Is Your Poetic License Expired?

Is Your Poetic License Expired?

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Penny Valentine

by

Can rock 'n' roll and poetry nestle comfortably alongside each other or does the mere mention of the latter make rock fans suspicious? Excuse me while I reminisce . . . At school they made us read Keats. Nightingales; orchards, castle feasts: all those things that had absolutely nothing to do with my life! And yet it still didn't manage to put me off-poetry altogether. I sneaked into the library at lunchtimes, eating a bar of chocolate that added to my painful teenage acne, sniffed and sobbed over purely accidental "finds"

like Christina Rossetti and her mad passion for nuns ana incest;"Wilfred Owen's poems of the First World War made all the more traumatic by the knowledge that he's joined—at 21—all those bodies wasted on foreign' fields. Poetry brought me passion (at that time about the only kind—vicarious—-I'd known) and seemed to slot in nicely with visits to Japnes Dean in East Of Eden (seven times and going through a box of Kleenex on every occasion, I swear).

Now we all know I was a wimpy little girl.

After that, rock 'n' roll took poetry's place for my emotional salvation.

Odd then, to notice how th6 music here is beginning to formulate its own rock poetry. And I don't mean Yes. Remember all those stoned evenings when people would sit with alburrr sleeves mulling over lyrics before putting the record on? Humm. Then the music came in and the two didn't sit easily with each other a( all. Not people's poetry. The new rock poets are people's poetry . Like the Liverpool Poets who started out post-Beatles and were witty and sarcastic and gave rise to Scaffold (with Paul McCartney's brother, no less). Like Jim Burns. You will never have heard of Jim Burns. He is not a musician. He's a bloke from a factory who ' writes about football matches and union meetings in his

Linton Kwosi Johnson speaks out in support of his chin.

poetry and some of them are very fuftny. The hew rock poets combine that kind of nicely turned "mundane" observation with, so far, two kinds of music. Punk and reggae. Whatever the record company moguls have done to both forms of music it at least had some political content/comment and continues, in its own way, to be subversive, even if it has been taken into the mainstream.

The new poets aren't in the mainstream. Maybe they'll never get there. Maybe that's why they sound more subversive than anything else that's going on in punk or reggae at the moment. It may be coincidental that John Cooper Clarke looks like early Bob Dylan. Wasn't Bob Dylan the first rock poet? In a way maybe poetry and folk always was a more acceptable combination. But look at Dylan's delivery: the "more spoken than sung" way of his approach, the impact that gave to what he had to say. (Now he's so closed in on himself that his lyrics manifest the internalizing of Jackson Browne. If there's a world outside it's not as important as what's going on in my life, thank you, variety). Anyway, John Cooper Clarke arrived around the same time as the Sex Pistols and Clash and was outrageous. A punk poet. An art school drop-put, of course, with a Manchunian drawl (for those not geographically minded it will sound like he walked the same streets as the Beatles to you). The first time I saw him I thought he was all flash and effort. Dark glasses, frizzed-out hair, skinny and snarling. Yawn. Trouble was, he popped up everywhere. A punk gig with too many bands? Bring on Cooper Clarke. A punk gig at an art college? Bring on Cooper#Clarke. A punk gig . . .At the ElVis Costello concerts he was—along with Richard Hell (a man who sounds like he's drilling the road early in the morning Right Outside Your Window and won't stop)—one of the support acts. Compared to Hell he suddenly sounded really good. CBS had signed him up by now (record companies, it should be noted, get a siege mentality when faced with full page features in NME, Melody Maker and Sounds on someone who hasri't put his signature on the dotted line). His first album came out at Christmas. DISGUISEL In Love. If you don't get the joke then don't bother to open the shrink wrap. "Valley Of The Lost Women" is about suburban housewives; "Psycle Sluts" (oh yes* the near-gobbing one has a neat twist of phrase) . .!. . amongst the despair for a Wimpey-and-Woodbines way of life (Wimpey's are Britain's excuse for hamburgers—nasty grey things; Woodbines are "working class" cigarettes, so small that they've gone in two puffs, but cheaper than other brands), Clarke's punk ethos is: "I don't want to be nice". Punks, remember, never wanted to be nice. They might have wanted to be successful but you weren't supposed to love them.

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Maybe the nearest thing you've got to Cooper Clarke is Tom Waits. But only because Waits equally doesn't give a monkey's, and is wily and difficult when it-comes to conforming with the system. (British journalists had a lot of trouble dealing with his punkish antagonism last time he was over, and that was before we even knew what punkish meant). The comparison ends there. Waits comes out of a traditipn— songwriter as epic novelist. And his songs are deeply mourning and romantic,'retracing some lost way of life that's lodged down/amongst the hobos and Woody Guthrie's panorama of the American worker (off duty). Clarke mourns only what's happening to him and others like him, today. He neither looks back nor forward. Maybe he wants something else, but the else is not fdrmulated.

