Cabut Richard - Punk Is Dead

First published by Zero Books, 2017

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Text copyright: Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix 2016

ISBN: 978 1 78535 346 8

978 1 78535 347 5 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951866

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The rights of Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix as editors have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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For my partner, Laura, and my children, Joseph,
Theo, Bernadette and Aniela

Richard Cabut

For my son, William, and my parents who share many of my punk memories

Andrew Gallix

Besides.

ART probably doesnt exist So its useless to sing about it and yet: people go on producing artworks because thats how it is and not otherwise Well what can you do about it?

So we dont like ART and we dont like artists (down with Apollinaire!). HOW RIGHT TOGRATH IS TO MURDER THE POET! However, since we must swallow a drop of acid or old lyricism, lets do it quick and fast for locomotives go fast.

Modernity too, therefore both constant and killed every night

Jacques Vach, War Letters, Letter to Andr Breton, 18 August 1917

Modernity killed every night.

Name for 430 Kings Road: after Jacques Vach (1974)

Jon Savage, Englands Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991)

by Judy Nylon

I emigrated to London in 1970, carrying a black zipped overnight bag, and wearing over-the-knee platform boots, cut-off jean shorts and a black Borganza coat. Borganza is like longhaired velvet, so I looked pretty lush. I had no trouble getting the max time of six months on my passport stamp there was just no history of people emigrating from the United States with carryon luggage. Nobody knew I only had $250. Id been in London before and had that inexplicable intuition that I was coming home. It never occurred to me to be apprehensive, I just set about meeting the people who would become my new world. I dont carelessly lose people: Im still down with my first friends from those days. I went to the Speakeasy nights and shared the front half of a house in Chelsea that belonged to Donald and David Cammel (they had just made the film Performance). Their mother, Iona, who had studied what she referred to as systems of human perfection with Aleister Crowley, lived in the back half of the house with Henry, her English bull terrier. I went to the Casserole at lunch and maybe passed by Parsons later. Chelsea is still my mothership. I was 510 with very short white-blonde hair and the sort of androgynous sprezzatura of someone born in the minor key. Im not going to pretend I was ugly or an outcast; I found it easy to meet people who were interesting. I kept it real by silently remembering the family names of the four foster homes Id grown up in. Even today, they are like remembering the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, reminding me that I belong everywhere and nowhere. I am often left out of punk histories because I fall between countries: I sort of represent the perennial thread that connects punk to the before and after of subculture. I dont identify with any particular class or flag, and dont rely on a single group for a belief system. I consider myself fourth world, a hybrid of the other three.

I quickly had to sign on as a model to get the home office behind me. I hardly ever worked. Whatever I was, I was not much of a model. I eventually worked in the studios in Covent Garden as a freelance photo stylist for advertising. This was during the era of very cheap $250 return air flights on Freddie Laker. You could pick up a guitar cheaply in New York and carry it back to London where it sold for double the price. I also took photographic prints to Paris as a private courier. With hindsight, when punk started, what I brought to the party was my gradual insistence that wed have the widest possible wingspan: inclusion, everybody in from all the margins, not exactly the same, but a scene. I was experientially prepared for this moment by the cards already dealt me in life. Id thought about it. Ive always been an internationalist, and as an autodidact, my real addiction is to learning more. There is no way Id let punk be reduced to a coffee-table book of white English boys spitting. It is a fallacy that there was ever a pure London punk, Paris punk, New York punk or Berlin punk: many of us were very mobile. Somehow in the books on punk that Ive read, the only one who ever took plane rides was Malcolm McLaren. Think about it: thats silly. My very existence would eventually come into conflict with Malcolm and Viviennes version of punk as an advertising trend. If you look at the pictures of us all at the opening night of the Roxy in Covent Garden, nobody is wearing clothes designed by Viv. Eventually youd start to see people who worked for her, or people she gave them to, wearing them because they looked cool. The trousers she gave me ended up being worn by John Cale on his Helen Of Troy LP cover. I dont know what happened to them after that. Those T-shirts that Bernie Rhodes made for their shop sold for 20 a pop, and the dole maximum was 45 or 50 per week. In the beginning, it wasnt about fashion; a few of us were visually-oriented, so having a look was a given. Nobody played well: it was about living differently. A collective cry from the heart seeking a way out of poverty, despair and boredom. My punk story is a diamond slice I can show you to help you imagine a rock too big for the frame.

Way before punk, my first female friend to hang out with in early-Seventies glam London was Gyllian Corrigan. We share a few funny stories. One night we went to a party thrown by Kit Lambert that became legendary because it hosted several layers of London together, before they were really aware of one other. Nureyev let us in the front door and Keith Moon was your host on the floor above. It was there that I met the New York Dolls when Billy Murcia was alive. On the Dolls second trip to London, with Jerry Nolan on drums, Syl would introduce me to Brian Eno at a late-night party in the bar of Blakes Hotel. The earth shook I thought Id met my most complementary mind ever. He matched the bookish part of my nature perfectly, though he wasnt a guy Id stand back-to-back with if I had to fight my way out of a bar in Naples. Im not from the same Catholic background he was. For me pornography was neither deliciously forbidden nor very interesting. For him, I was possibly kind of exotic. Id just come from assisting Catalan artist Antoni Miralda with a food-art performance on a train to the Edinburgh Festival. Enos Back in Judys Jungle references the way he and I lived when he briefly moved in with me. He taught me to be more selfish and, as he once said, I taught him to be complete alone. I need to be alone for at least a few hours each day. I always have.