I've decided to believe in punk rock after all. EMI have signed the Sex Pistols and I ain't about to be outcooled by those dumboes. The Sun had a center spread on THIS NEW PHENOMENON and pix of all the kids in their safety pins. Safety pins!?!?!? What sort of phenomenon is this, I ask, as it spreads from London and produces the best music paper ever called Sniffin ' Glue. It was Sniffin' Glue that convinced me. Mick, who plays with a punk band called Clash, explained to the mag about Americans: "They don't know what the fuckin' dole is, where as we're down the hole anyway, coppin' our monev off Rod Stewart's taxes!"

Nice one Mick and I hope you get a good whack.

It's the SG theory of punk that it's about being "broke, on the dole and living at home in boring fcouncil flats." In other words, punk is a perfectly reasonable response to The Crisis and to the effects of The Crisis on the mass of unskilled and unemployed kids.

Another response to The Crisis is less reasonable. His name is Steve Hillage. He wears a tea cosy on his head, looks like an Arabian holy man and is Britain's answer to Peter Frampton. Virgin Records (boy, did I get them wrong a few columns ago) have come up with a brand new guitar hero and what a wizard scheme! Hillage is the Missing Hippie! Britain collapses and he keeps on keeping on like it was 1968 still. Stars, Stonehenge, tea leaves, palms—you name it, he'll read it and, nodding off to "Hurdy Gurdy Man" and Hillage's seductive licks and the girl with the bells on her toes, good lord maybe it is 1968 still and I've had it wrong all this time. And then, no, I Couldn't've dreamt the Ramones.

Truth is that life now is nasty, British and short of the loot for U.S.-style hedonism. (Sniffin' glue? What have we come to?) I'm not surprised by the number of people floating off on Steve

Hillage's cosmic tea-tray and I won't be surprised if today's East End punks make it like their older brothers in Third World War didn't—same message (same as the Who, come to that, the skinheads, Slade even), harder times. But if life is n, b and s in England, think how much more n, b, and s it is in Irelandllf we're ever going to produce a truly great punk band (and there did used to be one called the New Beatles!) Bogside'd be the place for it to come from, or the Shankill Road.

As it is, the biggest Irish group is the Chieftains and they're, like, the Steve Hillages of the Irish scene. I explained to their man in the front office that I wasn't exactly a folkie but they sent me the

record and tickets anyway and I duly went along, solidarity WASP on a solid Irish evening out. Now Birmingham's had its share of the Irish Question—an appalling pub bombing, a wave of indiscriminate anti-Irishism. The Birmingham Irish remain a focus of suspicion—for each other, for the Special Branch; for the usual Black Country racists—and yet the only politics of the Chieftains' evening dated from early in the nineteenth century or before—Bonaparte's Retreat. What the Chieftains provided and what their audience delighted in was a friendly vision of a distant rural land—reels and pigs and colleens, a life that I guess every Brummy Irishman dreams of but which many of them also escaped, out of sheer boredom. The Chieftains, in their relaxed, pullovered, civil service style, present the sunny side of Ire' land's mythical history with such intensity that the whole experience becomes as spiritual for this family audience of whooping blue collars as theirs is for Steve Hillage's hippies. The New Musical Express reviewer came right out and had a Mystical Experience. I left early and remembered that the last time I was in a crowd like this I was too

scared to finish my drink. The folk singer in that pub sang republican battle hymns. The Chieftains didn't (though I guess they might have done after I left).

The greatest Irish rockers left Ireland, of course, but not altogether. Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, and Van Morrison were Irish punks in their time and the fact that they are no more says something about the problems of the punk position. Rory Gallagher, for instance, came out of Southern showbands to be the bejerkined flash-arrogant leader of Taste, the original fanatics' trio. But when that broke up he changed back to sweat shirts and a good nature and became the only white blues guitarist in the history of the

universe to go on getting better. And one reason is plain—Rory can't settle to a comfortable middle age 'cause he ain't got no place to stay! His is the life and idea of the wandering showmen by necessity. Calling Card is his latest and ' bestest album and that's all he's got to leave behind. You don't expect him to settle in Ireland, do ya?

Van Morrison and Thin Lizzy were street kids and street bands who quickly put a distance pf myth and poetry between themselves and those streets. Them went into the mystic and Morrison came out moody and magnificent but rarely what you could call comfortable; Phil Lynott has developed a rock 'n' roll world in which his band's swank and swagger can flow without fear. Johnny the Fox is Thin Lizzy's latest pnd bestest album but it isn't Paddy the Provo because rock'n'roll violence has always been a pose and in Britain, so far, it's only on the streets of Belfast that such a pose is really dangerous.

So punk hatred andpunk boredom may be real but I'm not at all sure that it's trouble that punks are looking for. "It's a bit silly, ain't it?" says Sniffin' Glue, as they get ready for a new round of musical war:/'discos" vs "punks" vs "hippies." "What jolly fun!" say the rock critics, pleased that there's still any excitement associated with rock at all and, wow, last week, at a Clash gig a girl bit a boy's ear clean offr "Hold on!" say I, posing ain't progress and as long as the sneers and contempt are kept on stage they're going to end up focussed on the usual butts of rock'n'roll bossiness-women (with probably something left over for Pakistanis—New York punks are already noted for their Puerto Rican "jokes"). Boredom and apathy ain't there to be celebrated, after all, and I think we should make as much trouble for those punks as we can.

says TURN TO PAGE 71.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 26.

LETTER FROM BRITAIN