Hate Has Made You Blind

Stiff Little Fingers : State of Emergency

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On February 2, 1979 Rough Trade Records released Inflammable Material, a debut album recorded in ten days by the Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers. Though released well after the year punk rock broke, the album ranks among the very best for its politically charged dispatches that deal with life in Northern Ireland during "The Troubles".

Taking their name from a song on the Vibrators' Pure Mania debut, Stiff Little Fingers  were originally a popular cover band. That's when journalist-turned-band manager Gordon Ogilvie convinced them to write their own material. Ogilvie contributed lyrics to songs like the first single "Suspect Device", the anti-racist "White Noise" and "Barbed Wire Love". I've already written about "Alternative Ulster", the second single. 

On the online collaborative metadata database site Rate Your Music, one fan of the album ( who goes by the name Jeeeesus)  writes that while Ireland's Undertones gave us romantic pop and Van Morrison ignored the trouble back home, Stiff Little Fingers declared war on the so-called security forces:

Inflammable Material takes so few prisoners over its blazing 35 minutes that the Ulsterman's traditional pursuit of discreetly figuring out the background of everyone with whom he communicates becomes impossible. "Suspect device" is its first track and crown jewel, a storm of protest against the self-appointed community guardians who take away our freedom in the name of liberty. (Singer) Jake Burns's warning shot as the chorus detonates underpins the whole album: Don't believe them, don't believe them. Don't be bitten twice. This is an instruction, repeated elsewhere on the album, by a young man living in Belfast to tell the sociopathic footmen of a paramilitary organization where to stick it. The people he walks among every day are their open or tacit supporters. For this to be the sole voice of reason in a country deserted or screwed over by everyone who should have been committed to its preservation is testament to both the infamy of the latter and the courage and intelligence of the band.

Not all of the album is a report from the front lines. "Barbed Wire Love" is a song about love and sex ("blasted by your booby-traps") in No Man's Love that comes with a surprising doo-wop interlude. "Rough Trade" is about getting cheated on a record deal ( and although the title name checks the band's label, they claim it isn't about THAT Rough Trade).  "Johnny Was" is a Bob Marley and the Wailers cover that runs over 8 minutes.

The album sold more than 100,000 copies and peaked at U.K #14, the first album on an independent record label to enter the UK Top Twenty. Stiff Little Fingers still tours and Jake Burns is still proud of the debut album, even though he wishes Stiff Little Fingers had more time to record it. He told Beatroute in 2018:

Even  by the time we got into making the second album, there were things on the first album I wanted to change. I would’ve liked to have had a bit more time to record it. You might think, ‘Yes, we could have played it better, we could have done this better, we could have done that better.’ But then it wouldn’t have been the album that it is.

Schneller, Harter, Langer

Nasal Boys : Hot Love

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In January of 1978, Swiss punk rockers, Nasal Boys, released a debut single with a glam rock name, "Hot Love". The band's motto was "Schneller, Harter, Langer” (or Faster, Harder, Longer). They may have been the fastest and hardest band in Switzerland, even opening for The Clash one night in Zutrich,  but they didn't last very long,. The Nasal Boys changed their name to EXPO in 1979 and broke up a year later. 

The Latest Craze

The Adverts : Safety in Numbers

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On October 28, 1977 The Adverts followed up their single "Gary Gilmore's Eyes" with "Safety In Numbers".  Though self-labeled "one chord wonders" at the birth of punk, the Adverts were getting better and more disdainful of the whole movement. As more neophytes embraced the punk movement, T.V. Smith dismissed the scene with the lines "Here we all are in the latest craze/ Stick with the crowd/ hope it's not a passing phase/ It's the latest thing to be nowhere"

.Michael Dempsey was the band's producer. He beat up a music journalist who have The Adverts a bad review and two years after the band broke up he died after falling off a ladder trying to change a lightbulb while drunk.

I'm Not An Animal

The Sex Pistols : Bodies

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If the sessions had gone the way I wanted, it would have been unlistenable for most people. I guess it's the very nature of music; if you want people to listen, you're going to have to compromise.
-Johnny Rotten

On October 28, 1977 The Sex Pistols released their debut album, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's the  The Sex Pistols . I didn't get around to hearing the album for years, but when I did, it both scared and excited me. It also disappointed me because , musically, it didn't really sound as revolutionary as we'd heard. Sure, Johnny Rotten was ferocious, especially those scathing lyrics. I began playing bar chords on my acoustic guitar and enlisted my ten year old sister into writing a song that began "There's a fucking little girl who lives down the street/ All she does is beg and eat".

In the US we had heard of the Sex Pistols but most of us didn't get around to actually hearing the Sex Pistols. I think it's a monument more than monumental. An album that came towards the end of a very specific time.

Here's what Billboard Magazine said about the album at the time of its release:

 Loud, raucous and irreverent, this LP delivers as promised. This is punk rock at its best, with no letup. Once it begins there's no getting up for air until the record ends. It's all simple riffs and elemental chords with a machine gun beat, but nobody does it better. Included here are all the notorious hits that so shocked the English establishment. Once you get past the rawness of it all, it becomes apparent that this band can craft some very relevant tunes. Best cuts: "Pretty Vacant," "God Save The Queen," "Anarchy In The U.K.," "EMI," "Holidays In The Sun."

