Phil at punkbrighton.co.uk has put up a gallery of Chefs pictures that I sent him a while ago (some are wrongly captioned). They are at http://punkbrighton.co.uk/chefsgal.html on the excellent site, which really captures the spirit of the Brighton punk and post-punk scene.
Phil has written a book about those times too, but I think the publishers keep delaying it, which must be incredibly frustrating for him. I can't wait to read it.
I doubt whether there's as truthful and interesting a site about a local music scene anywhere else in the world, but of course I am wildly biased, having been in three of the bands (Joby and the Hooligans, The Smartees and The Chefs) and having known just about all of them, no mean feat given the quantity of groups in Brighton in the late 1970s!
He includes fanzines, posters, badges, and all sorts of other stuff that builds up an idea of the power of the do-it-yourself world we all inhabited. It was a full-time occupation and the whole place was absolutely fizzing with energy, terrifying the Police and the local council (and quite a few snarly minicab drivers).
It was so creative, just like punk scenes everywhere: that's what people forget or simply don't realise.
It wasn't all about clothes or worshipping Malcolm McLaren: not for us, anyway.
Life was a vacuum and we filled it up with music, art, our own sort of clothes, fanzines, posters, politics and talk, putting on gigs and other events and refusing to lie down and suffer the consequences of not having a job.
Once on Radio 4 they set me up against Suzy Quatro, who set off on a little diatribe about women musicians in punk bands being not very good at music, how dare they, etc etc etc.
I knew she was quite a Tory, and I pointed out that the choice was either to do nothing, or to start something up and make a life for yourself, which is what a lot of that female music-making was about.
Entrepreneurial, n'est ce pas?
She agreed with me.
No comments:
Post a Comment