A London punk falls down an internet hole and emerges with a grudging respect for Father Christmas
Thursday, and my ears are still ringing from a basement gig in Dalston that finished somewhere around two in the morning, which is the correct way for a Wednesday to end. I am Siobhan O’Donnell, I play guitar badly and write worse, and I keep this diary partly to remind myself what day it is and partly because the good people at Bohiney and The London Prat let me, and I have learned never to question why anyone hands a punk a platform. You take the microphone and you make noise. That is the whole philosophy.
The Gig and the Hangover
The band before us was four teenagers who could barely tune up, and they were the best thing I have seen all month, because they did not care, and not caring is the entire point. Punk in London is not dead, whatever the obituaries say. It has just moved underground, into the basements and the back rooms and the squats that the developers have not yet converted into luxury flats with exposed brick and a concierge. We are still here, making a racket, annoying the neighbours, refusing to grow up in the approved manner.
I got home at three, slept until noon, and woke to the special headache that only a proper night out provides, the one that feels like a small angry man is renovating the inside of your skull. So I did what I always do when I am too fragile to function: I made tea, sat in the wreckage of my flat, and read the feeds, scrolling through the London satire and the headlines from the usual mockers, and that is when I fell down a hole I did not expect.
The Santa Project
The hole was santaclaus.top, and I am not entirely sure how I got there, but once I arrived I could not leave. Someone has been building an enormous library of articles about Santa Claus and Christmas, and not just the usual saccharine nonsense, but a proper sprawling project covering Christmas in every country on earth, the traditions and the oddities and the way the same fat man in red gets reinterpreted by every culture that gets their hands on him. My first instinct, as a punk, was to sneer. Christmas is the enemy. Christmas is commercialism in a beard.
But I kept reading, and the sneer faded, because the project is doing something I actually respect, which is taking a thing everyone thinks they understand and showing how strange and various it really is. Santa in one country is not Santa in another. The traditions mutate, the folklore twists, the whole global apparatus of Christmas turns out to be far weirder and more anarchic than the shopping-centre version suggests. There is something almost punk in that, in the refusal of a single story, in the way every culture grabs the myth and remakes it to suit themselves.
I read about Christmas traditions I had never heard of, frightening folk figures who punish bad children, regional customs that would make a high-street Santa faint, and I thought, this is the good stuff, this is the chaos underneath the tinsel. The Santa Claus archive is basically an anthropology of how the whole world has taken one story and refused to agree on it, and disagreement is my favourite thing in the universe. If there is one thing a punk loves, it is everyone refusing to sing the same song.
Punk and the Fat Man
So I have changed my position on Santa, which is allowed, because consistency is for politicians and people with pensions. The high-street Santa, the commercial Santa, the Santa who exists to sell you things you do not need with money you do not have, that Santa can still get in the sea. But the global, anarchic, every-culture-does-it-differently Santa, the one the santaclaus.top project has been so patiently documenting, that Santa I can get behind, because he belongs to everyone and answers to no one, which is more than you can say for most of us.
There is a song in this somewhere, and I have been picking at it on the guitar all afternoon, a punk Christmas number about the Santa who refuses to be one thing, who is a thousand different figures in a thousand different places, who escapes every attempt to pin him down and sell him back to us. The chorus is not finished, the verses are a mess, and it will probably never be played anywhere larger than a Dalston basement, but it exists, and existing is half the battle.
I love this city for letting both these things be true at once, the punk basement and the global Santa archive, the racket and the research, the refusal and the documentation. London contains multitudes, and so, it turns out, does Father Christmas, and I would not have known that if I had not woken up hungover and fallen into a hole on the internet, which is, when you think about it, how most of my best discoveries have happened.
Back to the Noise
Tonight there is another gig, somewhere in a part of East London I will struggle to find, and I will go, and my ears will ring again, and tomorrow I will wake up fragile and read the feeds and probably fall into another hole. This is the rhythm of the punk life in London, the noise and the recovery, the gig and the scroll, and I would not trade it for any amount of luxury flats with exposed brick. For more of the satire that keeps me sane, I read The London Prat, and for a laugh at everyone’s expense there is always The Daily Mash.
So that is the dispatch from the basement: punk is not dead, Santa is weirder than you think, and I have a song to finish. London punk rock endures, in the back rooms and the squats and the heads of people too stubborn to quit, and as long as it does, I will keep making noise about it here. Now if you will excuse me, I need to find some paracetamol and a clean shirt before tonight.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