Here's what the dean of rock critics, Robert Christgau, said in his A rated review:

Get this straight: no matter what the chicmongers want to believe, to call this band dangerous is more than a suave existentialist compliment. They mean no good. It won't do to pass off Rotten's hatred and disgust as role-playing -- the gusto of the performance is too convincing. Which is why this is such an impressive record. The forbidden ideas from which Rotten makes songs take on undeniable truth value, whether one is sympathetic ("Holidays in the Sun" is a hysterically frightening vision of global economics) or filled with loathing ("Bodies," an indictment from which Rotten doesn't altogether exclude himself, is effectively anti-abortion, anti-woman, and anti-sex). These ideas must be dealt with, and can be expected to affect the way fans think and behave. The chief limitation on their power is the music, which can get heavy occasionally, but the only real question is how many American kids might feel the way Rotten does, and where he and they will go next. I wonder -- but I also worry

Ali MacQueen wrote about the album for 1001 Albums to Hear Before You Die: 

In a decade of social unrest, the grey façade of 1970s Britain was crumbling under high unemployment and apathy. The entire country seemed in a state of cold turkey, the optimism of the 1960s a distant memory. Along came a kick in the balls, literal as well as titular. 

 As soon as the Pistols played their first gigs, their notoriety was in danger of surpassing the music. This was a feeling intensified by Jamie Reid's luminous cover. With its iconic logo and use of an expletive, stores refused to stock it and a court case came to pass (dismissed after Richard Branson called in a linguistics professor to testify to the non-obscene origins of the word). With style about to overshadow substance, the marching steps that introduce "Holidays In The Sun" were a venomous reminder that beneath the artwork was an album that was about to alter our perception of music, fashion, and generational attitudes. 

 There is the ferocity of "Bodies," with its abortion-based theme, and Steve Jones' simple but devastatingly effective riff on "Pretty Vacant," which gave hope to useless guitarists everywhere.
 "Anarchy In The UK," of course, is the album's most famous rallying cry but "God Save The Queen" matches it all the way as an epicenter of anger. Johnny Rotten bends and sculpts every note into a vituperative, royalty-aimed arrow. Few moments from popular music can ever match Rotten's guttural cry of "no future for you." Years of misery for the nation's youth were encapsulated right there and then.

And from Tom Moon's 1000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die :

For better or worse, this thirty-nine-minute blast of loud and proud scruffiness has become punk's ground zero. That's not to say it's the best punk record, or even necessarily the first. But it was the first one to tantalize, to terrorize, and eventually galvanize a large part of the rock-speaking world. And it remains an essential document for understanding the music's cyclical upheavals: When the Sex Pistols exploded, rock was mostly Foreigner. Safe stuff, with few aspirations toward rattling the status quo. 

 The Sex Pistols charged into the ring with an unruly sound, and an us-against-them ideology that disaffected kids everywhere understood immediately. These four musicians, barely competent on their instruments, took up the cause of England's unemployed and downtrodden, the legions of young people trampled by bad economics. As John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) said years later: "If we had an aim, it was to force our own working-class opinions into the mainstream, which was unheard of in pop music at the time."

 Force them they did, with help from a rampaging guitar-as-blunt-instrument attack and manager Malcolm McLaren's formidable hype machine. Early gigs were newsworthy for rowdy behavior (the band was known to spit on and taunt its audiences) that led to, in several instances, near-riots. McLaren seized upon the notoriety, using television appearances and outrageous altercations with media to fan the flames, and by the time this album arrived, a sense of full-on revolt was in the air. 

 Never Mind the Bollocks doesn't really need any hype. Its snarled refrains and bellicose chants -- "No future for you!" Rotten sneers throughout "God Save the Queen" -- signal that this is a profoundly different rock and roll enterprise. The songwriting's minimal. There's, like, zero finesse in the playing. And yet when the band lunges into "Pretty Vacant" or "Anarchy in the U.K.," it unleashes an undeniable force, leading to explosions of awesome magnitude that proved key to the then-developing ethos of punk. Fans loved the Sex Pistols because the band's music mirrored and magnified the decay they saw all around them. People who loathed the band considered its music (and its tactics) fresh evidence of society's decline. Both sides, at least, agreed on the existence of a downward spiral.

What the Hell is Wrong With You

999 : Nasty! Nasty!

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On October 26, 1977 London's 999 released the classic punk single " Nasty! Nasty!"

Now I Got A Reason

Sex Pistols : Holidays in the Sun

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On October 14, 1977 The Sex Pistols released "Holidays in the Sun". A #8 U.K. chart hit from the forthcoming album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, this would be the last single with John Lydon singing. Lydon says the song was based on a disappointing holiday in Jersey, followed by a visit to rainy Berlin where, at least, they were far away from London:

"Being in London at the time made us feel like we were trapped in a prison camp environment. There was hatred and constant threat of violence. The best thing we could do was to go set up in a prison camp somewhere else. Berlin and its decadence was a good idea. The song came about from that. I loved Berlin. I loved the wall and the insanity of the place. The communists looked in on the circus atmosphere of West Berlin, which never went to sleep, and that would be their impression of the West."

