Marc Bolan with Dave Vanian of the Damned 

and Siouxsie Sioux in 1977

 

According to Sebastian Horsley, Marc Bolan was super-plastic profound:

 

"A curious hybrid of dandy and poseur, street urchin and visionary. The mass of contradictions could be held together only by the unifying power of art. The only real philosophy he had was that a human being was an art form in itself. He was entirely his own creation: A creature lovingly constructed from the materials of his imagination. He was important for being trivial yet deep, poppy yet interesting - all the things I came to love in one person." [1]

However, whilst this loving description is undoutedly true, I have to admit that back in the day - i.e., the 1970s - I was never a great Bolan fan and when I stomped around the bedroom wearing my sister's platform boots, I was pretending to be a member of Sweet or Slade, not T. Rex. 

 

As was also the case with David Bowie, I was just a little too young - and perhaps a little too straight - to fully appreciate the queer sophisticated pop genius of Bolan and his "gorgeously nonsensical and deliciouly fey lyrics" [2]. 

 

And so, although I remember listening to his songs on the radio and used to love watching him on TV, it was Gary Glitter's poster which hung on my wall and Gary Glitter's singles I used to buy with my pocket money at the local record store. 

Only retrospectively, can I now see that I should've given my heart to this East London boy who, unlike many of his peers, embraced punk rock and was - again unlike many of his peers - embraced by the younger punk generation, as the photos above illustrate [3]. 

 

Whether Bolan genuinely loved the so-called New Wave, or simply wanted to ride along on it as he had once ridden a white swan in order to sustain his own career, I don't know. But I like to think this one-time hippie folk musician who became a glam superstar was more of a punk at heart than many might imagine [4].

 

Sadly, we never really got to find out, because Bolan was killed in a car crash on 16 September, 1977, aged 29.   

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld, (Sceptre, 2008), pp. 29-30. 

      Horsley borrows the title for his autobiography from the T. Rex single released 30 May 1977 (from the album of the same name released 11 March 1977 on EMI). Click here to enjoy a performance of this song on the children's TV show Get It Together, presented by Roy North (sans Basil Brush).

 

[2] Sebastian Horsley, Dandy in the Underworld, p. 27. 

 

[3] There are also photos of Bolan with the Ramones and Billy Idol - and, speaking of the latter, Generation X performed their debut single, 'Your Generation', on the final episode of Bolan's own TV show Marc (broadcast 28 September 1977): click here.  

[4] This is further evidenced by the fact that he chose the Damned to support him on a short tour in March 1977, which began at City Hall, Newcastle (10/03) and ended at the Locarno, Portsmouth (20/03), where the Damned joined Bolan and T. Rex on stage to perform 'Get It On' as an encore.    

How Do I Understand the Flies?

Joe Strummer, lead singer of the Clash, looking pensive and posing a question 

that has intrigued punks, philosophers and entomologists alike

 

I. 

 

Someone writes to say that my Insectopunk post was misleading insofar as I "neglected to mention the true character and importance of punk as a socio-political movement, primarily concerned with fighting for freedom and defending truth - not simply with writing inane songs about bugs". 

 

They close their criticism by suggesting that I should "stop listening to arty pop-punk bands and try the real thing, i.e., the only band that matters - the Clash".       

 

 

II.

 

Such idealism is always amusing and often, as in this case, betrays a mix of ignorance and naivety. 

 

Firstly, let us remind ourselves that this (hyperbolic and hubristic) tag line - the only band that matters - was one coined by American musician Gary Lucas [1] whilst employed as a copywriter in the creative services department at CBS Records. Although widely adopted by fans and journalists, one suspects it was something the band always felt secretly embarrassed by; a boast impossible to live up to and impossible to live down.

 

Secondly, it appears my overearnest correspondent has forgotten (or is unaware of the fact) that the Clash also wrote and performed a song about insects; the never officially released How Do I Understand the Flies? [2]. 

 

In this short ditty, Joe doesn't bemoan the state of the nation, but simply expresses his bemusement (and irritation) with the flies buzzing round his head in his basement bedroom, thereby preventing him from sleeping: 

 

In the summer ... the flies buzzing round my head / Every night, I don't understand the flies buzzing round my head.

 

It's not the greatest song in the world and by the end of 1976 it had been dropped from the band's live set and subsequently forgotten about. 

 

As a cultural entomologist, however, I'm really happy to know this song exists and I like to imagine that Strummer was having an existentialist moment inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre who was also troubled by flies - and insects generally [3] - as this passage from Les Mots nicely illustrates: 

 

"I go to the window, I spot a fly under the curtain, I corner it in a muslin trap and move a murderous forefinger toward it. [...] Since I'm refused a man's destiny, I'll be the destiny of a fly. I don't rush matters, I'm letting it have time enough to become aware of the giant bending over it. I move my finger forward, the fly bursts, I'm foiled! Good God, I shouldn't have killed it! It was the only being in all creation that feared me; I no longer mean anything to anyone. I, the insecticide, take the victim's place and become an insect myself. I'm a fly, I've always been one. This time I've touched bottom." [4]

 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lucas discusses this in a short 2013 interview available on YouTube: click here.  

