CATHI COMES HOME

I remember the first time I saw Johnny Rotten doing ‘Pretty Vacant’ on Top of the Pops. I was nine years old, lived in the middle of a field in Norfolk and had been brought up on the musical joys of The Singing Postman and Mister Acker Bilk. I was certain that I was seeing a live broadcast from Mars and was at once afraid and entranced by the alien being who had taken over the TV and the discordant racket made by his captive human slaves.

Twenty-six years later, when I knew full well what it was that I had seen on that day, I revisited that moment of childlike awe. Gave it to my character, Lynton Powell, a 16-year-old mixed-race kid whose parents had moved to Hull in the summer of 1977, forcing him into a world where he was most definitely an alien. Lynton was not popular at his new school, except with fellow social outcast Stevie Mullin, who took him home to listen to some of these new punk rock records he’d been stealing. Lynton needed some inspiration. Stevie chose ‘Anarchy in the UK’.

The music got louder and louder. Lynton felt like it was about to blow

him out of the room. It was like nothing else on earth, Stevie was right

about that. And in amongst the sheet metal guitars and powerdriving

drums and the acidic voice of the alien, Lynton sensed something

very powerful, taking shape and rising like a phoenix.

He sensed freedom.

A lot of old bollocks has been said and written about punk rock in the last 30 years, a lot of cash has been made from the chaos and almost always by the least talented and inspirational figures from the year when two sevens clashed. But what Lynton heard was the important thing, the thing that I will always carry with me, and the feeling that made me want to write a book set in the years between 1977 and 1981.

For that short period of time, it seemed to me, that the freaks had inherited the earth — Johnny had called to them and they had responded. You know those clips of punk gigs that are shown just about every night on I Love Five Minutes Ago, I Love Whatever and I Love Myself, Mainly? Look at the audience. Some of them have physical disabilities. Some of them are from ethnic minorities. A surprising number of them are even women, looking like women had never looked before, outside the set of Batman or Emma Peel’s turn at The Hellfire Club in The Avengers. They’ve all made their own outfits out of bin-bags and zips, second-hand clothes ripped up and remodelled with nothing more than marker pens, safety pins and panache. They all look so happy, because they have all said a big fuck you to what society in the sexually repressed, racially-divided, class-riddled Seventies had wanted of them. They have found each other instead.

This is what happens with the characters in my book and what really happened to some of the people who helped me with my research, people a little bit older than I was in 1977, who went on to have lasting careers a world away from what had been set out for them in the working class streets of the heavily-industrialised cities and towns they came from. The places like Hull, Birmingham, South Shields and Scunthorpe. Those three chords gave them the opportunity to be the people they really wanted to be, to live by their creativity and ingenuity, and the support they all had for each other.

Shame it never lasted.

I was at a venue in London last week called The Horse Hospital, in Bloomsbury – the sort of rare place were that spirit has not been lost, devalued, scorned or sold down the river, one of those rare places that can lift you out of the miasmas of the everyday. It was a special screening of a film called Vive Le Punk! that was the brainchild of Roger K Burton, the man who runs the venue, devoting his time and most of his money to putting on exhibitions, films, bands and esoteric happenings. Fifteen years ago, when he opened his doors, he had an exhibition of clothes from the shop run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood that gradually turned from Ted Mecca Let it Rock to Punk Rock fulcrum Sex. He asked both of them to come and talk about the garments and to his surprise – as neither had spoken to the other for a decade – they both did.

It began, as you may imagine, with Malcy talking his big talk and Vivienne hanging back, smoking her cigarette and drinking her wine. But slowly, she began to interject and slowly her comments built up a head of steam, to the point when she began a passionate discourse on why Punk was the Last Youth Culture, the last time young people stood up to the older generation and told them, forcefully, why they hated everything they stood for. She ended by explaining why she was no longer interested in young people today.

Only a very Conservative and probably Fascist society will flatter the young the way they are flattered today, she said, because only the very young and ignorant won’t realise why they are being flattered. They will be taken in and controlled, encouraged to spend all their time and money on idle and facile pursuits that do not educate or elevate them, least of all encourage them to think for themselves. There is no need to burn books, because nobody reads them, and all ideas are contained within books.

Back at home, with the latest trailer for Big Brother blaring out of my TV, I reflected to myself on just how profound her comments were. How lucky I was to have been born in a time when the ideals of Punk were ideals to be cherished. Question everything, accept nothing; the personal is the political; here’s three chords go form a band – all of those things. It is that spirit that I write about in The Singer, knowing that at least a handful of people will recognise in it their fellow aliens and the dreams that are to be cherished.

Because I never want to lose that feeling.

Read Cathi's new Pusher short ... here

Read The Pusher interview with Cathi ... here

Read Cathi's first Pusher short ... here