8. Alternative TVThe Image Has Cracked
It’s funny, I was walking down the market in Deptford the other day, and that’s the image on the label. This is the record where I had got into the punk revolution and got super serious all of a sudden. I was a teenager, had left school, and wanted to do this punk rock thing. Mark Perry created what they called the first punk fanzine, Sniffin’ Glue. There were only 12 issues and then he stopped it, and that appealed to me. He was famous as a writer and could have gone on to write for the NME but turned his back on it to become the singer in Alternative TV, and had ideals that other punk bands didn’t, and that’s why I was drawn to them.
I loved his great Cockney voice. It wasn’t Cockney in a Chas & Dave way. He wrote these amazing lyrics, hard to decipher, like The Fall, where you couldn’t understand all of them, but what you got, well, you knew there was a serious mind at work. I had their 7" called ‘How Much Longer’, which was a critique of the punk rock scene, and this was in 1977. I was confused, ‘They are already criticising something so new?’ The B-side was called ‘You Bastard’, it’s such a beautiful 1 minute 19 seconds. Each verse was criticising a youth culture going on at the time, one of the lyrics was, "How much longer will punks wear Nazi arm bands, and dye their hair?" I loved the idealism, and if you got into it, you really thought a lot about things. They were like mentors to me, and I was just coming into the music world, thinking about going in, reading the music papers for the first time, I looked up to them, and people like Johnny Rotten.
The record starts off with a ten minute live track, breaking barriers straightaway, so you could get an idea of what they would be like live. It’s a very exciting record, they were showing the way forward with minimal guitar songs that gripped me. The picture of him on the back cover, lying on the floor, surrounded by his favourite records was great, we would try to work out what records he liked so that we could buy them. I was only 15, I didn’t know any of the records, and then later you realise it’s Forever Changes by Love, Neil Young, things like that, so he had super taste as well.
