Interview with Acid House writer Simon Reynolds from 2006

Simon Reynolds is among the most engaging and astute British music writers to emerge over the last two decades. His work has been an object lesson in taking popular music seriously, in how to write intelligently about something so intimately linked with visceral enjoyment. Whether he's dealing with Ghost Box, grime or Gang of Four, Reynolds always captures the immediacy of the sonic experience and communicates the pleasures of the musical text. At the same time, his wide-ranging work has often theorized that experience accessibly, contextualizing it as a site of intersecting historical forces (such as race, class, gender and sexuality). Few other contemporary music critics combine these two apparently divergent approaches in such a seamless, readable or illuminating fashion.

Reynolds first started writing about music in the Oxford-based pop journal, Monitor, which he co-founded in 1984. In 1986, he joined the late Melody Maker, one of the Big Three British inkies (along with the New Musical Express and Sounds). His first book, Blissed Out: The Raptures of Rock (Serpent's Tail, 1990), compiled articles and interviews written during his time at Melody Maker.

Reynolds went freelance in 1990. Since then, his work has appeared in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic (The New York Times, The Village Voice, Spin, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Observer, Artforum, The Wire, Mojo, Uncut, among others) and he has published three more books. Written with Joy Press, The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion, and Rock 'n' Roll (Harvard University Press, 1995/Serpent's Tail, 1995) provided a psychoanalytical reading of notions of masculinity and femininity in rock, from the Rolling Stones to riot grrrl. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture (Little, Brown, 1998) -- published in the UK as Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Picador, 1998) -- offered a landmark account of the rave scene and the rhizomatic realm of electronic dance musics.
Reynolds' latest publication, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post-Punk 1978-1984 (Viking Penguin, 2006) -- the first book-length account of post-punk -- maps the continuities and discontinuities among the movement's sounds and sites, from Sheffield to Manchester to New York to San Francisco and beyond. Reviewing Rip It Up for The Guardian, Andrew Mueller said: "Anyone who claims to have read five better books about pop is mad, or a liar."

PSF: Do you think you could have written Rip It Up and Start Again ten years ago?
SIMON REYNOLDS: I've been giving various accounts of how I came to write the book -- and they're all true -- but the other day I came across something on an old disk I was going through, looking for old stories of mine. I found a proposal I had for a book from around 1991 or 1992 and it wasn't the same as the post-punk book but, in a way, it included the post-punk book. It was a book about all the different ideas of punk and how punk spread in all these different directions. There would have been goth, there would have been post-punk, anarcho-punk, Oi!, people like the KLF and the schemer bands, Malcolm McLaren, Sigue Sigue Sputnik and so on. So it would have been a bigger time span. I think it would have gone up to and included grunge. The idea was the "punk diaspora," but a big chunk of it was post-punk and that was one of the reasons I was interested in it. But ultimately I ended up doing a different book. I guess I came up with a bunch of proposals at the same time.

Around the time I first started writing, I used to do a fanzine called Monitor and in the last issue of it, I wrote an article about punk. It was 1986 and it was the anniversary of punk. It was ten years on and I was looking at where we were now, what had happened to all that energy. I wrote a piece about how punk was far from being something that had left and was nowhere to be found; its traces were everywhere and a huge amount of stuff going on in Britain at that time was shaped by some idea of punk -- whether it was goth, or even the Pogues, a lot of things had some relation to punk. The piece was basically saying, far from being something that's gone away and that we should mourn, punk's something that's oppressing us and that we need to break free from as a self-perpetuating thing.

So this idea of the punk diaspora, all these different interpretations of punk, is something that's been on my mind for a while but the specific focus on post-punk came about towards the end of the '90's. I started listening to those records again and thinking what an interesting time it was. I had been so involved in the dance music thing and the rave culture but then it got very uninteresting and lost all its edge. I started feeling kind of adrift -- wondering how I got there, how I ended up in this dance culture. It got very safe. It was all about clubs and quite pleasant-sounding house music and I was trying to work out, where did I first get the idea that dance music could be dangerous?

I thought of post-punk because a lot of the ideas around post-punk were punk-funk, avant-funk or dance music with a darkness to it, and, in fact, when acid house first came along it reminded me a lot of Cabaret Voltaire, DAF and all those sort of groups. There were certain tracks that even reminded me of specific songs by PiL. So it's that sort of idea of dance music as being more than just fun, having some kind of edge to it; that really goes back to the post-punk days. I'd been through the whole rave thing and that was very exciting and I followed the logic of it through to where I was just going to clubs that weren't really very edgy and the music was very "nice," just pleasant textures, and I began to wonder -- how did I get here?

