Sunday, February 27, 2022

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
g
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



2 comments:

Anthony Volpe said...

Great tribute but you left out Leningrad Cowboys, Simon! He's the lost American cousin they meet on their travels. Their version of "L.A. Woman" rivals the Doors original for me.

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