Arena Homme+ | The Husband Diaries
John Lydon, 1985 © Tony Mott
Words spoken almost half a century ago by a man who meant very little to me at the time, and of whom I had little knowledge and little interest, came to mind when John Lydon failed to become the Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest - staged this month in Le Royaume-Uni - as front man of PIL, with the song 'Hawaii'.
These words were spoken in the high season of punk during which I collected my weekly copy of Sounds on the way to school, and perused it en route to the bus stop for the short ride to Camberwell, via the ramp of the brutalist estate completed three years earlier. Work begun in the high season of glam rock ('In every dream home a heartache'), with the final flagstone laid the summer the Philadelphia sound was wafting through walkways and stairwells, as it emanated from the Phillip's cassette pet belonging to one of our gang. The cogs on a C30 or C60 or C90 tape rolled and MFSB rallied. By 1977 they were raging: 'Let's clean up the ghetto.'
The slab blocks were in a state of disrepair. The odds lifts were out of order more than the evens. It was a familiar story in similar settings in the 1970s. A number of shops were closed or taken out; smaller streets were razed and cordoned off by corrugated iron, hinting at a neglect of prospect or, simply a lack of promise. This was the London Sounds journalist Jon Savage was documenting, as he circled the equivalent streets in west London, photographing what was described as a dystopian landscape, when 'concrete jungle' became a cliché. Here was the inspiration, the muse for punk groups that came late to the party. Dystopias, destruction, the dole and the doldrums fuelled their one chord wonders. Everything started with a D.
The music press fixated on these bands in an effort to stay current. Almost any performer over twenty-five, who hadn't formed a band the day before yesterday, was relegated to the final pages, ahead of the small ads summoning anyone with an instrument to form a punk group. It was here that I was struck by a quote plucked from an interview from an older front man from a band cast as dinosaurs. The band was Jethro Tull; the man was Ian Anderson. A vaguely familiar figure he’d appeared on Top Of The Pops dressed like Fagin, wearing Max Wall tights, standing on one leg while playing the flute during 'Living In The Past'. This band meant something to hippy teachers and boys at school who, with their feathered hair and frayed flares, were living in the past - like Jethro Tull and Ian Anderson who, there, in bold capitals, Times Roman, had the temerity to ask of the helmsman leading the new wave (if my memory serves me well): 'What does Johnny Rotten sing about in his tender moments?'
Coming early to the party, in fact kick starting the party that was punk, the Sex Pistols had other songs in mind. As Greil Marcus wrote of the music of the movement: 'Banishing the love song, people discovered what else there was to sing about.' Anarchy and republicanism were among the topics fostered at Sex on the King’s Road under the aegis of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, where the quartet was famously formed. Tenderness didn't feature among the slogans and situationist pranks the duo indulged in, and that McLaren had been inspired by as an art student in the 1960s. Now that decade was done, with the hippies identified with it cast into the wilderness - or holed up in a Notting Hill squat. Chaos and anger surpassed peace and love when it came to the iconic Sex shop t-shirt which covered the torso of a Pistol or two. Beneath the heading 'You're gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you've been lying on', the word 'fuck' etched in red over two lists: people and topics that belonged in the present and those that belonged in the past. The reactionary on one side; the radical on the other.
By the time of her death at the close of last year, aged 81, Vivienne Westwood had become part of the former list rather than the latter, even though she was blissfully unaware of it. She was a national treasure, an English eccentric, recipient of the OBE, the creative pulse of a lucrative fashion brand, a company that made the news in recent years for alleged tax avoidance. Meanwhile, the activism she identified herself with was a quaint attempt at relevance by someone unaware the world had changed and much of what was once on the fringes had moved into the mainstream. Her efforts to draw attention to these causes had the hallmarks of the situationist pranks from her time with McLaren, but with neither the shock value nor the success. The slogans were closer to the peace and love placards that went the way of all flesh and fads in the hippy era.
Jordan, the infamous shop girl central to the Sex shop scene and the Sex Pistols story, and possibly the most interesting player in the ensemble, died months before Westwood, just as the whole saga was serialised on Disney under the direction of Danny Boyle. Even before Disney got its hands on it, survivors and casualties that had a cameo or a walk-on part in the movement had been regurgitated ad nauseam for television cameras, by way of successive documentaries. Along with ageing fans they recalled the period in the way their parents reflected on life during wartime. Some get emotional when they remember the time before the pogoing stopped and paralysis became a possibility. Yet, arguably the scene was burnt out and reduced to ashes - all that us elders are heading towards - when Malcolm McLaren cashed in on its embers with 'The Great Rock n' Roll Swindle'.
On the rare occasions I recall that period I seldom return to the sounds of the time. The piece of music that captures the memory of the experience, and evokes something poignant and tender, was assembled by McLaren shortly before his death in 2010. A playlist compiled for a Dries Van Noten catwalk show; a thirteen minute sequence opening with the soundtrack from Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'. It plays pianissimo beneath a loutish rant from the vocalist in The Mekons. Chit chat, clinking glass and ambient noise from a night at the Roxy Club kick in, making way for something cobbled and fractious from The Raincoats, before Burundi drumming builds and Bernhard Herrmann's film score returns. It's a tone poem by way of the simple and the sampled; a punk Finlandia.
Tender and poignant, like I say. Themes that rarely occupy the young, the wild and the reckless. Yet these hook into the outlook of those of us with dead nerve endings, cantering towards the exit and the dust and ash that lay beyond. These are the themes that Husband continue to address. Here, in this essay, the band has but a cameo; arriving now, more than two-thirds in and close to the bottom of the bill. Where else? But the story of the band's formation, the thinking behind it, was covered at length in two previous essays published in Arena Homme, both entitled 'Sick Notes'.