Also, around the same time a lot of people were bored with the same stuff and that was when you had the first people coming through referring back to post-punk. Andy Weatherall did a very early compilation of mid-'80's post-punk/industrial dance stuff -- it was called Nine O'Clock Drop. He was one of the very first people. He's probably the same age as me. He was probably someone who had been into post-punk music and then got into dance music through the Hacienda, working with Primal Scream, having one foot in rock and one foot in dance. And I think for him and me and other people I know, we started thinking back to when dance music seemed edgy and subversive -- more than just for blowing off steam on a Saturday night.

PSF: One of your reasons for writing Rip It Up had to do with reassessing whether it had been worth devoting all this time and energy to music and "taking music seriously." What made you want to write about music originally, as opposed to, say, literature or film?
SR: At the time, obviously, music was the most potent area of culture. I mean, you're talking about punk rock. This is the sort of thing that gives you an over-estimation of the power of music that will never leave you. There are still people out there who do web sites. There's this blog called greengalloway -- he's a guy who was involved in the anarcho-punk scene. For the last month he's been scanning in all these old fanzines from that time. He must be older than me and he's trying to work through all these things that meant so much to him, trying to interpret what it meant and what was going on. At that time, rock music was obviously the burning-hot center of anything exciting in culture and so that's what I wanted to write about.
Also, there are ways of explaining it and rationalizing it. For example, it's a very democratic art form compared with film. With music, it's much easier to have an impact with less resources. Even now, there are still people who make records that have an impact just with a few hundred or a few thousand dollars' outlay on equipment. They can make a record that will be a hit or get them discovered or take them to some place. So there's that democratic aspect. I enjoy film, literature and the other arts, but there's something about music... At that particular time in history, it was really meshed with a whole load of other things. It was still coming out of the '60's, when music was a prism through which everything was seen. It meshed with everything. It connected to politics, it connected to all the other arts and artists wanted a piece of it, whether it was Yoko Ono or whoever.

Music was the place to be, it was the thing that gave a bit extra to whatever you were doing and you wanted to have some connection to it. I think that was still the case when I was growing up. Music was definitely both the center of everything and what took you to other things and connected you to other things. For instance, there were certain kinds of authors; I mean, you couldn't say J.G. Ballard was a rock 'n' roll author but he had this particular connection with music. I was actually into Ballard before I got into music. I was really into science fiction. That's an obvious connection -- or Burroughs and music. But, to me, music was the only thing really worth being excited about.

PSF: It seems that a lot of British music writers eventually go on to write about other things.
SR: Some of them do. I think in the British music press, there's a feeling that you were supposed to do it for a few years and then move on, or you were considered a bit sad if you were still writing about it when you got older -- whereas in the United States, I don't think there's quite the same stigma. Certainly someone like Julie Burchill would have been very pleased with the fact that she'd left the NME within a few years and went on to write about "proper" stuff. It's weird, even though I've just said that music was so important and celebrated, it also had a sort of lower status in another way, which I suppose is also part of its appeal -- not being quite recuperated by high culture. The South Bank Show would do a show maybe three times a year on Talking Heads, or someone like that who they considered worthy, but the bulk of rock music is also somehow renegade; it's almost like its own parallel system of culture. It wasn't so much that it was infiltrating and being accepted as high culture -- it had its own hierarchies within it. It's like a whole alternate universe of culture.
Another appeal of music, I suppose -- and this wasn't my motivation -- is that you could excel at being a rock critic fairly easily. I mean, there's a lot of great rock writing but as a field in which to make your name, it's probably easier to break into than film criticism or literary criticism.

PSF: What are the main differences between writing about music when you started in the mid-'80's and now, two decades on?
SR: The main thing is the amount of space you have has shrunk a lot. It hasn't affected me too much, although I do have to contend with shrinking spaces -- but I mean for young people just starting out. When I started out there was this great thing of the weekly music papers. There were three of them and each one had a lot of space. They had to fill up the gig section, so almost anyone who was half-decent could get a break, because the people who were established writers there, the staffers, wouldn't want to go off to some godforsaken gig in Harlesden. So that's where the younger writers got their break, by going off to these gigs and reviewing horrible bands. It seems like it's probably harder now to break into.

