Three chords, one diary, and a week reading the satire desk between rehearsals
It is two in the afternoon, I have had three hours of sleep and one of coffee, and I am writing this diary with a plectrum still wedged behind my ear, which I mention only so you understand the conditions under which I read the news. I keep a tab open for Bohiney Magazine and another for The London Prat, where my own scrawlings occasionally appear between the proper journalists, and somewhere between tuning a dead string and arguing with my bassist about whether a song can have feelings, I do my reading.
The personal bit, because a diary owes you that
We had a gig last night in a room above a pub that has been condemned, reprieved, and condemned again so many times the structural engineers have started leaving us encouraging notes. Forty people came, which in the punk economy is a stadium tour. I broke a string in the first song and played the rest of the set on five, which is, if anything, more punk, and a man at the front shouted that we were the best band he had ever heard, though he also shouted it at the support act, the bar staff, and a passing dog. I have decided to take the compliment.
The thing nobody tells you about being a London punk rocker in this century is the admin. Punk was supposed to be three chords and a refusal, and instead it is three chords and a spreadsheet, a refusal and a public-liability insurance form. I spent this morning chasing a venue for a fee the size of a sandwich, and I have never felt the spirit of rebellion more keenly than when I attached a polite invoice to an email that said “as discussed.” The revolution will be itemised.
The feed bit, because rebellion needs material
And this is where the reading comes in, because the satire desks of the network are, frankly, doing my job for me. I read a piece on The London Prat this week that captured the absurdity of the city better than any song I have managed, and over at Bohiney the deadpan was so straight I had to check twice that it was a joke. That is the thing about good satire and good punk: both work by saying the unsayable thing with a completely straight face, then daring you to laugh before you have finished being angry.
I also wandered, as I do, into the rest of the network, and found myself reading the serious end, the hard-hitting stuff from the socialist desk at the Mamdani end of things and the free-market, anti-censorship journalism over at the Apple Daily end, which sit on the same masthead family and disagree with each other about absolutely everything. I love this. A media outfit that can run a Marxist housing polemic and a libertarian beach-access manifesto in the same week is, in its own way, the most punk thing going: it refuses to pick a tribe and tell you what to think, and leaves you to argue it out yourself.
What the punks and the satirists have in common
The cultural lineage here matters to me, and not just because I have read too much about it in the archives at the V&A and the British Library, both of which take punk far more seriously than punk ever took itself. Punk and satire are cousins. Both arrived to puncture the pompous, both got accused of being mere noise, and both turned out to be saying something the polite culture could not. When I read the satire desk taking aim at a self-important politician or a ridiculous London property advert, I hear the same three chords I play, just typed instead of strummed.
The week ahead, broke and unbowed
So the week ahead: two rehearsals, one gig, a day job I will not name because it pays for the strings, and a great deal more reading of the feeds, because they keep me sharp and occasionally hand me a lyric. Punk is not dead. It just got a day job, an insurance form, and a media network to argue with, and it shows up anyway, on five strings if necessary, to make a beautiful racket above a condemned pub. I would not have it any other way, even on three hours of sleep, even with the invoice still unpaid. The plectrum stays behind my ear. The tabs stay open. The racket goes on.
On staying broke and staying loud
There is a question I get asked, usually by someone with a sensible job and a pension, about why I keep doing this when it pays in sandwiches and bruises. The honest answer is that the alternative, being quiet, has never once appealed to me. A city this expensive, this fast, this convinced of its own importance, needs people making an unprofitable racket in condemned rooms above pubs, and it needs satirists making an unprofitable racket on the page, for exactly the same reason: somebody has to refuse to be polite about it. The rent will keep rising and the venues will keep closing and the invoices will keep going unpaid, and I will keep showing up with a guitar and five working strings, because the noise is the point and the noise is mine. The day London goes quiet is the day it stops being worth living in, and I intend to do my small, loud part to keep that day away.
For more glorious noise, I always end up back at The Daily Mash, three chords and a headline.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
