For a more honest, entertaining and rewarding look at Britain today you could do a lot worse than former NME writer Tony Parson's latest article publish in UK newspapers, 'Men from Boys.' The brutal honesty of a perceptive and prescient writer who has a perfect grasp of the story telling craft. To take the particular and make it universal takes a poet's eye for detail and a philosopher's mindset for truth. Or, in simple terms he writes like a songsmith. Like a Costello or a Dylan, who tells it like it is and shoots from the hip - unless, of course, the chorus demands a change of tone. This is how it should be; carried along by the narrative, the rhythm of the characters and the ideas within without pausing to allow the reader to think about one becomes the other.
I first became aware of Parsons many years ago when Bob Marley was still Jammin' and Elvis was still Watching the Detectives. These were the Golden Years of the New Musical Express. I've been meaning to write about the influence that this disparate bunch of writer had on me for some time now. I know that the NME continued and continues to to shine and attract good quality writers who write eloquently about the fine music that continues to emerge from these islands throughout the Nineties and beyond. But the class of the late Seventies and early Eighties were different. Many of the writers attached to the NME during what we now call the punk and post-punk era have since gone on to successful writing careers in other fields and this is indicative of the breadth of the influences on their writing at the time. From memory, the writers that I'm talking about include Tony Parsons, his one-time wife, Julie Birchill, Paul Morley, Ian Penman, Barney Hoskyns, Charles Shaar Murray and Danny Baker. As if this motley crew wasn't enough we also had photographers Kevin Cummins, who iconised Joy Division, and also Dutch maestro and later-day film director, Anton Corbijn whose haunting grainy monochrome portraits of Bowie, Beefheart and Miles remain with me today as defining images of the music that I love. I think that this punk and post-punk era kicked off when the NME famously advertised UK newspapers for 'two hip young gunslingers' and then filled the posts with the outspoken Tony Parsons and the even more ascerbic Julie Birchall. Many of you will know at least some of these names from various well-established Sunday and Daily newspapers in the UK, not to mention late-nigh arts-related chatshows. You might even have seen Petit's moodly and menacing ironic road movie, 'Radio On', in which Sting pops up as a fading rock 'n' roller on the roadside as the protagonist journeys from London to Bristol. Not quite highway 1 or Route 66, but that was the whole point of the post-punk rebirth of the Culture of Britishness. Petit was famously asked how he managed to get England to look so unrelentingly grim at the time of filming in the late Seventies and he replied that it wasn't difficult, that was how the country looked in 1979. What attracted me to the writing in the NME was the richness and the passion for the subject matter no matter that is was essentially this weeks single releases or last weeks gigs. In retrospect all this articulate urgency is now lost. Here were people who were both aware that they found themselves articulating the creative commentary on a vibrant and unrestrained era of creativity and political change. Many people view the late Sixties as the zenith of post-war revolutionary creative change but I would hold that that era was just a decadent party for an admittedly large group of upper class debs and the working class heroes who serenaded and photographed them. What happened just over a decade later was a more politically motivated sea of change that swept along beyond the metropolis to the cities and towns that were later name-checked in The Smiths 'Panic'. The musical legacy of the record labels of Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester tells its own story. Paul Morley, still writing up the pop sensibility today, was particularly interesting. As erudite a writer as ever reflected on the hit parade, he never failed to pack his reviews of the weeks new releases in UK newspapers with a swathe of influences from Barthes to Borges via Martin Seymour-Smith's The Guide to Modern World Literature.'
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