It's hard for me to say now because I'm in a different position from where I started, I'm at a different place in my career. Because I was on a music paper, I felt more part of a conversation than I do now and it was often an antagonistic conversation. I was fighting with people on my paper and also with people on other papers and it was on a week-by-week basis. So now, even though there are all the blogs and everything, I feel a bit more disconnected. There's a lot of interesting writing but it's scattered across this huge spread of stuff and it's quite hard to convene a conversation. It also seems like journalism's gotten a lot more consumer-oriented: it's more about whether something's worth buying. The music's seen as units of usefulness and pleasure rather than units of meaning or units of connection to a bigger formation of something. I get the sense that younger people have a more use-oriented view of music: it's something they're going to use and dispose of. But that may just be prejudice.

PSF: Your work has often shown a strong interest in critical theory. What does bringing theory to your writing enable you to do?
SR: Well, this book's probably the least theoretical one I've done. When I started writing it, partly I started getting a bit bored with theory and I hadn't really been keeping up with the latest developments, I must admit. I'm not even sure if there have been any. The sense I get is that there was this golden age of critical theory in the '80's and it was maybe still going on in the early '90's but it's kind of dipped down a bit. There are still a few people like Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek and these figures, but certainly the people I was into -- Julia Kristeva's got this trail of less and less alluring seeming books. It's the same with all of them really. A lot of the people that I was excited by originally have dropped off my radar a bit. But also, with this book, I was thinking that there never seemed to be a moment where using an idea from Deleuze and Guattari would particularly illuminate what I was writing about with post-punk. The only time theory really came up was when I was referring to the theory the musicians were influenced by, whether it was Gramsci or the Situationists: mostly the Marxist thinkers. With Green [Gartside] and Scritti Politti, there was the stuff to do with Derrida but I was only explaining how that influenced what he did, rather than using it as an analytical tool for the music. It just never came up. I'd say that in some ways I've almost got that out of my system.

I think a lot of the time in the past I used to use theory to bolster what I could have just said in my own words. It was almost like a rubber stamp, getting some authority to rubber stamp what I was saying. There are a few examples where I think certain ideas from Deleuze and Guattari were really useful in understanding rave culture and how it works, and there are certain other psychoanalytical theories that are useful with regard to understanding how rock works and what's going in rock (the economy of desire, repulsion and so forth). But in this book, it just didn't seem to be that useful. In some ways, the best theorists about music are people like Eno or critics like Joe Carducci, a great theorist of rock. People like that are still useful to me. When I was writing about 2-Tone, Dick Hebdige's work on subculture seemed useful to a degree but with Rip It Up I feel like I've got theory out of my system in a way. I'm not sure if I'll go back to it.
In my general writing, I suppose I've come back to Marxist concepts quite a bit. It doesn't really apply so much in Rip It Up but when I write about hip-hop or things like that, it seems that those are really useful concepts to understand: commodity fetishism, false consciousness and concepts like that, which have probably been problematized by other people but they seem very applicable to hip-hop.

PSF: Another reason you give for writing Rip It Up is that post-punk has been neglected by popular narratives of rock history. Why do you think that is?
SR: It's too diffuse, too rich in a way, too varied. It doesn't have the simple shock impact of punk and punk's imagery -- the Queen with a safety pin through her nose, Johnny Rotten's face -- or the obvious political impact it had, with "God Save the Queen" being banned, the Pistols on the Bill Grundy show and so on. There aren't so many examples of that with post-punk. It's less neglected now; it's had a lot of attention. In the bloggy world and the world of music criticism, webzines and among people who are hardcore rock critics and music fans and hipsters who go to Other Music (NYC record store), it's obvious that post-punk is a very known thing. But in a lot of the reviews, the book got in more general places, there was still this kind of "Oh, I'd never thought anyone would ever write about this and I didn't even really know this was a this; I didn't even know it was a thing."

PSF: You've mentioned elsewhere that even some of the artists you interviewed for the book weren't immediately clear as to what you meant by post-punk.
SR: Yes, which is weird because post-punk was a totally common term at the time. It was being used from 1978 onwards as a gesture of something. But I did a piece for eMusic on post-punk -- an intro explaining what it was, along with ten post-punk classics that you can download. I said, it's not really a genre, it's more a field of possibility. It's like an open space and all these different genres came out of it: industrial, goth, all these things. Punk had this relatively defined musical sound and an attitude and a philosophy. It had a history and certain events that happened and deaths and all that kind of stuff. And that's why there have been hundreds of books on punk and this is the first one on post-punk.

So, going into it, I did feel like it had been neglected and in some ways I had to rhetorically "do down" punk a bit in order to elevate post-punk. I'm a fan of punk up to a point. There are a lot of great punk records that I love but I did feel that I had to push it down a little and raise post-punk up a bit. The other thing with post-punk is that it's harder to define; I chose 1984 as the cut-off point but you could say it goes on and on and is still with us. I mean, people like Depeche Mode are still around and Nine Inch Nails could be seen as a post-punk band in some ways.