It's impossible to believe that if there hadn't been punk there would have been Cooper Clarke. He would have stayed lodged as a local phenomena in Manchester. You can't dance to him and he hasn't/ had a hit single but the cognescenti mink he's okay and if they're,not tired or desperate for some action they don't boo him off stage. Linton Kwesi Johnson might equally have never been heard on record if reggae also hadn't become a commercially viable proposition. Johnson's more overtly political than Clarke but then I suppose, it's all relative (while Clarke drones about the white boy's burden circa Lydon and Strummer; Johnson is angry about the life of young blocks who have all the white boys' problems—plus some).

The first time I heard Linton Kwesi Johnson's Dread Beat An' Blood album I was more qxcited than the first time I saw a Tom Robinson gig (which, in retrospect, is pretty remarkable). Like Tom was, Kwesi Johpson cuts the cackle and gets straight to the point. Linton is a young black who came to Britain from Jamaica when he was 11 and found that the country which had exploited his homeland and told its people that Britain was the "mother country" only wanted them for cheap labor. When that dried up . . . Like the poor whites in America's South who long ago turned against the poor blacks from fear and ignorance and the thought that all THEIR troubles were caused by THEM (how useful for the politicians), British blacks are blamed for rising unemployment, dole queues, food prices: you name it. You can't read Johnson's work on paper—as a white it needs time to struggle with the West Indian pronunciations. So, unlike Gil Scott-H6ron—the nearest Ameri-s can equivalent—his work dpes not slip easily into the mainstream . Although it does sit comfortably, in a biting way, on ears attuned to Bob Marley or Toots and the Maytells. Johnson's second album, Forces Of Victory, combines the words and music better than the first, but loses the edge of fury a bit. Johnson is first and foremost a political being, working in the black community, so he doesn't have the problems Robinson faces in aspiring to rock 'n' roll's great rewards. And his "songs" make Bob Marley's "Stand Up For Your Rights" sound like your old school song. But like Clarke he may find it impossible to cross the Atlantic. (It remains to be seen if Ian Dury has the sairne problem or whether he's gradually overcoming the intrinsically British-way-of-life nature of his material.) Clarke and Johnson are not really musicians in the true sense, and

poetry is still not an acceptable way of translating social emotions tQ an audience more used, if they read it at all, to do so in the quiet confines Of their bed sitter. It still has an "intellectual", class conscious tag that white audiences have ajbarrier against. Head banging 4s a much more satisfying physical outlet than getting angry inside your head I suppose. ' , '

If Clarke and Johnson stay on the outskirts of the mainstream, they're not alone—at, the moment. The Pop Group and Doll By Doll are not poets. They are not punks. But they've come up from the supposed after-affects (ah me, already?) of punk. So far they are pretty uncategorizable but the papers here, short of anything exciting to write about now that Lydon seems to have lost his crown and his way and Clash seem to have lost their naive energy level, have leapt on both groups with indecent haste. This is a new sophistication at work. And it's brought out an audience that seems to have been hibernating since Roxy Music and Bowie stopped being flamboyant. Doll By Doll boasts a lead singer called Jackie Leven who seems to have read a lot of Proust and talks about death all the time. A strange moribund fellow, chunky (though only a quarter of Meat Loaf), who describes himself on the group's album notes as "a man who remembers a phone call from his second wife shortly before their divorce, in which she informed him that he was a sexual slotHyou know the type); well that certainly explained a few things". The group's (reportedly— I've not seen them yet) live eccentricities haven't transferred on record for me. "Remember" doesn't have the impact that, say, the first Talking Heads records brought me. Still . . . The Pop Group sound better on record. You can hear their influences—especially the reggae "dub" technique where the music seems to roll out of focus to rumble back again and stop short. Jagged stuff. Weird cover to their single. Death, surrealism, punky art combined.

Seeing them at a gig in a church was bizarre. When it started the abysmal sound (cathedral acoustics have only worked for Handel as far as I recall) and the Sherman tank feeling made meT think five minutes of this row was all I could stand. I was getting a headache. All around me kids dressed in clothes that were a riot of imagination over costing, stood on pews looking intense and blanked out. Then, just before the end, something happened. The drummer, I realized, was great. Rare.

' (A bad drummer has ruined more rock gigs then I care to remember and why do sound engineers turn them up full?) i picked up on his razor dark rhythm. I stood on a radiatot to get a better view.

Kids dancing on stage threw odd shadows on the half-lit church walls like glove puppets or a mad black magic B-movie. The band are very young and intense and the last number it all came together and made me interested. I'd 1 begun to think the New Music was strictlyaimed at the brain cells: music to sit still and let your grey matter pump to. I suppose both hands come somewhere from the art school tradition. No garage bands these. No dole queue songs, no tower block reminiscences. A triumph of intellect over pogoing indeed. I suppose it was bound to happen. I'm not converted yet. The art school dance may go on forever—but I'm still playing Southside Johnny's "Trapped Again" On repeat.