I've been writing this column on and off since 1972 and I just decided to stop. I’ve got other things to do and I’v said as much about Britain as I can for a while. Ever since the rise of punk, the difference between what’s happening here and what interests you there has been growing, and I’ve now lost a sense of what to write about.

The last CREEM I got had Tec Nugent on the cover again, and he’s a: insignificant for British music as Kissmore insignificant probably; he’s beer doing the same thing for longer Similarly, the British bands you like arc all old poseurs, from the Rolling Stones to Queen, routine showmen for whom 1978 was just another year. There is good American music, but the onh, thing its performers have in common— Ramones, Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, etc. —is that their pictures aren’t on the cover of CREEM.

Which is why I’m not sure what I’m doing inside. This isn’t just a matter of punk cultism. 1978 hasn’t actually been a punk year. For the under-tens it was the year of Grease. I-doubt if the film was originally made for pre-teens but they’re the ones who’ve wanted it. Up and down the country mothers have been casting uneasy glances at their daughters^-is it nice for mother and child to fancy the same man on the same screen for the same reasons?— while their sons sit spell.bodnd through the banter and the innuendo. Grease is an interesting film anyway, a sophisticated evasion of the sexual questions it poses, but what does it mean \yhen this sexual sophistication, this knowingness, is being consumed by eightyear-olds?

For over-tens 1978 was the year of Boney M. Boney have taken over from Abba as the European hit assembly' line, and like Abba, their appeal is a mixture of craft (the master mind in this case belongs to Frank Farian, German disco dreamer) and image. You may hate the idea of their anodyne version of “Rivers of Babylon”, but by the time they finished selling it, it had become more compulsive than the original. The Boney visuals are childish anyway— the group look as if they ran amuck in a grownup’s dressing-up box—and all their songs come out as nursery rhymes. For Christmas they dressed up in white teddy bear skins and sang “Mary’s Boy Child”. The year’s Christmas hit and probably Boney M’s last. Still, they did pull the year’s best sales trick: after “Babylon” had finished selling its millions, the record company flipped the disc and “Brown Girl In The Ring” sold millions too. Most Boney fans bought the same record twice without realising.

Behind (and beneath) Grease and Boney M, 1978 was about old new wave bands entering the mainstream of British business and British rock ’n’ roll. The year’s critical fun was watching the poses dropping, the choices stopping, as the successful “punk” acts found their proper non-punk slots—the Boomtown Rats as party music, the Jam as 60’srock, the Buzzcocks as 60’s pop, Sham 69 as 70’s populism, Penetration as headbangers, XTC as artists, Elvis Costello as a star, etc. And the year’s critical challenge was from bands not finding a slot and either vanishing (like the Damned) or struggling to keep punk contradictions alive.

1978 was, oddly, a more political rock year than 1977, Jubilee time. There was a lot of rock against racism, carnivals and parties in which music and marching were combined, and songs were used as political weapons more directly than at any time since the days of folk protest. Bands still dream of making mass political music and both the Tom Robinson Band and the Clash made mucih more incisive albums than you’d expect from their rough thinking. Both bands use orthodox rock forms and both, especially the Clash, use rock banality as the source of their aggresive concern.

I love the Clash7s second album but I can’t help hearing it as old-fashioned, slightly quaint in its 1978 context of a rash of bands, whose subversive intentions are purely musical. Johnny Rotten formed Public Image Ltd. and their debut album is at once self-indulgent (never thought Johnny would be into ten minute tracks of instrumental manouevering) and startling. Siouxsie and the Banshees, the last of the original punks to appear on LP, make their music as a form of artfully controlled wailing. And all round the country, on local labels, in oddball studios, there’s a new genre of music being made—electronic, self-conscious, pretentious, anti-commercial. I don’t expect any of these groups to amount to anything (Human League and the Normal, Prag Vec and Scritti Politti, the Flying Lizzards and the Fall) but they’re true rock eclectics, pulling elements from here and there, and something good’s gonna come out sometime.

When it does you won’t hear it. American music seems to have frozen into its taste markets for ever—local scenes will survive, I suppose, but whether they’ll ever be an interesting mass music taste in America again I don’t know.

1978finished, as usual, with the big boys out on their Christmas runs. Clapton’s and Stewart’s are now over, Elton John’s is just announced. I don’t care about any of them though I know they’re all good CREEM stories. But what can I do when, for me, 1978’s most intriguing album was by Poet and the Roots, was a London reggae album in which stark, bloody visions were talked over an eccentric, slashing backing track? How are Ted Nugent fans going to adjust to that? And the sad thing is that, in principle, Nugent and the poet are working much the same areas. But Nugent fans will never know.