The starting point for this was a lyric fragment from a song called "Alice Available" by The Scones, which opens: "Too many days of purple haze crash through my head / too many nights spent wide awake alone in bed". Having scribbled down a couple of lines, I realised construction by syllable was somewhat alien to my thought processes, such as they are. Hopping onto the net, I found a useful paper on "Syllable Structure in English" at http://cla.calpoly.edu/~jrubba/phon/syllables.html, which was most illuminating. Not having any graph paper to hand, I simply printed off lots of copies of a 10 x 14 table into which to spooge* my creativity. The reference to Four Wedding And A Funeral's "bugger!" church scene appeared at the last moment when I had two sections and my couplet already planned out. I probably think in song/film/book quotes far too much.
* Tech slang, which roughly translates as the "quart into pint pot" metaphor or equivalent stuffing.
I'd already written a few lines of this song in my first year of university. Well, I'd added to something I'd written at college. However, it never actually went anywhere, possibly because our college band was typically lousy and I can't write music. Then entitled "Sid's Dead", it was a vague rant against the narcissistic self-obsession of a Limpkin Bizkorn* hoody-clad MTV generation which fails to realise the extent of its spoon-fed confinement. (Obviously, my critique has since become a tad more specific and coherent in its elucidation!)
* Amalgamation of Linkin Park, Limp Bizkit and Korn - hybrid music drawing from a large range of other musical styles, yet still managing to sound remarkably homogenised. On the more explicitly 'punk' side of things, represented by the likes of Blink 182, OPM and the Bloodhound Gang, we have a culture tending to glorify violence or idiocy without consequence and underlying misogyny, in which scarred wrists are public testament to depth of character. Put simply, the 1970s were a decade of huge political and social upheaval, high UK unemployment and endemic despair. In my opinion, things have improved just a little in the intervening twenty years or so. This is not a particularly politically correct stance, to question the validity of another's anguish. However, punk is many ways just as elitist and exclusory as the systems it seeks to subvert, and its sneer is something I was strongly aiming to communicate-but, I sought to communicate the argument that past followers generally had more excuse for the manner of their rejection of the lives mapped out for them than a 30yr-old whining expletives (Fred Durst). More to the point, I knew a fair few people who were genuinely torn to shreds by both mainstream and "alternative" culture for daring to be individuals. This was not due to the nihilistic, pyrrhic tendency of alternative culture but because a majority of its agents coalesced into an exclusory mainstream of their own. Having set up castle, they pulled up the drawbridge and sent out invitation cards printed with rules for admission.
Thus, this is in some ways a rhyming couplet apology for the excess of the 70's, but I prefer to think of it as an understanding. Looking back on the facts of two dysfunctional youths, a stabbing and a suicide, and their exploitation of and by the media and the press, I compare that to the current state of music and myself feel part of their confusion and captivity. Because whilst today, the artist, the company and the associate press are frequently in collusion and the limits of pushing the envelope established, the Pistols (and so many of their fans) were expendable. They were created with the express intention of capturing for posterity the spectacle as they crashed and burned.
"Your knob would turn to rot" is a bit of good ol' juvenile vulgarity to get everyone's attention and mimic in form a challenge, which, this being post-1990, fails to shock. Also a suggestion that attempts to bring down systems from the inside historically have often led to mere subservient complicity. "Fuck the system", "punk's dead" are hyper-dense counterpoised sound bites which both serve as a point of reference for anyone unfamiliar with cultural phenomenon of the past 30yrs, and interestingly tend to apathetically cancel each other out. Intended to ask: Is there hope? "Anarchy has gone to pot" is a slight hippy/drug reference. Most punks generally seem to favour stimulants over relaxants, even if only adrenalin. Those who don't tend to call their music "ska" (sarcasm). "No cause to celebrate" hopefully implies 'cause' less as synonymous with 'reason' and more literally, in that what is now labelled as 'punk' has become depoliticised. In fact, the achievement of popular success in itself challenges the punk anti-ethic, which is one of its interesting little twists.
"Submission", "no future", "never mind the bollocks", "pretty vacant" and "silly thing" are Pistols lyric or album references. "A bloody mess below the sink" = Nancy, unfortunately.
"Too weird to live, and [yet] too rare to die" is my selection of literary epitaph for Sid and everything projected onto him. The full Hunter S. Thompson snippet from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas is: "There he goes, one of God's own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die." This struck me as ideally representative of the repellent yet strangely sympathetic existence of Sid Vicious and his real-life persona (his own favoured nickname, incidentally, was "Sly".) Because, despite the fact that in reality, he was every bit the psychopath, he was also a lonely and distant individual caught up in events he neither understood nor was able to cope with. He never asked or fought to be a spokesman for a generation, only for an escape.
The poem at the foot of the page was discovered amongst Sly's belongings after his overdose. I've intentionally thrown in a lot of such media and more obscure references in the faint hope that anyone who actually recognises what I'm re-interpreting will have a stronger grasp of what I'm trying to communicate, and anyone who senses only fragments might be compelled to a) recognise my efforts as somehow validated and worthy of notice on basis of their association, and b) might even pluck up some enthusiasm for social history and find out about some of the others.
We could change things, dammit, if we weren't so apathetic and resigned to failure!