George Shaw on Music

I was really too young for punk. Punks were the bigger boys at the end of the road or on the back seat of the bus. Needless to say, I had nothing to do with them and, fortunately, for most of the time, they wanted nothing to do with me. I learnt about records from listening to the radio — the charts, and later, John Peel. As time went on, I talked about records with other kids at school but not often. I heard about things like the Sex Pistols from the news but I don’t remember listening to them. The first punk song I remember hearing was Sham 69’s 'Hurry Up Harry'. I thought it was brilliant and hilarious. Someone told me that 'Sham' stood for 'Skinheads are magic' and I think I believed them. A few years later, I found the track on Sham 69’s second album That’s Life (1978). I was drawn to the collage cover, which was designed by Jimmy Pursey, the band’s singer and writer. It’s a mash up of newspaper headlines, photographs, and adverts that sum up mid-1970s discontent (27).

I’ve heard it described as a concept album, but it’s simply a series of songs that are linked by snippets of conversation, so it runs like a play or a musical. If it has a story, it’s one of an average young man’s day: getting up, going to work and the pub, meeting girls, and all his moaning and joking about the world.

In the late 1970s, a television play called The Witches of Pendle brought my dad’s tales of the Lancashire witches to life in our living room. My enduring fascination with this story brought me to The Fall’s Live at the Witch Trials (1979). The cover summed up my blossoming bleak vision of the British landscape: eerie, anxious, and threatening; deep-rooted and dying (28). The songs themselves are the soundtrack to that landscape. I don’t know anything about the mysterious John Wriothesley, who is credited with the cover.

The very basic black and white graphics of the Two-Tone Records label made it easy for us kids to replicate it using marker pens on schoolbooks and bags. Similarly, the black and white photography on the cover of The Specials (1979) kept it rooted in real experience (29). It also looked like a low-budget version of My Generation (1965) by The Who. The track listing on the front has always made me think of poetry titles and pushes the content right in your inquisitive face. Paul Weller described the music and cover of Setting Sons (1979) as 'an English story so we wanted an English sleeve' (30). The image shows the sculpture by Benjamin Clemens called The St John’s Ambulance Bearers (1919) in the Imperial War Museum. I spent my primary school years obsessed with the First World War and I was gripped by this image when I saw it in the record section of the local library. I quickly handed over my ten pence to borrow it for a week.

For their debut album, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, Kevin Rowland, the lead singer of Dexys Midnight Runners, said he wanted 'an image of unrest'. This came courtesy of a newspaper photograph of a Catholic boy fleeing his Belfast family home, following the introduction of internment by the British Government in 1971 (31). Of course, when I saw this cover for the first time, I knew nothing about these details — it appealed as an image of a lost and melancholy youth. My own copy is a cut-price reissue, which I probably bought in the mid- 1980s.

By the time Crocodiles (1980) by Echo and the Bunnymen arrived in my bedroom, I was beginning to have more other-worldly ambitions to do with art and ideas (32). I remember some mild abuse when the band’s name was found on my school rucksack. This image of the young men hanging around an eerily lit wood, together with the cover of Joy Division’s Atmosphere (1980), confirmed my self-image as a doomed romantic artist striding out into the landscape (33). Any contradiction between roots and ambition were, for a while,

reconciled by The Smiths. Morrissey mined the iconography of post-war working class culture to tell his own story of lost innocence, unrequited love, injustice, and alienation. Each of the singles released in the mid-1980s had their own 'cover star' and the star of Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now (1984) is Viv Nicholson, who is shown returning to her childhood home after winning (and losing) the football pools (34). The B-side of the single is 'Suffer Little Children', which was written about the Moors murders. The physical similarity between Nicholson and Myra Hindley is a calculated one.