After receiving nothing but kind words via e-mail for this site, for which, thanks again, I was strangely relieved to receive a couple of stinkers, recently, both from ardent Roxy Music fans objecting to my Reaper column, both within hours of each other (could it have a concerted nationwide campaign?). The gist of one was, how could I write bad things about Roxy Music when they were clearly one of the greatest bands of the Seventies. I’ve been struggling and writhing in the logical grip of this argument for several days but sadly have been able to come up with no adequate riposte. The second correspondent had me by even crisper hair. First, they stated that the lyrics I had quoted for one of Bryan Ferry’s songs were “wrong”. Apologies if that’s the case but this, I would venture to suggest is the sort of misunderstanding that can arise when you choose to sing like the charwallah from It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum. They then went on to deliver the coup de grace. Bryan Ferry, it seems, did not teach pottery. He taught ceramics. And so, the brittle edifice of my entire anti-Roxy Music argument comes crashing down like a dinosaur skeleton laid low by a wrecking ball. Sadly, I’ve been more aware in recent times, especially in my capacity as a music journalist, of an obsession with facts and minutiae. Maybe it’s the changing nature of the music press, a new culture of Corrections & Clarifications, the more details-orientated, archaeological requirements of music journalism on which readers (and I don’t entirely discount myself here) thrive. Letters to music papers are increasingly concerned with perceived factual errors, so that the dominant tone can quite often be one of sneering pedantry and self-satisfaction. As professional journalists we should “get our facts right”, runs the refrain – and indeed, we should. However, this is accompanied by the wholly incorrect implication that The Facts Equal The Truth. They do not and never should that idea be allowed to prevail. Certainly, in the first, frantic three years of my writing for Melody Maker, of the many words I churned and spewed onto its pages, there were probably only about six facts (and three of them were probably incorrect). Back then, whenever I perpetrated a howler, I openly celebrated it as a badge of honour, much in the way the bebop jazzmen celebrated each lousy review they received in the mainstream US jazz press. Nowadays, like most journos, I live in craven fear of the misspelt name, the erroneous birthdate, the wrongly attributed line up credit, the potentially libellous reference. People aren’t wrong to pull up journalists on factual mistakes. What is wrong, however, is to imagine that this removes any obligation to engage with the core arguments, the back and forth of discourse and ideas. Fuck facts. The truth is what counts.

Walking up said road through Chelsea after an interview with the inestimable Buck 65, this thought started ticker-taping slowly around my head.

I used to come down from University on regular trips down here in the early Eighties, when the Kings Road was dotted lengthily with mini-emporiums flogging post-punk/new romantic finery to NME-reading fashionistas like myself. It was a time when dressing as a form of pop-cultural assertion was a relatively marginal and tribal activity and one which I took extremely seriously. Here, you could buy cheap, replicated versions of the sort of baggy zoot trousers sported by the imaginary hipsters of Serge Clerc cartoons. To do so wasn’t frivolous or even even vain, to my mind but a necessary cultural gesture. These were trousers of honour. However, at some point during each expedition, I’d inevitably past by a cluster of crusty looking punks congregating sullenly around a bollard. They didn’t present any semblance of menace – they were no danger to anyone, least of all themselves. I suppose they were there voluntarily, trying to catch some of the afterglow of McClaren and Westwood. They were a reminder of Sex (though most definitely not the lower case variety). Yet it was as if they were in captivity, culturally appropriated and caged, as much a part of London’s postcard warp and landscape as the Beefeaters. They were like unpaid tourist attractions. They always looked existentially at a bit of a loss and as I passed them, my gait breaking into an involuntary and self-conscious mince as I did so, I wondered what they made of me in my ballooning trousers and red braces. Like Windsor Davies’ sergeant in It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum, I could sense their lips forming the word “poof!” silently. Of course, I could have explained to them that chaps like me didn’t represent some sort of rejection or betrayal but were the direct dialectical descendants of punk (can’t think why I never did). These geezers had missed the point. Punk wasn’t an end in itself but the beginning, the Big Bang that had created rock’s postmodern state, as Dick Hebdige had outlined. But these poor sods weren’t able to progress one inch beyond the Anti Nowhere League.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxoymq-uah0

Still, they lingered, well into the Eighties and beyond. They’re no longer there, now. There must have been a day – maybe in 1994 or 1995 when they trudged off for the very last time, unacknowledged, in a cloud of crusty dust, towards whatever subcultural elephant’s graveyard awaited them. Today, the Kings Road is an array of the usual assortment of haute couture brandnames you can find in reshuffled order along any of the boulevards, malls or avenues of New York, Milan, Paris. There is no one to stare balefully at you, no reminders of anything. We need the punks back down the Kings Road.