PSF: In Rip It Up, you mention how, when you got into post-punk, you never listened to older music. Thinking of the Pop Group, some of the No Wave bands, Throbbing Gristle and PiL's Metal Box, for example, this stuff was quite challenging for kids who hadn't heard more complex rock music that preceded it. How did you know how to listen to and enjoy it?
SR: There are certain groups from that time that I didn't listen to or that I never came across that I probably would have found a tough listen, like Throbbing Gristle maybe. I don't think I ever heard any of their stuff, somehow, because I don't think John Peel used to play it. It's weird, though, because the Scritti Politti stuff has got odd time signatures and the melodies are fragmented, but there's still this pretty, melodic sensibility in there that comes out and there's a plaintiveness to it. I didn't find too much difficulty with Scritti.

PiL was like a big stumbling block for a lot of people but also it was Johnny so you made that effort. For instance, I only recently realized that the side with "Theme" on is the first side of the record. I always thought the album was easier to listen to because I always played the second side. "Theme" is this incredible atonal dirge and it was a real statement for them to make it the first track of the album. I'm not sure where I got the idea that the sides were the other way around. I must have just happily started on the second side, which is much easier to get into. But it was Johnny Rotten so you made a bit of extra effort. But I think the Slits are pretty engaging fairly instantly and Gang of Four are quite stern in some ways but there's a real rhythm thing going there and it's catchy in its own kind of way. The Pop Group stuff was quite hard. It was quite free.

I wasn't that huge a fan of the Pop Group at that time. I think I only had that single, "In the Beginning There Was Rhythm," with the Slits on one side and the Pop Group on the other side with "Where There's a Will."
There was a challenging side to post-punk. Some of it could be willfully difficult, willfully strange and a bit too dour but I didn't have much of a problem with the best of it. I really enjoyed it. It wasn't an effort for me to listen to it. It wasn't a pose. This is the stuff I was really into. I would listen to Metal Box over and over. I took it into school once. We had a day when people brought in their favorite records to play for the music teacher. I tried to explain why I thought it was important. I was just recycling what I'd read in the music press -- "well it's very influenced by reggae and it's very influenced by funk" -- and then I asked the teacher whether he thought it was any good or not and he said he'd have to listen to it some more. He was a classical music teacher who believed that pop music had some things going for it but he would always bring up "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" by the Beatles and say, "That's not good. 'Do It in the Road'? I'm not into that nonsense!" Other songs, though, like "Yesterday" -- he probably thought that was a good song. Another boy brought in Bob Marley but he didn't have any explanation for why he thought it was good. It was just, "Here's another song; here's another one; and this is also good; and this is another Bob Marley song."

Of the bands that were my absolute core bands at that time, the only one I could see why people would find it difficult, because the singing is quite weird, is PiL. The Slits are exuberant, very catchy and tuneful. Talking Heads, I think, is just beautiful music. And so many brilliant musical, musicianly touches. Gang of Four, Slits, PiL, Talking Heads and then Joy Division, and maybe the Fall, were the core bands I was into, partly because I didn't have very much money. Another band I was listening to was the Stranglers, who don't really count as post-punk for some reason. I had them on tape. And Ian Dury. I was massively into Ian Dury. In some ways that was my preparation for the idea of funk: disco as being interesting and cool, because the Blockheads were really shit-hot musicians.

PSF: Life was remarkably grim and boring in late-'70's Britain. Do you think there's a sort of inverse relationship: there was an immense rush of post-punk creativity to fill that void, compared with today, when there's an overload of entertainment and information and music isn't perhaps quite as vital?
SR: I think there are definitely a lot of entertainment options now, whereas there were so few back then and you had to make your own entertainment and excitement all the time. You would just grab onto these things. It wasn't just me, I've spoken to lots of people, like the guys in Orange Juice, for instance. They were just obsessed with the music press. The music papers would arrive on a Wednesday, probably a Thursday in Scotland, a Wednesday where I lived, and they'd just read them from cover to cover. It was like a little kind of capsule of some world where all the excitement and all the ideas were. And then there was John Peel beaming this stuff out to you and every so often, there would be a gig. I would have to go to Aylesbury, which was the nearest place I could see a gig. There was very little on TV. There were only three channels, I think, and a little bit of pop music now and then. You were starved for the music and you were just starved generally for stimulus. So I would get it all from books and the music press and I listened the radio. Those were my lifelines.
It seems that there are a lot of entertainment options now and also you can listen to the music from the past very easily, so I feel you can get by today with yesterday's excitement. It seems like cheating somehow -- to be all buzzed up on post-punk or it could be the Incredible String Band, because all these folky bands are into that stuff, aren't they? You can be all buzzed up on this stuff that's from another time but it's cheating. Between me and my friends, we had tapes of the Beatles and the Stones and so on, but we didn't use it that way. It was also more recent then. But yes, it does seem that there's an advantage to cultural scarcity, in a sense. It makes people hungry, it makes them more inclined to make their own excitement.

