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ROCK OF AGES Â
Passing fancy
Jeff Cloves
H ere are a couple of
books of interest to
PN readers; seasonal
gifts perhaps? Both are
doorstoppers of around 500
pages and both are by blokes
who are  to quote 1066 and
All That  "a good thing".
In the 1970s I wrote for Pete
Frame's celebrated music mag
Zigzag but Pete has since become
more widely known for his series
of superbly researched and
drawn Rock Family Trees.
These are the product of his
meticulous research and obses-
sive interest in the minutiae of
popular music in general and
rockanroll in particular; but now
comes his awesome The Restless
Generation (Rogan House £18.99)
and he's revealed as an idiosyn-
cratic social/cultural historian
unrestrained by academe and its
faux objectivity.
Sub-titled "How rock music
changed the face of 1950s
Britain", it is a work of love and
devotion which makes his case
 and pretty well justifies it.
Wandering troubadour Mike
Horovitz, whose work has been
recommended many times in PN
over the last 40 years, has waged
a righteous (nonviolent) war
against the forces of authority
and repression throughout his
creative life.
In making a nod towards T.S.
Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) and
New Labour's obssession with
re-branding, his latest book has
re-branded Eliot too.
Thus, A New Waste Land (New
Departures £15) is a poetic
assault on Blair and the New
Labour Project.
However, if Pete's affirmative
examination of the years 1949-
59 is popular history from the
rock bottom up, then Mike's
denunciation of the Blairistocra-
cy (1997-2007) veers towards
media history from the top
down.
There are no photos of Pete's
working class rockanroll heroes
in TRG (they would have made
it even more pricey) but ANWL
is stuffed with cartoons from
Steve Bell et al. and photos by
persons known and unknown.
In all it includes 64 photogra-
phers, artists and cartoonists
and, in particular, the photos of
torture, death and destruction
are used to horrifying effect.
What I like about TRG is
how unfussily and naturally Pete
has combined the story of the
rise of skiffle and the birth of
British (imitation American)
rockanroll with his accompany-
ing social commentary.
In writing, for example, of the
rise of coffee-bar culture in Soho
in the late '50s he combats Fleet
Street's denigration of it:
"As they [its denizens] recall,
their refuges incubated and fos-
tered the swinging sixties, toler-
ance, spirituality, social and sex-
ual equality, inter-racial and gay
relationships, beat culture, ban-
the-bomb communality, an
interest in poetry [for which
they owed a great deal to Mike
H and friends - JC] and jazz and
folk music, not to mention
decent coffee. People wrote, read
books, and newspapers, played
chess, played guitars, sang,
ruminated, discussed, argued Â
or, if they were Diz Disley, drew
on the walls.
"A jazz-bent guitarist, often
forced to take skiffle gigs for the
money....he painted American
jazz greats and Botticelli-style
angels in return for mountains
of spaghetti bolognaise  `spag
bollock naked' as it was known."
TRG contains Pete's best
writing as well as occasional cru-
dities and excesses. And so it
should. It was a decade of musi-
cal crudity and excess which
ushered in a decade of musical
invention and genius and he has
properly told its story with
pride and prejudice  and pas-
sion.
As for the venality of the
Blair years, Mike Horovitz can
hardly miss. His angry poem
takes 214 pages and the notes to
it occupy a further 212 in which
he generously quotes from other
poets and writers  alive and
dead. His reach is exhaustive;
but somewhat exhausting. And
too late. His aim is true, his tar-
gets deserving, but his prologue
 referring to (New) Labour's
election victory in '97 declaims:
With Labour in office again
we felt free
 Well
for a month
 or three....
That "we"! I never felt freed by
Blair's triumph.
More of the same I thought Â
and I was right. I'm an admirer
of Mike's poetry but ANWL is
just too party political. A shrill
cry of "betrayal" runs through it
which I find naive. His tirades
against the arms trade, though,
endear him to me as ever:
Hear the cries of babies
and the birds on the wing
From your lies about wrongs
righting wrongs
That hot up night and day
with more Big Deals that pay
Endless wages to war and
bombs.
Pete Frame notes that in
March 1959 10,000 CND pro-
testors arrived in Trafalgar
Square having marched from
Aldermaston, and in August
The Quarry Men skiffle group
played the Casbah Coffee Club
in Liverpool.
By the end of the '60s, song
writers were among the finest
poets of the twentieth century.
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