Parsons, Tony. “The kids are hungry.” New Musical Express, 2 Oct. 1976, pp. XXX. Reprint – History of Rock 1976, p. 116.
The kids are hungry
— Story and Author: Feature by Tony Parsons in New Musical Express, capturing the surge of high-energy youth rock in Britain during 1976.
— Reports on eaerly punk. Sex Pistols and Eddie & The Hot Rods as the sharpest challenge yet to the bloated rock establishment. Comparisons with American garage roots (Ramones, Television, New York Dolls),
— Parsons argues that the UK’s new street bands—Clash, Damned, Wharf Rats—owe more to hunger than polish. Punk is cast as a genuine “kids’ rock” born of Essex overspill suburbs and London clubs, tracing its lineage from Dr. Feelgood’s pub circuit. Warnings abound that youth is fleeting, but the ferocity of Anarchy in the UK and club punch-ups signal that 1977 could topple the complacent old guard.
— Sex Pistols at Notre Dame Hall, Leicester Place, London (15 Nov. 1976); regular Hot Rods gigs at Wardour Street venues; pub-rock trailblazing by Dr. Feelgood in London clubs.
New Musical Express | 2nd October 1976 | Reprint History of Rock 1976 | Page 116
PHOTO November 15, 1976: the Sex Pistols at the Notre Dame Hall, Leicester Place, central London, Ian Dickson / Getty
The kids are hungry
The energy in the punk movement should give senior rockers pause for thought. This time next year, writes one young staffer, they could be laughing on the other side of their faces.
Smashing guitars used to be proper anger; it isn't any more. It’s theatrical melodrama Pete Townshend, January 1968
I think this whole punk thing at the moment has got too stylised. There’s no such thing as punks anymore. This lot are consciously making themselves out to be something they’re not. They’re trying to come on like little yobbos. And they’re not little fucking yobbos. Lee Brilleaux, September 1976
Go! Geet-outa-Denver baybee Go! Geet-outa-Denver baybee! Go! Geet-outa-Denver baybee!! Go! Go! Go! Go! Eddie & The Hot Rods, right now
So in the year of our punk 1976 the veteran end of the rock world finally woke up to the nine-year-old fact that this ain’t the summer of love. The kick in the teeth that savagely brought an end to its slumber was, of course, the mercurial rise and still rising of amphetamine-stimulated high-energy ’70s street music played by kids for kids for the first time in maybe 12 years.
Yeah, you guessed it - the unfortunately titled punk rock. Unfortunate because punk rock is a second-hand name first used to
describe American garage bands like ? And The Mysterians, The Leaves and Shadows Of Knight who started making their music after being completely won over to the cause of rocking when they first heard the bands of the mid-’60s like The Fab Four, The Stones, The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds and all the rest.
Unfortunate because punk rock is the term used to describe the descendants of those garage bands in the States, combos like the now defunct New York Dolls, the Ramones, Tom Verlaine’s Television and the Heartbreakers.
Unfortunate because of the stance that Britain’s so-called punk rock bands are taking, the Sex Pistols and Eddie & The Hot Rods being top of the crop at this moment in time is original enough to warrant a handle all of its own.
Punk rock just won’t do - the name is too old, too American, too inaccurate. The teenage kids in the Hot Rods who shake the foundations of Wardour Street every week ain’t punks. That makes them sound like refugees from West Side Story.
They are kids who are the product of the United Kingdom in the 1970s; more specifically the teenage wasteland of the Essex Overspill. The music they play reflects their times, no more, no less. Kids rock would
be more to the point than punk rock. Sure, they play a lot of material that they didn’t write themselves. So did The Stones and The Who when they were 18 years old. What’s so good about the scene that the Hot Rods and the Sex Pistols are in is not only is it the most exciting thing happening in this country at the moment, but also the members of the bands have time to develop as writers, which they must do if they are going to survive over any period of time, let alone make it. /p>
That is, to do what the Feelgoods did - evolve from their stomping grounds of small clubs and pubs and make the transition to playing large venues in front of 10 times as many people without losing the essential blitzkrieg malevolence of their music, make their set a healthy mixture of original material and old masters and, ultimately, cut records as exciting as their live show.
It was the Feelgoods who blazed the trail around the pubs and clubs of London that the punk/kids-rock bands are following. They made it possible for bands like the Sex Pistols, the Hot Rods, The Wharf Rats, The Damned, The Clash and all the others to get venues twice a week or more where they can get up and play the music they want to in front of people who are getting off on it.
The Feelgoods weren’t the only band on the pub-rock circuit, of course, but by using their success to further the cause of bands like the Hot Rods, the Feelgoods can deservedly be considered the godfathers of the whole punk/kids-rock scene.
But the Feelgoods are not punks or kids; if you called Lee Brilleaux a punk he would no doubt bottle your eye out before you could say Iggy & The Stooges. You only have to compare the old masters of the Feelgoods to the old masters of the Hot Rods to see that they are from different generations - the Feelgoods, along with the Wilko Johnson material, do songs by Chuck Berry, Rufus Thomas, Lieber/Stoller, Sonny Boy Williamson and Solomon Burke, while the Hot Rods are coming from the Stones, Who, Them and ? And The Mysterians time.
That’s the point - a rock generation lasts only two or three years at the most. I’m 22 and I felt prematurely middle-aged the other day when a honey-thighed 16-year-old jailbait bud who looked like a roadie for The Runaways told me that her favourite Stones album was Rolled Gold.