PSF: Rip It Up emphasizes post-punk's resistant quality. You underscore how unique that period was in British culture and how Thatcherism was, ironically, beneficial for the arts in Britain. It's hard to imagine this happening again. Is oppositionality still possible, beyond simplistic protest singing?
SR: It's so hard to say. As much as I say there was all this oppositional energy in music then, it all ultimately failed. It didn't change anything and it didn't last, so maybe the folk memory of the failures is part of what disinclines people from doing it now. I think that you do get people who try and register dissent in music: Godspeed You! Black Emperor tried a bit and even Radio 4 tried. I saw Radio 4 support Gang of Four and they did this political stuff and it came across as kind of crass and ineffectual. But then the Gang of Four songs, with these lyrics that are really old, still seemed really incisive. It was as if they were describing current realities when they were singing "Natural's Not in It" -- "coercion of the senses" and so on. It just seemed to fit with modern mass media and modern advertising better somehow. But it doesn't seem that there's anyone around now who's developed a knack for it. People are too smart maybe, too knowing maybe.

There was a little thing in New York last year that was kind of touching called Downtown for Democracy. I think it's still going. They had a whole bunch of little events and there were all these avant-garde people who normally wouldn't bother much with politics and they were just so fed up and upset by what was going on in this country that they organized some events. James Chance played. Excepter played and it was really funny. They did what they'd normally do -- which is total abstract noise -- and this girl singer was dressed all in white and she was rolling on the floor, she had these white jeans and this white top that were getting all dirty, and she was screaming, totally abstract, no words. But one of the band's followers or hangers-on was just standing through the whole performance with a placard saying "THIS IS PROTEST MUSIC." And there was something really touching about it but it was just so, not ineffectual, but just marginalized somehow. It was more just to raise a bit of money and they were going to send people out to Ohio to get the vote out.
But as much as I find the post-punk period so inspiring, I do sometimes wonder if it was all just a delusion or a waste of energy. Maybe they should have just got involved in politics more. Some of them were, of course: Scritti Politti were members of the Communist Party and they were always putting on bands and benefits and stuff like that. All those bands did lots of benefits. I remember thinking at the time, if Gang of Four got on Top of the Pops and did one of their songs, it would really make a difference and people's minds would be changed. But it's hard to explain it, it's weird to try to recover that mindset when you actually thought that songs made a difference. As time went on, though, it was something that seemed less and less plausible. By the time of Billy Bragg, some people of my generation would still say, "Great! The Protest Singer -- shouting down power!" And then people like me would think, well, this is just like preaching to the converted and it's pointless.

For a long time, I was one of those people who thought, oh, there's no point in doing a protest song. There's always a dilemma. There's something like Robert Wyatt's "Shipbuilding" and that's one way of doing it. That's a very clever song but possibly too subtle. Or you do it the other way, the Tom Robinson way or the Billy Bragg way -- I'm probably being a bit mean to Billy Bragg. His songs are probably relatively subtle. He's not like a crass protest singer, his songs are quite smart. But it is that model of a Phil Ochs sort of thing.

I still don't know what I believe about protest songs, whether they work or not. There are certain songs that are so powerful that you just think, how could anyone hear them and not be changed by them? And it's not even the obvious ones: I often bring up UB40's "The Earth Dies Screaming." But maybe everyone who heard it and really listened to it was already anti-nuclear anyway. It's hard to say whether people are ever changed by music or whether they just look for what reflects where they're already at.
PSF: A striking aspect of Rip It Up is your knack for writing about music you're hyper-familiar with and yet evoking it in such fresh ways. Was it hard to go back to something you were so passionate about and deeply immersed in and to come at it anew?

SR: I didn't really have that problem. The main problem was that some of this music was so special to me that I felt I wasn't conveying what was so good about it. I felt that I had to come up with something that really captures what's great about it and, a lot of the time, I'm not sure that I did. I mean, I tried as best I could. Actually, it relates to this whole thing we were talking about before with Scritti Politti -- a lot of what's good about them has nothing to do with Green's theories, or politics, or anything like that. In a weird way, what's great about Green is what's great about Paul McCartney, or any great melodist. And that's something that's impossible to talk about, or at least very hard to talk about. In some ways I had the same problems that I always have writing about music. There are various ruses you can employ: you can do imagistic stuff, instead of just using adjectives you can try to personify the music, so the music does something or it's an action or it's a machine -- something that isn't just a string of adjectives. I think in this book, I did less of that than I've done in any other book, less purely musical description, because there was so much other stuff to deal with, so many other parameters. But I'm glad you said I managed to convey some of what it sounds like.

