SOLID BARROOM SKRONK

As a little kid I already wondered why the music I liked most - be it wild 50s rock 'n roll or mid-60s Kinks/Who-type stuff - seemed to have bloomed for a very short period, to be quickly discarded and replaced by more boring stuff. In contrast, the boring stuff (disco, barroom boogie rock) never ever seemed to go away. Later I found out this holds true for just about any musical genre I like: ska, psych, garage, rockabilly, bebop, even early New Orleans jazz: all disappeared after 1 or 2 years in the limelight. Why? Maybe these were all particularly combustible musical forms that appeared at moments of big social change so the music had to change with it.

But invariably, after some 15-20 years, these styles would all get "revived". Is that good, or bad? You can blame the revivalists for living in the past, but does that mean any boogie rock band playing music that never went away is better? The problem is, of course, that you can imitate what's on the surface but you can never duplicate the feelings and times that caused the music to sound like it did.

Somehow with Punk Rock there's a little twist in the tale. It never disappeared because it was never mainstream in the first place. Instead, it kept on mutating and branching off, all these little branches spawning their own little revivals every couple of years. One piece of bark off the punk tree didn't lend itself to reviving, though: those weird, squeaky, Beefheartian pieces of noise that labels like Rough Trade released around 1978-80. In New York they called it No Wave, though some critics preferred the word Skronk which I like too as it sounds like a blast from James Chance or Ted (Blurt) Milton's sax. These records, by bands like Essential Logic, Lemon Kittens, Slits, Blurt and many more, sounded like a bunch of kids were let loose in a toy shop; that's because these bands were kids let loose in a toy shop; DIY was in its infancy and for a while there were no rules. I guess that's why, after the little kids themselves grew up and learned to play properly, nobody could ever "revive" this kind of music.

The catchy named PragVEC, though very much part of that Rough Trade/Post Punk scene, were odd ducks in a way because on their EP you can hear they already knew how to play properly; the guitar squeaks and skronks with the best of them, but there's always this foundation of bluesy fluidity underneath. Susan Gogan's great vocals veer in all directions, from soft to loud to distorted, but always in control; guess that's why she got compared to Pauline Murray of Penetration a lot (Virgin passed them up using that as an excuse). Then there's the mock-French in "Existential", showing they knew their Beatnik roots. I don't know much more about PragVEC, except that their second 7 inch is pretty good too, though a bit more "poppy". Oh yeah, and the famous Jim "Foetus" Thirlwell played bass for them later on. An old NME piece on PragVEC says they rose from the ashes of "Trotskyite R&B combo the Derelicts". Trotskyite R&B? Now that explains it all!

Existential
Bits
Wolf
Cigarettes (1978)

(Actually, come to think of it, there actually was a revival of sorts of this type of music in the late 80s, with UK bands like Dog Faced Hermans, Badgewearer and Stretchheads, bands that I thought were much more exciting than their recycled-USHC peers of the time.)