the sound of the suburbs (RIP Nicky Tesco)

 

Same old boring Sunday morning

Old man's out washing the car

Mum's in the kitchen, cooking Sunday dinner

Her best meal moaning while it lasts

Johnny's upstairs in his bedroom

Sitting in the dark

Annoying the neighbors

With his punk rock electric guitar

Every lousy Monday morning

Heathrow jets goes crashing over my home

Ten o'clock broad-moor siren

Driving me mad, won't leave me alone

The woman next store

Just sits and stares outside

She hasn't come out once

Ever since her husband died

Youth club group used to want to be free

Now they want anarchy

They play too fast, they play out of tune

They practice in the singers bedroom

The drums quite good, the bass is too loud

And I can't hear the words

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Family shoppers crowding out the center of town

Young blokes sitting on the benches

Shouting at the young girls walking around

Johnny stands there at his window

Looking at the night

I said, hey what you listening to

There's nothing there

a song in the tradition of  

My father's name was Dad

My mother's name was Mom

How can I take the blame

For anything I've done

See the hollows of my eyes

Make my career of empty skies

I'll laugh at it all

a song whose contemporary cousins include 

"I  swallow my dreams like my beer

Sunday dinner with the wife now

Cos nothing new happens here

This is my life!"

and also 

Hello darlin', I'm home again

Covered in shit and aches and pains

Too knackered to think so give me time to come round

Just gimme the living room beat to the TV sound

My hard earned dough goes in bills and the larder

And that Prince Philip tells us we gotta work harder!

It seems a constant struggle just to exist

Scrimping and saving and crossing of lists

From this window I've seen the whole world pass

From dawn to dusk I've heard the last laugh laughed

a song whose transatlantic cousins include 

Your mindless devotion

To lack of emotion

Is no kind of religion for me

and also

Suburban Dream

You won't get mugged

Suburban Dream

No cockroach bugs

Suburban Dream

It's really true

Suburban Dream

Everybody's like you...

Television living takes up all my time

Making the suburban dream

Suburban Dream

It's really nice

Suburban Dream

Now this one I find very inadvertently funny (and don't get me wrong, I love the Descendents, or at least I love this one album of theirs Milo Goes to College) because it starts with this sneer about suburban voidoids - "I want to be stereotyped / I want to be classified" - but what could be more stereotypically punk, more classifiable as a generic lyric subject and angle of attack, than this song? 

I want to be a masochistic

I want to be a statistic

I wanna be a clone

I want a suburban home, suburban home, suburban home, suburban home

I don't want no hippie pad

I want a house just like mom and dad

Of course, I'm barely scratching the surface here in terms of anti-suburbia songs in punk / New Wave / hardcore / Mod (original and revival) 

Thing is, what with being thoroughly ensconced in Pleasantville myself these days, I'm sorta wondering what exactly they've all got against suburbia?  It's a little placid, I suppose, that's true...  

But then I guess I'm very very far from adolescence - and quite content to be somewhere the action isn't.... 

(perhaps I'd have a different feelin about it if I was a commuter - but going to the office for me is walking about 40 feet from the bed to this desk..)

Bonus beat / postscript

And here's a Members song/promo I never saw before, actually about commuting - but commuting within the city - and about how living in the city can be just as dullsville and depressing as living in the suburbs. 

RIP Nicky Tesco

turning Jam-anese

 "Turning Japanese" by the Vapors is by any measure a minor tune of its era. A huge hit  in the UK (Number 3 in 1980) ... something of a radio perennial in the States, on a certain kind of oldies station anyway...  partly from being a minor Billboard hit at the time (number 36) but also its popularity on MTV as a video several years after it came and went (just like the band's career) in the UK.

I liked it at the time, same as I liked things by the Rezillos or Blondie or The Cars or Martha & the Muffins ... even the odd thing by the Boomtown Rats... but I'd never have thought of buying it. 

Hearing "Japanese" it on the radio the other day I was struck by how fresh it sounded, still... and thought about how it was part of this giant wave of freshness at that time - i.e. the New Wave  .... the sense of an all-change that swept over the radio and the charts, that made the Old Wave sound old, and also worried some Old Wavers enough to try to young up their sound a bit

guitar-bass-drums - the standard rock line-up - but "Turning Japanese" doesn't sound like the Sixties or the pre-punk Seventies

the bass is prominent, loping... the guitar, not quite "angular" or "jagged" but definitely not based in blues-derived hard rock, a world away from contemporaries like AC/DC, who were aggressive and thrilling and stripped-down and irreverent and even had punkoid lyrics ("Problem Child", "TNT") but were very much an extension of the Old Wave....  That was how you differentiated New Wave (a break) from Heavy Metal  / Hard Rock (a continuation), i.e. the disappearance of raunch from the music,  the replacement of  "feel' and "swing" with a jumpy exuberance and choppiness.

At the time Vapors were regarded as imitators of The Jam, another group who eliminated
feel/swing/groove from their music (only to attempt disastrously to reinject it at a later stage - "Precious", ugh!)

And they shared the same producer - the disconcertingly named  Vic Coppersmith-Heaven

It's audible on much of New Clear Days the debut Vapors album but I don't hear Jam-iness at all on "Turning Japanese".... if anything I hear maybe just a tiny trace of "Hong Kong Garden" (another Polydor act)

But then The Jam sound itself -- at its prime, i.e. after the shaky start but before they got into direct pomo-referentiality and recycling with "Start"/"Town Called Malice"/"Absolute Beginners" -- is itself  a break from Sixties/pre-punk Seventies

the ideology and the look is mod, but the run of  great tunes from "Down in the Tube Stations At Midnight" via "Eton Rifles" and "Pretty Green" to "Funeral Pyre" -- rarely sound Sixties-evoking or even Sixties-invoking


What, in the actual 1960s, sounded anything like "Going Underground"?

What an odd tune it is, in its arrangement and production! Jerky, fussy (yet pared down), agitated, an epic flail

I don't know if I even like it...  at the time I never bought it (the only Jam record I actually bought was "Down in the Tube Station". I found, and find still, something resolutely non-magnetic about Weller as a character, on recordings and in real life).  I don't know what "Going Underground" is "about", never did ...  But I recognise its originality, its invention, its force on the radio.


Okay, The Who is in there, somewhere.... but the Who were explosive, the Jam implosive

Rock music (is it even really rock music? it's certainly got no 'n' roll to it... it's more like jacked-up-on-neurosis guitar-pop) at its most uptight, repressed.  Its most English, in fact.