I'm not sure there was anything uniquely difficult about post-punk as regards the descriptive process. All music is equally hard to write about, really, if you think about it. In some ways, maybe in post-punk, with there being all these other things to write about, it let me off the hook a bit. There was just less space to write about the materiality of the music. Certain bands, though, I felt really intimidated to write about -- like Joy Division. They're an important band to me (although they're not as high up as they are for a lot of people) but the intimidation in that respect was "how do you write about a band that's been written about so brilliantly by other people and yet there's still this irreducible mystery about them?" There's this thing at the core of Joy Division that even the very best writers have never really tapped. So I felt a little nervous writing about them. And the Fall too, in a way. The Fall are kind of a mysterious band. So there wasn't too much of a problem of being over-familiar with the music. It was more that I was worrying that I wasn't doing justice to it.
PSF: When you went back and listened to the music you cover in the book, did any of it seem less compelling than you had remembered it? Was there anything that actually sounded better?

SR: Most of the stuff that I thought was really great originally still sounded really good. I don't think there was anything that I suddenly thought was rubbish. There were quite a lot of groups that I wasn't a particular fan of, but that I really grew to like a lot and respect. Depeche Mode was one band that I thought was really good. Throbbing Gristle was a band I had never really listened to at the time and I did grow to like them quite a bit. Cabaret Voltaire, I got really deeply into. I wanted to have everything by them. Every little solo offshoot. Richard H. Kirk's solo albums. Stephen Mallinder's solo album. All these demo tapes they had. Theirs is such an original sound, so strange. There really was nothing like it beforehand. But I don't think there was anything I suddenly thought, oh, this was rubbish -- or certainly nothing that I had respected before.
PSF: In Rip It Up you debunk some of the grand narratives of punk -- particularly the notion that what came before '76/'77 was crap. One way you do that is to situate post-punk as part of the continuum of '70's art-rock. Could you talk a little about post-punk's relationship to the art-rock tradition in Britain?

SR: There was this whole music culture before punk, especially in Britain, that had a bunch of things that parallel it with post-punk. One was that it had this peculiar Englishness but also, contradicting Englishness, or running in an interesting mesh with it, was the idea that it was steeped in black music. An obvious example would be Robert Wyatt. He was totally into jazz, Thelonious Monk, Roland Kirk, all these people, to the point where he says he doesn't really have anything to do with rock and he's never made a rock song in his life. So he's totally projecting towards black American music of a particular kind, but he's incredibly English: there's his English humor, his whimsy and his singing. I think that somewhere I call it "true English soul." It's the closest there's ever been to an English soul voice -- not like, say, Paul Young, not someone trying to sound black -- someone soulful, but English.

So I think there was that pre-punk culture of bands like Soft Machine. The whole Canterbury scene, I think, is a kind of precursor to some of post-punk, and it also has direct links to a group like This Heat. Charles Hayward from This Heat was part of Quiet Sun, which was Phil Manzanera's band, and I think he played in several other groups at that time.

So there's this sort of avant-rock sound before punk -- with unusual time signatures, a bit willfully difficult but with whimsy added as well. And the thing that links it all is John Peel, really. That was what he played before punk, and that's what he went back to after punk in a lot of ways: willfully eccentric groups like (And the) Native Hipsters, Family Fodder, all those English eccentrics. There's also the political thing. Green was really into the Canterbury stuff like Hatfield and the North but he was also into Henry Cow, who were very political and quite didactic. I guess that before punk there was all this kind of stuff that was coming out of rock but trying to push beyond rock and there was the same impulse in post-punk. Also important is the Eno end of things. Eno was such an important figure before punk and then, during punk, his star definitely declined a bit but then he creeps back in post-punk and becomes a central figure again. That seems interesting. But there are very important differences as well. Pre-punk, it was a lot more laid back and non-militant, a bit willfully lackadaisical and stoned, that kind of stuff.

Let me bring up the black music thing again. Post-punk is all about this play between Englishness, well maybe not Englishness but British bohemia, and the black musics that were the kind of source musics: reggae, a bit of jazz and funk, for instance. That seems like an interesting parallel between what was going on before punk and what was going on after punk. And then, in the middle, you have punk, which is very non-black, very anti-fusion, anti-dance.

