Defenestrationism.net

 

Let’s begin with the album cover.  An over-lifesize oil painting by French artist Théodore Géricault titled Raft of the Medusa has been altered to include the faces of the band members.  The Medusa was a ship that sunk, and a hundred plus shipwrecked sailors piled onto a raft, dying of thirst, and eating one another out of starvation.  Yes.  So… Punk.

The album opens with The Sick Bed Of Cuchuliann, a dirge to a friend, which soon turns into a very fast dirge, and the lyrics soon develop a very rowdy friend.  Cu Chuliann was a frenzied, warrior demigod in Irish mythology, the mid-1980s skinhead reincarnation of whom seems to live up to the mythical one.

Rum is the first umbrella concept introduced, “there’s devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands”.  Sodomy doesn’t take long to follow, “got syph down in Cologne”— syphilis usually being transmitted sexually.  

While this song has plenty of lashing about, two prominent instances stand out as exemplary.  A violent verb lash, “They took you out into the street and kicked you in the brain, but you walked back in through a bolted door and did it all again.”  Then some abject humiliation, “They took you up to midnight mass and left you in the lurch, so you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church.”  

The Old Main Drag is the next track, a vivid capturing of the pre-Punk scene of 1970s London.  Let’s close read:

“When I first came to London, I was only 16.  With a fiver in my pocket and my ole dancing bag, I went down to the dilly to check out the scene and I soon ended up on the old main drag.”  McGowan, born in1957, would have been 16 in 1973, and so, youthful, broke, optimistic and new to the big city, he heads downtown.

“There, the he-males and the she-males paraded in style, and the old man with the money would flash you a smile.  In the dark of an alley you’d work for a fiver… but there were boys in the cafes who’d give you cheap pills.”  McGowan is now sex-working for drugs, qualifying the song for sodomy and rum.  

And the lash?  “One evening as I was lying down by Leicester Square, I was picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls.  Between the metal doors at Vine Street I was beaten and mauled, and they ruined my good looks for the old main drag… I’ve been shat on and spat on and raped and abused.  I know that I am dying and I wish I could beg for some money to take me from the old main drag.”  These are the conditions which spawned the Punk rebellion in this city in 1977.

The next song is instrumental, but its slashing guitar chords and its title of the Wild Cats of Kilkenny, the lash is clearly captured. 



 

I’m A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day follows.  “My name is Jock Stewart… a roving young fellow I have been, so be easy and free when you’re drinking with me, I’m a man you don’t meet every day.  I have acres of land, I have men at command, I have always a shilling to spare, so be easy and free when you’re drinking with me, I’m a man you don’t meet every day.”  Young, prosperous, powerful, generous— or so this man claims— Jock Stewart seems a jovial sort of fellow, and rum is clearly present.

The lash, however, is more subtle than in previous tracks. “I took out my dog, and him did shoot, all down in the County Kildare, so be easy and free when you’re drinking with me, I’m a man you don’t meet every day.”  The bragging is gone, now, and several verses into this brannigan, this man reveals he had to put down a beloved dog this day.

A Pair of Brown Eyes is possibly the goriest love song ever written.  “One Summer evening, drunk to hell…. a rovin’, a rovin’, a rovin’ I’ll go, for a pair of brown eyes”, sings McGowan, despite, “no pair of brown eyes waiting for me”.  Clearly, romantically tinted eyes are longed for amidst the booze—feminine eyes, with mascaraed eyelashes.

Yet, with “In blood and death ‘neath a screaming sky, I lay down on the ground, and the arms and legs of other men were scattered all around.  Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed, then prayed and bled some more, and the only thing that I could see was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me”,  this seems to be a war scene, or a debauched punk scene, and the eyes seem to be those of an enemy.  Lash, check.

Next, a drinking song.  Sally MacLennan is the ballad of a barfly named Jimmy who hits the road for “God knows where.”  There also appears to be a first person narrator— though the pronouns become vague at times— and a love interest, Sally MacLennan. 

