The Ned Wood Archive

There’s a new sun

Rising up angry in the sky

The Ramones

So after the Field Trip, after my extended stay with Bernie, after my introduction to silly Zen Buddhism, and after having joined in with Bernie’s late night meditation ritual of Blitzkrieg Bop, Beat on the Brat, and Judy is a Punk right up at the highest volume his tiny deck could sustain, I went back home.

But things were pretty tense up there with Elsa, so I came back down.  Well, not immediately.  I had to stay with my old dears and build my stock back up after having got back a day late.  I mean, how old am I?  Can I not take care of myself?  It was like when I was fifteen just after my ‘O’ Levels and we went to see David Bowie do Ziggy Stardust at Birmingham Town Hall and me and Jack missed the last train home and after that I was grounded for months.  Hey, I can look after myself now.  

And I guess the old dears weren’t the only ones I stood up that weekend.  Elsa had arranged some night out for me that I didn’t even know about.  And then it was her birthday and I sort of screwed that up by seeing her then avoiding her.  Have you seen Wayne’s World?  You know how Wayne runs away whenever he sees his old girlfriend?  I was like that with Elsa, but without the humour.  And she wasn’t even my old girlfriend.  I was trying to work out why things should be tense.  Had I mislead her or had she expected something?  Who knows?  

I gave her an album for her birthday.  I know.  I did it to try and feel less guilty.  But I still feel guilty, even now.  And what’s worse.  I can’t remember what it was.  I’m really trying, but it just won’t come back to me.  I can’t even work it out.  It would have been something we both liked, so that would rule out most of the stuff they made between 1957 and 1977.  It might have been some Bowie or Roxy Music or even Deaf School or maybe the Stones. Or John Cale Paris 1919. I gave that to all the girls.  It might even have been something a little unusual so she could look at it in ten years and say, wow Ned was listening to them back in 77.  I know she gave me Mink de Ville’s Cabretta for my birthday four months later, but it really annoys me that I can’t remember what I got her.  It really embarrasses me.

She stood there holding the platter I’d just given her and said, “You don’t have to do this.”  And then she got more insistent.  “Take it back.  Please take it back.”  And then, “Why can’t you just say it?”

“What?”

“Why can’t you say it?  You just stand there and try to fob me off with this.  Why don’t you just say you don’t want to see me?”

She was right.  I couldn’t say it.  I couldn’t say anything.  It’s a condition I have, like dyslexia but instead of not being able to read words, I can’t say them.  I just stood there and watched.  

She walked away.

I’m sorry, Els.

So after that I didn’t stick around home too long.  On the Saturday I went to the County game.  It was at Meadow Lane, which was deserted.  We drew 1-1, which kept us just above them.  Football has always been my way of getting away from it all.  Ever since I was old enough to catch the train on my own, I’ve been going alone and leaving my worries behind me.  The solitude of the bus ride to Burton puts you in a different world.  Having to act nonchalant at Derby station with my scarves hidden inside my trousers so the Rams didn’t cotton on I was a Forest fan gives you different things to worry about.  The splendid isolation in the middle of a packed terrace where everyone knows which team you support, but knows absolutely nothing else about you, gives you a different way to belong.  All of these things let you forget homework, your family, and your failings with the opposite sex.  It’s like that ‘I never bring my work home with me’ mantra.  I never take my home with me to football.

Before the game I went into Selectadisc to listen to the Clash album.  I wish I could say I’d bought the Clash album for Elsa.  That would have been cool.  I wish I could say I bought her Garnet Mimms, or Neu, or the Flatlanders.  Any of them would be really cool.  But that would be lying.  Anyway, the NME were giving away some free single if you sent in a red sticker or something from the cover of the album.  But none of the albums at Selectadisc had a red sticker, so I didn’t bother getting the album.  I hated the single anyway.  I mean ‘White Riot, I wanna Riot….” I wasn’t bought into riots at the time, so it struck me as pretty dumb.  OK, so the song was supposed to be comparing white guys who don’t have the guts to riot with the black guys at Notting Hill, but I never got the hang of the destructiveness that hung in the air.  

I mean a riot isn’t a demo; it’s an orgy of violence.  It’s breaking stuff and people just for the sake of it.  We’d been on a demo, me and Sonia, and Jo, and the rest of the gang from Chamberlain.  And Bernie and Mark and all that lot too.  It’s a good way of expressing an opinion, letting the man know what you feel; more importantly, letting the man know how many of you feel the same way.  And also if you get decent press then you wake up the average Joe and Joanna in Daily Mirrorland to what’s going on, whether it be the fact that student’s haven’t got enough to live on, or the book shop in town won’t sell books to gay students, or the lab is cutting up animals.