PSF: Do you think it's possible to use class as one of the ways of characterizing the difference between punk and post-punk?
SR: I think punk rock itself was not so much of a working-class movement as everyone has made out. I always go on about this liminal class in Britain, this lower-middle class/upper-working class zone. That area is where a lot of music energy comes from. Maybe it's something about the precariousness of that zone that gives people their impetus or their drive to escape mediocrity. I don't know exactly what Siouxsie Sioux's class background was but she was from Chislehurst and she doesn't seem like she's from a proletarian background. You listen to her voice and she seems like she's from this petit bourgeois suburban background. Glen Matlock was middle class. A lot of people in the heart of punk were pretty middle class.

I guess post-punk gets more student-y, more squatland. I think that, by all accounts, punk seems to have been an alliance across the classes and then it restratified a bit. In the book I talk about punk rock being a fragile unity or a fragile coalition of working class and middle class, and then it starts to separate again. Obviously, though, it's not clear-cut. Someone like Mark Perry, I think, is from a working-class background, although he was a bank clerk; he wasn't a laborer or anything like that. He was a skilled clerical worker. But he went from being pure punk rock-ish to being really experimental. And before punk rock, he was into Zappa and really arty rock -- rock at its most pretentious. A paradigmatic example is John Lydon with his Third Ear Band and Peter Hammill records. Some people have said that prog rock had a big working-class following in Britain, supposedly in places like Liverpool. I think the idea that prog rock was just the gentrification of rock is mistaken.

PSF: A striking aspect of the post-punk era was the development of the music press as what you've called an "autonomous cultural zone" and the emergence of writers who were almost as important as the music itself. Of that generation, who captured your imagination?
SR: The first one of all was Julie Burchill in the NME because her writing was so vehement, quite vitriolic and aggressive and so confident and sweeping in its judgments. That excited me. One of the reasons it was an autonomous zone, in more structural terms, was that a lot of the writers, the precursors of the people I was into, were all recruited from the '60's underground press. It was literally like an autonomous cultural zone: they were imported into this more mainstream magazine culture where they could make a living, just through benign neglect by IPC and whoever owned Sounds then. They could still keep doing a bit of this underground press thing within this big company. And then the people came along who weren't out of the '60s underground press, but they read the writers who were, so that was their starting point.

After Burchill, it would have been Paul Morley and Ian Penman, the most striking stylists. I didn't appreciate them so much at the time because I wasn't familiar with the previous era of the NME but they were reacting against the underground press-era guys like Charles Shaar Murray and Nick Kent. Those guys were still very much of the '60's and the idea of "revolution"; they were still very much making sly little references to smoking pot in their articles, a nudge-nudge wink-wink sort of thing. It was still that kind of '60's groovy, sex & drugs & rock & roll mindset and the newer writers were reacting against that. There was a more puritanical worldview that was more exciting, or more modern: more cold and pure and appropriate to post-punk music. And then there was Dave McCullough in Sounds and Barney Hoskyns, who was a really good writer. He was rebelling against the Morley thing. He had his whole kind of rock-romantic approach. He was a bit like Nick Kent reincarnated, with post-structuralist theory among his arsenal of weapons.

It was all very intoxicating. On a week-by-week basis, you could follow it and they'd be fighting amongst each other, dissing each other and taking each other's ideas and running with them. So, in a way, it spoiled me for life because I thought that was what rock writing would be like and I always wanted to be in the heart of something like that. There have been a few times when I have felt like that. When I was on the Melody Maker, it was a bit like that and then also in the early days of the blogs -- people would be picking up others' ideas or having little wars. I always thought I would be in a context where there was that combative edge. That was what I liked and I always assumed that, in that sort of environment, the combativeness would be understood as a form of, not amiability, but respect. You fight with someone, you argue with someone, de facto you respect them, because you're bothered enough to get worked up by what they've said.

So that's what I'm always chasing: that feeling of being in the heart of a very argumentative culture and also the sense that argument is actually worth something, that something might be at stake -- it's not just people wanking off. That's what the earlier music writers left me with because it really did feel like they were discussing important stuff, that it was momentous and consequential. People still have lots of ideas and argue about things, but creeping around the back of everyone's minds is the idea that maybe it isn't going anywhere right now. It's like the elephant in the room.