[2] This song - also known as 'For the Flies', or simply 'Flies', was written in the summer of 1976 and first performed at the Screen on the Green on 29 August 1976. Click here to listen to a bootleg recording made at the Roundhouse on 5 September 1976. 

[3] Indeed, for Sartre, all nature was de trop - an undifferetiated and threatening substratum of non-human and inhuman existence for which he feels not only contempt but a visceral disgust, as readers of La Nausée will recall. 

      For an interesting essay on this, see Shannon Mussett, 'Nature as Threat and Escape in the Philosophies of Sartre and Beauvoir', in The Sartrean Mind, ed. Matthew C. Eshleman and Constance L. Mui, (Routledge, 2020), pp. 515-527. Click here to read this essay online.

 

[4] Jean-Paul Sartre, The Words, trans. Bernard Frechtman, (George Braziller, New York, 1964), p. 247.   

 

 

This post is for KV who kindly reminded me of this little known song by the Clash and for Sophie Stas, the patron saint of flies.   

Insectopunk

Image adapted from one used as part of the Wake Up Punk project 

conceived by Joe Corré and Nigel Askew

 

 

I. 

 

When I was a young child at school, one of the songs that we were encouraged to sing - despite nobody in the classroom knowing any Spanish - was the popular Mexican folk song La Cucaracha. 

 

Whilst entirely ignorant of the song's lyrics, origins, and significance, it did inspire in me a love of songs about insects and pieces of music which either imitate or incorporate the sounds made by our six-legged friends. 

 

This ranges from Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee (1900), a classical composition intended to musically evoke the seemingly chaotic and rapidly changing flight pattern of a bumblebee, to big-hearted Arthur Askey's silly (and somewhat irritating) Bee Song (1938), written by Kenneth Blain. 

 

 

II.

 

Of course, not all insect songs are about bees and don't merely possess novelty value. Thus it is, for example, that some of the finest examples of punk rock - in its broadest and best sense - are about insects. 

 

These include:

 

(i) Wire: 'I Am The Fly', written by Colin Newman and Graham Lewis, released as a single in February 1978 and also found on their second studio album Chairs Missing (Harvest, September 1978): click here. 

 

Sample lyric:

 

I am the fly in the ointment 

I can spread more disease than the fleas 

Which nibble away at your window display

 

 

(ii) The Cramps: 'Human Fly', written by Poison Ivy Rorschach and Lux Interior, originally released in November 1978 on Vengeance Records, it can also be found on the 12" EP Gravest Hits (Illegal Records / I.R.S. Records, July 1979): click here. 

 

Sample lyric:

 

Well I'm a human fly 

I, I said F-L-Y 

I say buzz buzz buzz 

And it's just becuz 

I'm a human fly 

And I don't know why 

I got 96 tears and 96 eyes

 

 

(iii) Blondie: 'The Attack of the Giant Ants', written by Chris Stein, final track on side two of the eponymous debut album Blondie, (Private Stock Records, December 1976). Click here to play the remastered version from 2001. 

 

Sample lyric: 

 

Giant ants from space

Snuff the human race 

Then they eat your face 

Never leave a trace 

 

(iv) Adam and the Ants: 'Antmusic', written by Adam Ant and Marco Pirroni, the third single from the second studio album Kings of the Wild Frontier (CBS / Epic, November 1980). Click here to watch the official video, dir. Steve Barron, on YouTube.

 

Note: the single got to number two in the UK charts in January 1981 and would've been a number one were it not for the fact that John Lennon's 'Imagine' was re-released following his murder in December 1980. As I remarked at the time, it's a sad day for pop music when a dead Beatle can crush a live Ant.  

 

Sample lyric:

 

Don't tread on an ant, he's done nothing to you 

There might come a day when he's treading on you 

Don't tread on an ant, you'll end up black and blue 

You cut off his head, legs come looking for you

 

 

(v) And finally, let's not forget the track 'Insects', by Altered Images, which can be found on their debut studio album Happy Birthday (Epic Records, September 1981), vocals by the punk generation's very own version of Lulu, Clare Grogan. Click here to watch a live performance of the song on The Old Grey Whistle Test (24 November 1981).

Sample lyric: 

 

Insects 

Insects 

See them crawling 

Insects 

In their thousands

 

 

Finally, let me note in closing that there are, of course, other punk and post-punk songs that could be added to this list. We might include, for example, 'Insects' by Osaka Popstar (2006), or Danny Elfman's 2021 reworking of the Oingo Boingo track of the same title from 1982: click here. 

 

The five songs selected above, however, remain my personal favourites; although they are not listed in any preferential order.

Note: for an academic take on this question of insects in relation to popular music, see Joseph Coelho, 'Insects in Rock & Roll Music', American Entomologist, Volume 46, Issue 3, (Fall 2000), pp. 186–200. Click here to access this work online as a pdf. Thanks to Thom Bonneville for this reference. 

 

For a related post to this one, entitled 'Punk Moth', click here. 

 

And click here for a follow up post, in which I reply to a critic and discuss a little known song by the Clash, 'How Do I Understand the Flies?'