But if you start breaking stuff up or putting bricks through bookshop windows or burning down labs, then your average Joe and Joanna decide that students and the like don’t deserve more money or whatever.  They certainly don’t stop to listen to any argument, because they can’t hear it above the screams of the tabloid press.

So I’m the other side of the fence when it comes to riots of any colour. 

I asked Bernie about it once.

“Bernie,” I said, “what do you think of the Clash single?”  We were sitting in a carriage on a train up to London.  It may even have been that day we were going up to see Television and had to catch the train at dull, grey, soulless Basingstoke.

“It’s got energy, you know.  So much energy” and he’d start to bang the seats of the train with his hands, leering at me, singing White Riot at the top of his voice, his misshapen teeth flaring up in front of my eyes as he crowds my face to sing the chorus.  He knows I don’t like it.

“Don’t be so middle class, Riffy boy.  You’re taking the words too seriously”.  He calls me Riffy boy when he’s taking the mick.  Did I ever tell you why they call me Riff?  Don’t worry about the Clash; I’ll get back to them.

When I was younger I wanted to be in a band.  I wanted to play football too, but Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I wanted to be in a band.  So I’d invent a few.  Back at home there was a band called Permafrost and the Ice Packs who did two gigs, but they didn’t want me.  They did Brown Sugar, so I bought a saxophone hoping I could manage the sax bits, but I couldn’t, only the riff from the B-side, so I never got a gig with them.  Then there was The Edwardian Uncles who did one gig that I can remember.  I got on stage with a guitar and started hammering away during the encore, but it wasn’t plugged in, so that was a failure.  And after that I started inventing bands telling everyone I was in them.  Me and Alex, who did the sound for the Ice Packs and also never got on stage.  We were both in those imaginary bands.  Except they were my bands.  That’s what it says in my copy of the NME Book of Rock where Alex scrawled the history of Sandy and the Quartzites.  

Me name’s Eddie.  That’s a RocknRoll name.  Eddie Cochran.  That song about playing your guitar just like Eddie.  Could have been me.  But Eddie Wood?  Nah.  I’ve heard all the jokes: ‘What do you call a guy with a wooden head?’  ‘Edward’.  ‘What do you call a guy with a very wooden head?’  ‘Edward Wood’.  Thank God I’m not Edwood Woodwood.  You don’t have to remind me, I know.  Eddie Wood is not a RocknRoll name.  It needed something a bit more spicy.  One holiday me and Alex and a few kids from school went on a tour of Germany or Shenstone or somewhere exotic.  And just before that we’d all seen West Side Story.  At least I’d seen it on TV and even Alex had seen the first bit where the Sharks and Jets danced because he had the Alice Cooper album with that song on.  And after that I was hooked.  I’d do that whistle.  I’d try to do a bit of a dance and click my fingers.  But most important of all, I’d get folk to start calling me Riff.  Eddie Riff.  What a name.

And it didn’t really matter that Andy Mackay out of Roxy Music got there first and made an album called ‘In Search of Eddie Riff’ which didn’t even have anything to do with me.  I thought he was a wizard anyway and it was because of him that I’d got the sax in the first place.

And when I got to university, I tried to get folk to call me Riff, just in case I ever became a star.  Most folk were too grown up and wanted to call me Ed, but some were cool and called me Riff.  Like Bernie. 

Anyway, where was I?  You know, it still nags me about that album I bought Elsa.  I’ve tried to imagine the scene.  It was at the end of our road.  She’s sitting on the sign that tells what road it is.  The one me and our kid tried to nick, but couldn’t unscrew.  A heavy black and white painted cast iron sign.  A couple of years later, they replaced it with a modern one.  Thin metal painted brown and cream.  We nicked that no problem, but after a couple of days of it hanging up in our kid’s room we decided to put it back.  It was too ugly.  I mean who in their right mind has a brown and cream colour scheme in their bedroom?  That was the trouble with the seventies – lousy colour schemes. 

So in my mind’s eye, I’ve got Elsa sitting on the road sign looking up at me while I’m trying to talk, but I can’t remember any more.  I try to figure out what she’s wearing.  I know it must be jeans, but I don’t want to remember her wearing jeans, I want to remember her in that a long black pencil skirt with her wonderfully slim legs slipping through the slits at either side that night we danced all night at the New Year’s party.  See, my mind starts to wander and I never get enough of a grip on my giving her the album to remember what it was.  I know it wasn’t the Clash though.

