Punk Desert Island Discs

I was asked to come up with my Punk Desert Island Discs for the Ripped and Torn [punk fanzine 1976-1979] website.

After going through boxes of old punk singles trying to choose my favourites I tried a different approach- choosing my favourite pre-punk songs, counting down to punk as Year Zero.

You can see my (not-so punk) Desert Island Discs here. 

I had to miss out record minus1which would have been a track by Ozrics Tentacles.


-1. Ozric Tentacles Mescalito from Tantric Obstacles and Erpsongs released in 1984/5.
In late summer/ early autumn 1985 I was living in a field  at Greenlands farm just outside Glastonbury. I had gone there to take part in a meeting to discuss the future of Stonehenge Free Festival. Also on the farm were survivors of the eviction of Molesworth Peace Camp in February 1985 and the Battle of the Beanfield in June 1985. Most of their trucks and buses still bore the scars of the Beanfield. I don’t recall there being many punks there, most of the ‘new-age travellers’ were a few years older and had missed out on punk as they travelled around the free-festival circuit from 1976 onwards. A few were sixties veterans. It was quite an intense experience, such that these days all it takes is a whiff of wood smoke from a camp fire to set off  an altered state of consciousness. One day Ozrics Tentacles turned up and played. Their music looked back to the psychedelic experimentations of the late sixties and early seventies, but a few years later merged smoothly into the more trancey techno styles of acid house dance music. I didn’t hear their music again until recently when I downloaded a few of their albums which I listen to for hours at a time while writing/thinking.



Also Riders on the Storm by The Doors (to represent  listening to pirate radio stations in the sixties/ early seventies and I Can See for Miles by the Who to represent  sixties pop/rock.