Ain't No Loser

Dead Boys : Sonic Reducer

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In October of 1977 The Dead Boys released their debut album Young Loud and Snotty, one of the best punk albums ever recorded in America. These Cleveland natives ( featuring Cheetah Chrome and Johnny Blitz of the seminal proto-punk band Rocket From the Tombs) moved to New York where CBGB's owner Hilly Kristal began managing them. Inspired by The Stooges and The New York Dolls, The Dead Boys played raucous shows full of hijinks, singer Stiv Bators turing up Iggy's act to 11. Their set lists were made up of covers, originals and more than a few songs from Rocket From the Tombs, including "Sonic Reducer" which contains the anthemic lines 

I don't need anyone
Don't need no mom and dad
Don't need no pretty face
 Don't need no human race
I got some news for you
Don't even need you too

From Robert Christgau's B rated review:

Despite Stiv Bators's mewl, which can get almost as annoying as Geddy Lee's falsetto, this is mostly well-crafted junk, tough and tuneful and in one case--the definitively deafening "Sonic Reducer"--positively anthemic. But the charm of good junk has always been its innocence, and if these fellows are innocent they're pretty perverse about it--emotional incompetents out of their depth. Alternate title (stolen from Mary Harron): Take My Life--Please

Reunited for a 40th anniversary tour, Cheetah Chrome told Blabbermouth the Genya Raven produced album wasn't supoposed to be released the way it was:

"The original album was actually a demo," Chrome says. "None of us had been in a studio before, and we figured we would go back in and do it right, but the label said no. It has stood up, but forty years later, we can do a 'What if?' What would it have sounded like if we could have gone back in? So that's what this is about. It's not better. It's just different." 

The tour had to go on without singer Stiv Bators who was killed  in 1990 when a taxi hit him in Paris.

My Vision Is Confused

The Adverts : Gary Gilmore's Eyes

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We Were Sentenced to Die The Day We Were Born

-Gary Gilmore

On January 17, 1977 convicted double murderer Gary Gilmore was shot to death by a firing squad, becoming the first American prisoner executed in nearly ten years. Despite requests from his mother, members of various churches and the ACLU that his execution be stayed, Gilmore just wanted to get it over with. "This is my life and this is my death. It's been sanctioned by the courts that I die and I accept that." When asked for any last words, Gilmore simply replied, "Let's do it." 

Within hours of the execution, two people received his corneas. That inspired the UK punk band, The Adverts, to record their UK Top 20 hit "Gary Gilmore's Eyes".

I'm lying in a hospital,
I'm pinned against the bed.
A stethoscope upon my heart,
A hand against my head.
They're peeling off the bandages.
I'm wincing in the light.
The nurse is looking anxious,
 And she's quivering in fright

 I'm looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes.

 The doctors are avoiding me.
My vision is confused.
I listen to my earphones,
 And I catch the evening news.
A murderer's been killed,
And he donates his sight to science.
 I'm locked into a private ward.
I realise that I must be
 Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes.
Looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes.

 I smash the light in anger.
Push my bed against the door.
 I close my lids across my eyes,
And wish to see no more.
 The eye receives the messages,
And sends them to the brain.
No guarantee the stimuli must be perceived the same
When looking through Gary Gilmore's eyes.
 Gary don't need his eyes to see.
 Gary and his eyes have parted company.

40 Year Itch: Rock's Greatest F-U

Still from Criminally Insane ( 1975)



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"As a statement it's great, as a giant FUCK YOU it shows integrity—a sick, twisted, dunced-out, malevolent, perverted, psychopathic integrity, but integrity nevertheless." 

                                   ~Lester Bangs

 Released in July of 1975, Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music consists of four sides of ear-splitting guitar feedback. Was it a joke? A fuck you to everyone? The result of some kind of record company dispute? Or Lou Reed's response to getting caught up in the "star maker machinery behind the popular song"?

I think we'll go with the "fuck you". 

Reed himself said: 

It was a giant fuck you. I put out Metal Machine Music out to clear the air and get rid of all the fucking assholes who show up at the gigs and yell for "Vicious" and "Walk on the Wild Side". 

Despite all the intellectual suggestions that the album anticipated industrial music, noise rock,  and the punk attitude ( Creem Magazine readers voted Lou "Punk of theYear" in 1975) MMM is unlistenable. Still, thanks probably to its awesome cover and curiosity, it sold 100,000 copies. Reed was unapologetic.

I don't care of they paid $59.98 or $75 for it, they should be grateful I put the fucking thing out and, if they don't like it, they should go eat rat-shit.

The album nearly ended Lou Reed's career. But a year later, Coney Island Baby was climbing the charts and Metal Machine Music was becoming a collector's item. A quadrophonic copy of the album is currently on EBay priced at $129.98.

In a 1976 interview with Rolling Stone, Reed said

I shouldn't be here, man, not after Metal Machine Music. Nobody is supposed to be able to do a thing like that and survive.