Posted on July 1, 2009 - by John Robb

Buddy can you spare a dime!

Fat cats lick their lips as the shops get boarded up…these are the end of times, the dying days of empire with all the filth and greed you would expect as the battle rages for the last few dollars to be squeezed from the corpse of rock n roll.

The reaction to these dog days varies; some bands are using the opportunity of the mass media and the last days of the mass market to propel some kind of inspirational message to the masses whilst others are raiding the corpse like necrophiliacs robbing the last grubby coins out of the pockets of the bamboozled population.
First we look at the good guys…Green Day- proof that the mass-market does have a point.

Green Day’s upcoming new album throws up that eternal debate about whether they are punk or not- not that the band really care- they got round that debate years ago by saying that they were just Green Day. For purists that cry sell-out though they are perhaps missing the point, Green Day have taken punk rock to the malls and with a grand musical ambition that stretches punk into all sorts of shapes.

Billie Joe Armstrong is an amazing songwriter who can articulate a lot of the stuff from punk rock into all different musical shapes and sizes.  The band’s last album, ‘American Idiot’ for me is a great punk rock record and with its political/social content it took the message to the mainstream bang smack at the top of the charts saying something about the media and the Iraq war when no-one else seemed to dare to.

Its like Green day took the message of Gillman Street right into the mainstream, and for Billie Joe to pretend that he can’t write such great songs would have been the biggest lie of them all- perhaps the most revolutionary act of the band is not to pretend they are underground- to keep on the right side of the hipsters but to follow their own natural instinct and take the message to the masses in a way that the Ramones could, unfortunately, only dream about.

Because this is the crux of this argument, this whole ‘sell out’ business, punk somehow got redefined by the media just after its explosion into something that people sold out from! The initial wave of punk bands were all pop bands- they were trying to get massive hits, that was the whole point- it was populist music- music made for everybody and not for a tiny hipster elite, the minute it went underground it was removed from any danger- the radio had an excuse not to play it anymore and remove it from the zeitgeist. The underground is forced upon us- it marganilsies and makes us tame. All the great underground bands should have been mainstream- getting their message through- all the way!

Even bands like Crass who made zero attempt to be commercial were selling thousands of records- they expanded the underground into a potent force- a potent force that still echoes through to this week’s demonstrations at the G20 summit in London. Crass had this potency and power because of the size of punk- it had the audience and for every ten kids that bought a Sex Pistols record one went further and bought a Crass album and if the Sex Pistols were singing about anarchy Crass were patiently explaining what ‘Anarchy’ was in an amazing series of records that were intellectual hand grenades. They may not have got the instant revolution but they somehow joined the hippie radicalism of the late sixties with the white heat fury of punk rock and, for my money, were the best example ever of  a counter culture band- perhaps the last stand of counter culture in its purest and most idealistic form.

Green Day somehow are related to this, there is a tiny bit of Crass in there and Billie Joe’s knack of writing great pop songs has expanded the punk debate into the nowhere towns that are usually excluded from this kind of talk. Green Day are not snobs and their music touches people who don’t even know that our raging scene exists- power to them and for the every ten albums downloaded or bought one person will open the trapdoor and discover this huge seething international scene inside and have their lives completely changed. And that’s a powerful thing because we don’t get access to the mainstream media- Green Day are our mainstream media and they use their space wisely.

And in these times of the credit crunch and the end of capitalism that message that was at the heart of all the best idealistic punk seems to be on the front pages of the newspapers every day. It is the end of capatilsim- the newspaper headlines read like song titles from Crass!

The music industry is over! What are we going to do now!

These are tough times for bands no-one is going to shell out money for CDs any more and gigs are struggling as the money runs out- only the bands who really want to do it are going to batter their way though this fallout- which is great but there are still hideous reminders of the past springing up like vultures picking at the bones of the last days of the music industry. Just when you think the recession has removed the possibility of the hideous band clogging up our lives along comes the news that Spandau Ballet have reformed.

Are Spandau Ballet the worst band of all time?
Perhaps.

The news of them reforming is one of the low points in the history of pop music with their tedious ballads about to ooze out from the mega stadiums- the soundtrack of Tories everywhere.Punk threw up a lot of possibilities, a lot of exciting possibilities so of course the worst one, the new romantics, became the most successful with frilly shirted goons in exclusive London clubs commandeering all the early eighties media attention from their mates in the press and became the biggest pop scene of the early eighties.

The fact that Spandau Ballet were perceived as the hippest band of the new romantic lot gives you a real measure of those desperate times. I still shudder now thinking of that fortnight when they were considered really cool and a swathe of easily swayed early eighties youth aped their look before realising the error of their ways and the band found their more natural constituency of middle England.

The curse of British music has how its always been dominated by fashion which somehow has become more important than the music, not style but fashion and fashion meant those groundbreaking looks worn by the bands, they sound tracked this with the musical equivalent of the guffawing and braying of three young Tories- the Eton crop of expensive suited champagne swilling horrors that would grow up to run the British banking system into the ground.

Please stop this nightmare now! Think of ‘Gold’ and ‘True’ the kind of songs that footballers like sung by Tony Hadley in that soulless drone of a voice- it’s a Orwellian vision of hell…