Three chords and the truth: punk's nostalgics

We bought food once at Woolworths. We then kept the docket, cut out the date and stole exactly the same food every week for six months and wheeled it through the exit lane with the impunity of youth. If anyone stopped us, we’d show them the original docket. Quite a saving.

One night we were watching The Riptides play at a legal aid benefit to about 300 people (mostly punks and fellow travellers) when the police busted the place at midnight and arrested 70 people, including me.

I spent two nights in the Roma Street watch house and because I was wearing army fatigues, the cops made me march up and down in front of the cells for two hours. Reasons to be cheerful? Not many.

Every time I walked down the street after that the cops would pull me over and interrogate me. I looked forward to seeing those chickens. They never yelled at me. The abuse politicised me and for the first time in my life, I knew the depths of real anger and there’s nothing nostalgic about that.

The BBQ stopper

And that’s exactly the type of story boring old farts of my ilk will tell you at BBQs or dinner parties. Notice how nostalgia is “sticky”. It attracts more nostalgia.

I can't remember my parents doing it. There was the Depression, then World War II and then I reckon they were happy to just to live in the moment. Don’t you hate it when your parents, born in the 1920s, “out Zen” you? The great mathematician and philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, “Those who live in the now, live in eternity”. Deep, sure, but hard to refute.

There's nothing wrong with a gaggle of middle-aged blokes drinking ales at a BBQ, all mentally strolling down memory lane from 1977 to the end of The Clash.

As the sausages blacken, the blokes start to bemoan the state of contemporary Australian music and the lack of airplay non-mainstream bands get. This is the B-side of the boomers highjacking the play lists of 70 per cent of the nations FM stations to play golden oldies from the 1960 and 70s.

This is where the boomers and the Lost Generation meet. They believe that the music produced back then (whenever) was seminal to the formation of modern Australian music (whatever that is). And they could be right.

Here's the tricky bit - and because they were listening to or even performing in bands to half full bars in one horse suburbs, that they too, were part of some sort of inchoate movement. It gives existential meaning.

I'm not going to tear down someone's delusion that because they followed a group of bands who sold bugger all LPs and had a miniscule following, that they were not, indeed, part of history. We're all part of history and quickly becoming it.

Critical curmudgeon Theodor Adorno told us that the masses would be easily duped by the offerings of the monolith he called “The Culture Industry”. He also told us that pop music featured standardised acts as interchangeable as auto parts - and that each of these acts would be promoted with a trick to market them as unique; a bandana in the pocket here, a quiff there, to fool the public into thinking they were different when they really were more of the same. He called this pseudo-individualisation. This was punk and post punk writ large. Remember Johnny Rotten’s last words, “Ever feel you’ve been cheated?” Exactly.