Oh yeah, like I was saying, I don’t usually take the words to anything seriously unless they’re in your face like White Riot.  

What’s the point of saying destroy?  We want a new life for everywhere.

The whole point about punk was its creativity.  Finally the people are doing something, after years of sitting back and saying, “here we are now entertain us”, or not even getting that much, not even getting entertained, just getting the privilege of watching some git a mile away on stage entertaining himself.  Finally punk meant the audience could grab a guitar and do it themselves.

Yeah, they may have screamed about how they felt every once in a while, like saying we’re bored teenagers, or we’re the blank generation.  But at least that was expression.

You can’t dismiss what’s gone before.  A foundation for us to explore.

Now if they’d released I’m So Bored with the USA first and hidden White Riot on the second side of the album, I would never have got into this argument.

To me that album is the essential punk album.  That was when it really started.  See, over in Southampton we missed the beginning.  We missed the bit when the Pistols and the Clash and the Bromley Contingent and Viv and Malc were running round playing the 100 Club.  We missed the brief TV appearances, whether it be So It Goes or Today with Bill Grundy.  We heard everything second hand.

Sure we got into Anarchy.  Sure we’d heard that the Pistols were the leaders.  But, apart from the glorious single, where was the proof?  Back in April 77 the Pistols only had one single and you couldn’t even buy that.  The Clash had a whole album.  It makes me laugh when all these pop pickers choose Never Mind the Bollix as the number one album of all time.  Come on boys, that album was as late as a Kenny Burns tackle.  The scene had moved on by the time it came out.  The problem with the Pistols was that the stunts and the tricks and the hype they pulled in London to get themselves known only had the effect of cutting them off from the rest of the country.  The Pistols couldn’t play anywhere that summer.  They performed for the press outside the palace or on a boat on the Thames, but they never came close to where we were.  Mind, not that any punk band ever played Southampton.  But at least the Clash and the Jam and the Buzzcocks and the like were accessible.  At least we got to see the Clash.

I asked Bernie whether he thought the Pistols needed to prove it and he said no, it was the singles that mattered.  This must have been after Pretty Vacant.  He said that the Glorious Trinity of singles should stand on their own for all time.  He said that when I started talking about albums, I sounded like some long-haired prog rock freak.  He really said that.

Anyway, now the Clash had an album out.  Start the revolution without the Sex Pistols, boys.  After all, they started it without you.  Just like the Ramones album, the Clash album is so simple and so obvious, and yet, nobody had ever done it before.  Just guitar, bass, and drums.  But hey, the Shadows never sounded like this.  The Beatles never sounded like this.  The Stones never sounded like this.  The Faces never sounded like this.  No Elvis, Beatles, or Rolling Stones in 1977.

In some ways, the Clash were just as manufactured as the Pistols.  Bernie Rhodes wanted a band like his mate McLaren and tried out some of his ideas on them, like writing about politics not love.  But the Clash were more than that.  They mixed pub-rock from Joe’s old band the 101ers with Ramones style Zen-punk and guitar-heroism from the Jones boy.  But what really made them was the reggae.  What they did was put some gaps in, some space, some fade out.  They added dub.  You’ll be listening to first-class buzz-saw punk then the guitar would stop and you’d just be left with the beat.  All the best music is eclectic.  

The album kicks off with the jittering, spluttering drums of Janie Jones, sounding like a kid on a first date stammering, trying to talk to the girl.  The band is so excited just to be there, they race through the song at breakneck speed and suddenly you get to the chorus and like I say the guitar stops and once more you’re in love with the rocknroll world.

They slow it down for a breather with Remote Control and they sing about alienation, boredom, who needs the parliament making laws all day – Joe spits out contempt of everyone else: they’re all fat and old.

Then, on I’m So Bored With The USA, he sang “Yankee Detectives are Always on the TV”.  It was true.  We had Kojak, Columbo, McCloud, Starsky & Hutch.  You name it.  Every day.  I only really watched them at home, because I sort of got out of the habit of TV at Southampton.  One day I got into a discussion with Mike and Neil about an episode of Starsky & Hutch they’d seen.  Not so much a discussion as Neil lecturing like he always was.  He was telling the plot and how it started with S&H shooting this crim.  Some female liberal journo had seen them and started hounding them about how they had no right to pop guns on the hour every hour and how this was doing America in.  Anyhow it turns out that this liberal journo gets captured by some other gun-slinging crim and gets taken hostage.  The show ends with S&H cornering the crim (who’s still got the journo) and instead of shooting the crim, Starsky and Hutch come over all softly softly and capture him without a fight.  But not before the lady journo has lost all control and screamed at S&H to ‘Kill him, kill him, kill him’.