PSF: Much has been made of the post-punk revival. Of the current bands that are influenced by post-punk, do you think any are doing anything more than clever pastiche?
SR: The extent to which they remind me of post-punk is the extent to which they aren't doing anything new, so it's difficult to say. There are bands who are doing new things but they only have a very tangential relationship to post-punk. Gang Gang Dance, for instance, occasionally do something that sounds a little bit No Wave-y but you couldn't really say they were a post-punk influenced band in the way that the Rapture or Franz Ferdinand are. In the book, I'm quite kind to the recent bands who are explicitly identified with post-punk and I say they probably see that period as unfinished business and as having sonic potential that you can do new things with. In truth, though, not many of them have done anything really that new.

I mean, I enjoy Franz Ferdinand's records quite a bit, but on the new album, the best track is the one that sounds the least like post-punk. I can't really think of anyone who's done something truly amazing. They often seem to be drawing on quite a narrow spectrum: that angular sound. Wire and Gang of Four seem to be the most pillaged sources. It seems that there are so many records from that time that newer bands could rip off but that don't get ripped off, like the Raincoats. The pillaging could be a bit more widespread and broader.
PSF: Post-punk was a good time for women in rock. Do you think any of the traction women gained in music during that period was lost or squandered afterwards?

SR: Well, not forever, but there did seem to be an immediate slip back with the New Pop stuff. Most of the women were suddenly singers or backing singers and you didn't get female drummers or bassists so much, maybe not until the grunge era. I think post-punk made it more possible for there to be female instrumentalists because in a lot of the mid-'80's alternative bands, there were women playing keyboards or, say, there was the woman drummer in the Go-Betweens, or there was Throwing Muses who had a female bassist and two female guitarists. It was like the advances of post-punk stayed within alternative music and then grunge, to an extent, with Hole, Veruca Salt, Liz Phair, although I don't know if you'd call Liz Phair a grunge performer really, but that whole alt-rock explosion. And then with riot grrrl it was the first time there was an explicit point being made about femaleness, with all-female bands. That was a big thing again, for the first time in a long while. But I don't think it went away completely.

PSF: In Rip It Up, you compare the '60's and the post-punk era -- in terms of both the broader social and political landscape and the intersections of a resistant political culture with an innovative musical landscape. Do you think the musical legacy of post-punk is as strong as the legacy of the innovations in music of the '60's?
SR: Well, obviously not in the maths sense but that was my rhetorical pitch, really. It was an authentic expression of frustration, as someone sick of the baby boomers retelling their stories over and over again -- as we see with the massive Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan. Or even something like Peter Guralnick's book on Sam Cooke. It's not even the first book on Sam Cooke and it's 750 pages long, which is longer than my book on a whole era of music and 40 bands. Maybe Sam Cooke was that important a figure, but can he be so much more important than hundreds and hundreds of bands and an eight-year span of music history? I don't know but it does seem like the '60's still has this hugely privileged status.

At the same time, though, I see post-punk in some ways as a continuation of the '60's -- that idea is there in the book a bit, but it's more and more on my mind. Punk and post-punk are part of the idea of youth as vanguard that was illustrated in the '60's, although obviously, there's an internecine war within that vanguard with the generation before. But it's all one thing: the whole idea of music as this incredibly serious thing, records as statements, records as something you tell the time by, zeitgeist stuff, seriousness, the lack of irony, the non-retro-ness. It's all one block of time and I always feel that the '60's start to end in the '80's.
More and more, I see that the '80's is when the post-punk vanguard either sells out or goes totally marginal and also when the original '60's people start selling out. You look at what Peter Gabriel did in the '80's -- he completely abandons all that proggy, dressing-up-in-costumes stuff and does this slick soul. Or Steve Winwood. He remakes himself as a modern soul singer. It's as if he's going back to being what he was originally: a Mod, imitating black people. So, it's as if the mid-'80's is the time when all that ends. Obviously, it's not as neat as that because you have alternative rock and you have grunge and you have the echoes of, or the return of, rebellion -- the return of punk as grunge, for instance. You have rave, which has an almost postmodern echo of the '60's -- the summer of love, and all that sort of thing.

So, these things never go away completely and there's always squatland and there are always people trying to live outside of society. There's still bohemia. Nothing is as clear-cut as that, but in the book I wanted to boost post-punk and claim too much for it and the way to do that was to set it against the '60's. Nevertheless, I think post-punk has more in common with the '60's than music today has with post-punk. Post-punk still had a tremendous seriousness, a tremendous conviction that music had power or that it could change the world. And it was pre-irony, it was pre-retro culture. But, of course, it's complicated. Pop time is very complicated. You can divide it up in all these different ways. It's not like irony and retro rule everything now. There are still people who are very passionate about music and who are totally unironic and probably believe it has all this power to do things, but they seem more and more marginalized.