“Jimmy played harmonica in the pub where I was born”—  I wouldn’t be surprised if Shane McGowen actually was born in a pub, but the reference certainly includes drinking— “We walked him to the station in the rain, we kissed him as we put him on the train… though we knew that we’d be seeing him again.”  

Here begins the pronoun confusion, “So buy me beer and whiskey ’cause I’m going far away”— this must be Jimmy speaking in the first person, because the song makes no sense if that is not the case— “I’d like to think of me returning when I can to the greatest little boozer and to Sally MacLennane”.  It is Jimmy who here wishes to return to Sally, someday.

As the lyrics continue, we find that, “When Jimmy came back home he was surprised that they were gone.  He asked me all the details of the train that they went on.  Some people they are scared to croak but Jimmy drank until he choked, and he took the road for heaven in the morning.”  There’s the lash for you, Jimmy drinks himself to death in heartbreak.

Side two of the record has mostly covers, either traditional folk tunes or written by contemporary songsters, with only one original tune. 

Dirty Old Town lashes us with some environmental commentary.  “I met my love by the gasworks wall… I kissed my girl by the factory wall, dirty old town.”  There is nothing romantic about this factory town, the only places to be in love have dirty walls.  There can be no sodomy— nuptial or otherwise— in this town, only the lash of dirt and grime.

The tempo picks up abruptly with Jesse James, a Western-styled folk song glorifying the U.S. outlaw.  “Jesse James we understand has killed many a man, he robbed the Union trains.  He stole from the rich and gave to the poor, he had a hand and a heart and a brain.”  Lash, double check.

Up next comes Navigator, a ballad of Irish railroad builders.  “They blasted and dug with their sweat and their guts.  They never drank water but whiskey by pints.  And the shanty towns rang with their songs and their fights… They died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where, save the brass in the pocket of the entrepreneur.”  It is the capitalist exploitation that truly brings the lash in this song.

Billy’s Bones is the original, and it’s a wild one.  “Billy saw a copper and he hit him in the knee, and he took him down from six foot to five foot three.  Then he hit him fair and square in the do-re-mi, that copper won’t be having any family”.  Smack a policeman in the bollocks, that’s good ol’ Billy for you.  Then comes some pressing social commentary, “Billy went away with the peace-keeping force, ‘cause he liked a bloody good fight of course.”  This Billy wants war, and if the only option for combat is a peacekeeping mission, well… it might not be so peaceful.



 

Gentleman Soldier keeps the wild times going.  Mostly a ballad about a soldier seducing a virgin country girl, then leaving her, the lash comes in hard with, “she had a little militia boy and she didn’t know his name.”

The final track is “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”, a slow, somber song about a World War I. veteran.  “In that hell that they called Suvla Bay, we were butchered like lambs at the slaughter.  Johnny Turk he was ready, he primed himself well.  He chased us with bullets, he rained us with shells and in five minutes flat he’d blown us all to hell, nearly blew us right back to Australia.  But the band played Waltzing Matilda, as we stopped to bury our slain.  We buried ours and the Turks buried theirs.  Then we started all over again.”

The truly poignant statement of the song comes in the final verse, as the veteran parade passes by.  “And now every April I sit on my porch.  And I watch the parade pass before me.  And I watch my old comrades, how proudly they march, reliving old dreams of past glory.  And the young people ask, “What are they marching for?” And I ask myself the same question… Year after year their numbers get fewer, some day no one will march there at all.”

Yes. So. Punk.

Punk is fundamentally a tearing down of society.  It is a rebellion with no real goals, no strategy for a new society.   

So the debauchery in songs like The Old Main Drag are statements against the rigid, elitist society structures of the previous decades— indeed centuries— it is not a permanent destination for society.   

Punk is a raft after a shipwreck, where all one can do is lash oneself to the mast and wait for what the sea will bring.

 

more Concept Albums Explained
ready for the real thing? T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” Explained

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