If the punk/kids-rock bands want to survive, then they have got to come to terms with the fact that they can only trade on their youth for so long. Otherwise, there will be younger kids coming up in a year or so and the punks of today will be seen clutching their battered Fenders and Strats and floundering like beached whales all along Wardour Street, 21 and well past it.
The message is clear: trade on the fact that you are young enough to be the son of the Rolling Stones’ rhythm section for as long as you can, kid, but realise that in the end you will stand or fail by the music you make.
In the meantime, though, you can sneer all you want about rock’n’roll mutton dressed up as lamb, all those tax-exile superstars of the ’60s, jaded old farts the lot of them, and anything that you say about them they deserve. The main reason the punk/kids-rock scene is so healthy is because the kids who are playing it and the kids who are getting off on it are all hungry, and that breeds good rock, rock, rock!
They are hungry for music that they can identify with, their music, not product. Hungry to make it, to be stars. Hungry for good times and ecstasy. Hungry to burn it all down and start again. Listen, when you see Elizabeth Taylor or Princess Margaret at a Who or Stones concert drinking champagne backstage with your heroes, and you’ve queued for six hours for your overpriced ticket and the officials at the stadium treat you like dirt and your girl gets her head opened up by a bottle and there’s the rock aristocracy up there in the clouds sipping your wages, there’s only one thing you can do, no matter what age you are, there’s only one thing you can do - vomit.
"The kids who are playing it and the kids who are getting off on it are all hungry"
Rock music in 1976 needs middle-aged has-beens like a leper needs a dose of the clap. But to get rid of them won’t be easy. When The Beatles and all the rest happened in the ’60s there was literally no competition - Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly were both dead, Gene Vincent was still recovering from the car crash that killed Eddie, Elvis was back from the army and singing ballads, Chuck Berry was doing time and Little Richard had given up rock for religion. There was a gap in rock the size of the cosmos and everyone moved in. And, of course, they were great, they had real hunger.
Pete Townshend, for instance. Pete had a big nose and when he was growing up everyone laughed at him and made his life hell. So he stayed indoors for two years, only leaving home to go to school and get laughed at because of his nose and he learned guitar so he could lead a rock band and become famous, get his face on the cover of every rock paper in the world, big nose and all, ram it back into the face of everyone who laughed at him, make a billion dollars and screw any chick he wanted. And he did. He did it all. He had real hunger, real fire inside him, and I’d rate him as the most exciting performer on stage that I ever saw.
But these days, of course, like all the other one-time greats of the ’60s, the anger has gone and now, after having all the money, the glory, the girls, the drugs, the booze, what does he do now? Make home movies about Meher Baba. Well, that’s not as bad as jet-set cocktail parties or inviting royalty to your concerts, but I can’t help but wander off and look elsewhere for the rock’n’roll excitement that I used to get from The Who. And I'm getting it from the punk/kids-rock bands that have got as much hunger inside them as Townshend, Jagger and Lennon had when they started out.
Those bands are getting a lot of criticism from the same people who were calling out for a return to high-energy raw-power rock five years ago, and now that it’s here they don’t like it! But that don’t matter. How many 30-year-old fans did the Stones have when they were playing at the Scene in Soho, 1964? You shouldn’t call the doctor if you can’t afford the pills.
A few years back I remember Bob “Whispering Grass” Harris putting down the New York Dolls after Jet Boy and Looking For A Kiss from their first album on the OGWT, skidding about on their platform boots (remember them?), and playing loud, brash, amateurish.
Bromley Contingent mainstay and punk icon Soo Catwoman Erica Echenberg / Getty
I thought they were great, but then I was never very fond of half-hour guitar solos.
Mock rock, Whispering Grass said with an it-couldn’t-happen-here smile. Well it has, and none too soon for my taste. A short while after that TV slot, Lou Reed was quoted saying about the Dolls: I like the titles of their songs [“Pills”, “Personality Crisis”, “Subway Train”, “Bad Girl”, etc] more than the actual songs. Well, the punk/kids-rock bands are going to have to get used to those kind of comments. In a scene where ex-hippies and ex-junkies just ain’t relevant, there is bound to be a lot of ill-feeling.
But it’s OK. Kids are used to old men bitching. They can take it. And they can get their revenge through their music.
Punk rock is really just a lazy journalist media spiel for a genuine new wave. After all, what has Patti Smith (who is called punk rock by some rags, not NME), who brings together in her music such diverse influences as Burroughs/Velvets/Dylan/Ginsberg/Stones/masturbating to Arthur Rimbaud’s Greatest Hits, have in common with straight-ahead nihilistic rockers like Joey Ramone,
Dee Dee Ramone, Tommy Ramone and Johnny Ramone?
What does Birdland have in common with Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue? Right first time. Nothing.
I can get off on both, but to presuppose that they are one and the same and call it punk rock along with all the new wave bands coming up over here is, if you will, bullshit.
If the young bands causing so much controversy at the moment are going to sustain themselves, then they have got to start writing the soundtrack of the lives of their audience with songs like the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK. That song could only have been written in 1976. Imagine them doing it on Top Of The Pops. Tony Blackburn meets Johnny Rotten. Oh, yeah!
When a band like the Sex Pistols gets in a punch-up with members of their audience halfway through a performance, it probably gets a big laff with all those coke-snorting superstars up there on Olympus, as secure as the Tsars of Russia. Just maybe, if things work out as they should, this time next year they’ll be laughing on the other side of their faces.
Tony Parsons
New Musical Express | 2nd October 1976 | Reprint History of Rock 1976 | Page 116