And Neil is saying that this is all propaganda on behalf of the Department of whatever the department is in the US that looks after the cops to convince us that all cops are good cops and only kill crims if they have to.  And all of us nice Brits are getting brainwashed in our homes at 9:00pm every Sat’day or whenever.

And Neil also says the story is clearly bollix because there’s no such thing as a liberal journo in the US.    

And I think this is over the top, but I remind myself to watch it with a little more scepticism next time I’m home.

So just like the Ramones album, the Clash’s album starts with a holy trinity.  But then you get White Riot – which as Bernie says is energy, like most of the album, pure punk energy, but as they say on the next song Hate and War is the only thing we got today.

Which is partly because the punk movement had this ambivalent attitude toward violence.  Or was it even ambivalent?  Like Rotten says “I use the enemy”.  Well McLaren used violence to sell them as much as he used anything else.  Stuff like the engineered fights; stuff like the ominous presence of Sid Vicious who was encouraged to live up to his nickname; stuff like all of the Nazi imaginary.  It was all calculated to annoy and it was always calculated to overstep any mark you cared to give it.

“Bernie, how do you square this Buddhist stuff with all of the violence in punk?”  I’d asked, getting back to the subject of White Riot.

“You don’t,”  he said, finding a serious voice.  “What I see in punk is the pure, noble energy.  The passionate, rabid howl, the terrorist guitar, the violent drums, they throw your thoughts up into the air so they can settle in a more peaceful pattern.  Lots of old Buddhist teachers used to go round and hit their pupils around the head.  When you think about it, punk is the same, just slightly more civilised.  You know that hardship and abstinence and all that jazz is a way of finding enlightenment?  The Ramones and the Clash and Anarchy help just as much.”

“So, what are you saying, Bernie?  That every one who is unenlightened misses the point?”

“Sort of.  You can’t really call kids from South London and places like that unenlightened.  It’s irrelevant.  They’ve got to find themselves before they can even think about enlightenment.  The reason you get violence with London punks is because that is what is expected from them.  Expected by the press.  If they found themselves, they wouldn’t need to follow the press and their elders and the Nazis and such, because they’d be able to think for themselves.”

“We could do without the Clash calling for a Riot,” I said.  And he agreed.

“They should take all that energy and do something constructive with it,”  he said.  “Which they have done, for the most part.”

He was right.  There’s a new sun rising up joyful in the sky. There’s a new voice crying, “We’re not afraid to fly”. Let the old world make believe, it’s blind and deaf and dumb. We’re gonna shape the change of things to come. There was this enormous energy waiting to explode.  And the thing was to get it onto the record in a constructive way.  And the Clash got it onto record.  Listen to London’s Burning – what a great wake up call, right from Joe Strummer’s first shout all the way through to the sounds of the cars racing round the Westway, the energy jumps out of the speakers and grabs you and forces you to turn around to face the new religion.

And now they’ve got it on record, the short bursts of guitar, the great chunes, the catchy phrases, now it’ll live forever.  And now we’re part of the new religion.  Me and Annie and Bernie, Dusty and Elsa, Sniff, even Paulie and Susie.  We’re all in this now.  We’re committed.  We’re all one big garageband.  We all come from garage land.

That’s why, when me and Bernie were on the train up to London, we’d shout “Woking, Woking, this is Woking, change here for Garageland, Boredom, Inner City Decay, and the Blank Generation.”

I’d cup my hands over my mouth and affect the nasal whine of a station announcer.  It was a joke we shared, Bernie and me.  We’d be on a train, always the same train, going in the same direction, and I’d be leaning out of the window annoying the folk at Woking station.  He’d pull me back from the carriage door, put his arm around me, and join in shouting.

“Woking, Woking…” we’d chorus, waltzing around the carriage until, finally, unable to stand we would both fell on the floor in an exaggerated show of laughter and togetherness.

You know, it still bugs me about Elsa’s album.  Maybe I can work it out from first principles.  It was Easter 1977.  Like I say, I wish I could say I gave her something cool like Van Morrison Astral Weeks or the first Modern Lovers album or the New York Dolls or Nico.  What I thought was cool back then, apart from the obvious, was sixties stuff like the Small Faces or maybe Lou Reed, so I could probably have got something like Berlin.  Doesn’t sound right does it? 

Maybe I bought her chocolates.