Husband came about at the start of Covid, a period the young will one day recall the way elders remember the war or punk. My musician neighbour - let’s call him D - on guitar, with myself as frontman. Someone who has never performed, sung, or written a song filling in the evenings, following days on furlough. The approach was akin to those punk bands that simply picked up instruments and played, but executed by men in late-middle age. The tracks are about death, illness, and thwarted desire. The band expanded to four, then in the last year contracted to two. The young drummer made his excuses and left, when his soap-making business took off; the bass player is on a sabbatical from the band, weighed down by his accountancy career and a burgeoning property empire in Snodland. 'And then there were two,' sighs Paul during a rehearsal in the 'Get Back' documentary - which features in ‘Sick Notes II’ - when Ringo turns up and George and John go AWOL.
D was born at the fag end of the 1960s as the hippy dream died. He was therefore some way into infancy as punk was in the ascendant. Nevertheless he is an aficionado. He strummed in many a punk band before Husband, where he is apt at skillfully aping Link Wray and Duane Eddy on certain songs. But he still has some skin in the game, taking in the odd punk reunion festival, where old men in old bands play in old pubs to audiences largely made up of elderly fans. The queues outside the venues are populated with characters looking as though they are heading to Lourdes for a cure, rather than the party faithful looking for a safe space to pogo, or simply watch others do so. They come: the wheelchair bound, the amputees, those disfigured by Day-Glo mohicans in their dotage. They come: those for whom gravity, age, piercings and Prince Alberts have dragged ear lobes towards shoulders, nipples towards the belly that once housed a waist, and the penis to their knees. It's a fraternity. In a packed pub in Plymouth, D turned up to see GBH. The sound man looked familiar. Wasn't he himself in a band? 'I'm the drummer in The Wurzels,' he said. Small world.
Husband came to me like a vision in the 1990s, when the concept was that of a forty year old man fronting a band of sixteen year olds. Time has made it appear more perverse that it was. Odd to think that forty was old in a cross-generational band, singing songs about being a grown-up. Tony James had a similar idea at the time, when I was working for the BBC on an arts series about the 1980s. In an effort to recruit interviewees I found myself in a mews house in west London asking him about his Eighties experience with Sigue Sigue Sputnik and his Seventies experience with Generation X. Of greater interest to me was the band he had in mind for the 1990s. They were called Fin de Siècle (if my memory serves me well); their songs fixated on growing old and feeling young ('Age Up'). This summer James and his erstwhile band mate Billy Idol join forces with two former Sex Pistols to tour as Generation Sex, with a setlist combining songs from the bands assembled in their youth. Songs about anarchy, republicanism and alienation (‘Your generation don't mean a thing to me').
What do they sing about in their tender moments? Some of the purveyors of the punk ethos from that period have progressed to songs that were anathema to many from the period, when everything started with a D. At several shows on a recent tour, Robert Smith was brought to tears, along with fans of The Cure, when he sang ‘Endsong’. Word reaches me that it’s a song about his late brother. ’And wondering about that boy/And the world he called his own/ And I’m outside in the dark/ Wondering how I got so old.’ Seeing footage of him performing the song with the bird’s nest hair and bad make-up that have been a staple of his on stage look since the 1970s, somehow made it more poignant than tragic.
What does Johnny Rotten sing about in his tender moments? After becoming John Lydon the former Pistol took his rebel yell to the world of PIL and, as he himself gracefully acknowledges, made the most of the opportunity he was given. A number of us stayed for the first couple of albums. We dipped in and out over the decades, as minor chart success called him to the fore: 'This is not a love song. This is not a love song'. Along with the rebel yell, he maintained the stance, the attitude, the sneer and the stare, as surely as Robert Smith clings to the lipstick and the lacquer. Punk purists who’ve taken the mohican into their dotage and turned up at punk festivals with the party faithful, disowned Lydon when he joined celebrities in the jungle, dressed in Cording's tweeds for butter ads, and finally, attempted to enter Eurovision.
Some of us paid attention to him in recent years. He was more of a maverick than those who believe they are kicking against the pricks, while mouthing the laboured soundbites of the age (the risible Billy Bragg, for one). He rails against the weedy, woke and triggered of the left, and the accompanying cancel culture they’ve created. He wore a MAGA t-shirt; supported Brexit; tweeted 'Send her victorious' when the Queen died. This isn't because he’s old. This isn't because he's reactionary. It's because those that oppose a number of these stunts and opinions are. ’Where is this ‘moral majority’ nonsense coming from,’ he asked, ‘when they’re basically the ones doing all the wrong for being so bloody judgmental and vicious against anybody that doesn’t go with the current popular opinion?’ I guess he has done what many of us have had to do and what many others need to do: he’s woken up and decided which side of the bed he’s lying on.
Of late Lydon has appeared on screen more frequently. Often at breakfast time, where he moved an insipid female presenter to tears, between segments on genocide, gang rape and a dog that smiles. Serious, funny, emotional, he shares his experience of losing his wife, a woman who has been in his life almost as long as he’s been in the public eye, as dementia took hold of her. (She died in April.) 'Remember me, I remember you,' he sings in the tender moments of 'Hawaii'. Oh yes, he actually sings, and sounds touched and torn by the words he sings. This is not a rebel yell. This is not a one chord wonder. This is a love song.