sweet effay

The Cinestatic empire has been switching servers and we haven't been able to post anything for the duration. Still seems okay now. Thanks Mike!

Here's something I wrote earlier:

The West Country Massive over at An Idiot’s Guide have been pontificating about their favourite punk singles. Naturally, this triggers off the Sad Old Punk™ inside me and I just have to add my two cents.

First off, anything post 1977 can be discounted straight away (well, apart from the Dead Kennedys and Black Flag, obviously). Why? Because Simon Reynolds and his posse will immediately jump up and down crying “Oh, that’s so post-punk!” Consequently, whilst I have some sympathy for Cloudboy’s choice of ‘Honk Kong Garden’, it’s going to have to be ruled out because nobody wants to get into a dreary argument down the pub about which genre’s which. I will just add though that it seems to me that the whole argument re The Banshees and The Slits (to name just two) being post-punk simply hinges on the fact that it took them a while to get any records out.

So what are we left with? We can discount the Pistols, Clash, Damned, Ramones, Adverts, etc. straight away because, good though they are, even ‘Anarchy’ wasn’t that shocking. They might have been in the vanguard of punk, but the music just wasn’t punk enough. ‘Peaches’ by The Stranglers? Well, it had rude words in (although not the version they recorded for Capital Radio) and an interesting bass line, but not really.

Now at this point, you’re probably thinking “Oh God, the twat’s going to come out with some obscure bunch of second-raters like Eater or Chelsea, but no dear readers. The best punk single ever is ‘Oh Bondage Up Yours!’ by X-Ray Spex.

Why? Well it might not sound that bizarre now, but it certainly was at the time. The first time I heard I heard it was when Leper Jack played it to a bunch of us and it was greeted with stunned silence. Until that point, we thought that the Pistols had an extreme vocalist, but Poly Styrene was something else all together, and Laura Logic’s squawking sax provided a perfect counterpoint to it. Furthermore, it has an even better spoken intro than the Damned’s ‘New Rose’. Most of my friends who heard it couldn’t actually cope with it. Sure, The Pistols, etc. rocked, but that woman sounded just terrible and the lyrics! Furthermore, we mustn’t forget the b-side, ‘I am a Cliché’ which is not quite as good (nothing else X-Ray Spex ever did was), but is still very fine indeed.

If punk was supposed to make people shake their heads in horror, ‘Oh Bondage’made even punks shake their heads in horror. There can be no finer recommendation.

And the runners up? The Buzzcock’s ‘Spiral Scratch’ ep and ‘Love Comes in Spurts’ by Richard Hell and the Voidoids.