And this is where it started to get confusing because the Red Crayola seemed to become the Red Krayola and the group’s Mayo Thompson seemed suddenly to appear at the epicentre of what was happening with punk, putting out new recordings on Radar (and wasn’t the version of Hurricane Fighter Plane itself a new recording?) where suddenly they were label mates with the Pop Group, Yachts, Mac Curtis, Richard Hell, Nick Lowe, Bette Bright, Tanz De Youth and La Dusseldorf. There was a single called Wives In Orbit and an LP called Soldier Talk, which both still sound fantastic, in terms of fragmented, jarring, disorientating pop, and yes it was very much pop.
And before you knew it Mayo Thompson seemed to be at the heart of what was happening with adventurous pop, playing with Pere Ubu on The Art of Walking and Songs of the Bailing Man, collaborating in various ways with the Raincoats, Essential Logic, Blue Orchids, Swell Maps, and so on, like appearing on the soundtrack of Lizzie Borden’s Born In Flames, the title song of which is perhaps Mayo’s finest moment, and it’s a fine film, featuring also The Bloods and Adele Bertei. And by the time the legendary NME/Rough Trade C-81 cassette came out Mayo was pretty much the central figure to that one way or another. Yet it shouldn’t be forgotten that at the time there were raised eyebrows, and questions asked about who this old dude was and what was he up to muscling in on this scene, and that only goes to show the strange ideas there were in the punk era about age, but things moved so fast. The Red Crayola were what first around in ’67? The Nuggets compilation of gems from that era came out in about ’72? Maybe a bit later? The punk thing exploded in ’77 and the golden age of post-punk was what ’79 to ’81? It would be about ’84 and ’85 that there was a real resurgence of interest in garage punk. And how old were the flamin’ Stone Roses when they supposedly burst onto the scene in ’89? Positively ancient by punk standards. I bet they were older than Johnny Thunders was when he was singing about how you can’t put your arms around a memory.