I WAS pleased to see that Belfast punk outfit The Defects have reformed, at least temporarily, to impart onto a restless world their own particular brand of edgy old school punk. They played a prestigious gig at London venue, The Garage, last week.
The Defects were at the hard core of the now legendary Seventies Belfast punk scene, but maintained a lower local profile than contemporaries such as Rudi and the Outcasts, in part because their sound had just a few too many hard edges for many, and certainly most radio DJs, and in part because they quickly swapped East Belfast for West London as their primary stomping ground, where they slipped into a clique of national league punksters including the UK Subs and The Anti-Nowhere League.
Despite spitting fire and fury, The Defects were just great fun, and tremendously supportive of bands of whatever genre who made the trip over the Irish sea, including a little new wave pop outfit that I was involved with. I had several good nights in the after-hours muso hangouts of Soho with The Defects.
The Defects were among the last of the first wave of punk bands who were actually fun.
Nowadays punk is often written off as something dour, unpleasant and threatening, but in the early days the complete reverse was true. Punk was a reaction to the grey hopelessness of the Labour government of the late Seventies, it was about exuberance and getting up and doing something, sometimes angry and provocative, but also often deliberately silly.
While there was a good dose of issues politics about, particularly anti-racism, punk as movement was generally apolitical. The spirit of independence and creativity that ran through punk was, at its beginning at least, more in tune with the message of Margaret Thatcher than with the smothering straitjacket of old labour and the union dinosaurs who thought that they could control every aspect of people’s lives.
That the style and fashion of punk, once considered outrageous and fit only for derision and suppression, is now the mainstream is a testament of the outpouring of creativity that came with the movement. Naturally punk quickly turned on Thatcherism, because it was at its core anti-establishment, but, more insidiously the punk movement was infected by a partially unpleasant strain radical leftism.
Multi-coloured hairdos and good-natured three chord thrashes were replaced by crusty dreadlocks, dogs on strings and obscure philosophies of Anarcho-syndicalism, a narrow and intolerant left wing ethos that is absolutely no fun. But in truth punk had probably run its course by then.
More recently, new axe-wielding warriors have come up to keep the punk flag flying high, most notably Californian outfit Green Day, who manage to be both ridiculous and radical at the same time. They write cracking tunes too and can fill out stadiums at the drop of a hat.
However, in less enlightened corners of the world, grassroots punk still has the power to concern repressive regimes, and so my support goes wholeheartedly to kids in Indonesia who have been subjected to the most alarming sort of police brutality.
The Indonesian police recently stormed into a concert, chucked the kids into trucks and sent them off to detention for “re-education”, which included involuntary haircuts and the enforced removal of earrings and piercings, all in the name of enforcing Islamic values.
Getting your Mohican shaved off at baton point is unpleasant enough, but spare a thought for other Indonesian non-conformists; lovers stoned to death for adultery and gay men jailed or lashed in public, whose plight too often goes unreported.
The incident once again exposes the double standards of the left-wing human rights industry which howls to the moon at the indiscretions, real and imagined, of democratic Christian states, but remains silent as regards to the horrors of radical totalitarian Islam.