The Mekano Set

You've probably heard all this before. If you read it, it may make you angry. So you may not wish to read it.

Once upon a time, a long time ago, a young boy living in a slummy, rat infested part of London caught meningitis. He survived, but was left with a twisted spine, epilepsy and dodgy eyes amongst other things.

On my cracked and fuzzy computer screen, the boy with a twisted spine, funny eyes and misshapen face is throwing himself around amongst prettier boys playing clanky rock music.

The boy's name is John. The band look anachronistic, pedantic and posey, and sound rather chaotic, but the boy called John looks and sounds like an escaped mental patient. He looks like he means it. He is strangely beautiful in his Iggy Pop Meets Doctor Who ugliness, with his inability to stand up straight, his randomly, badly cut hair, pasty complexion, scrawny limbs and rubbish attire, perhaps because he seems to be celebrating all of his quirks rather than attempting to hide them.

His performance of this song inspired a generation of other boys and girls to have a go - some meant it, a few of them simply tried to copy what John was doing. Some people even copied the way his sick little body made him spit a lot. The song is called "Anarchy in the UK". The band is called The Sex Pistols.

John wasn't exactly doing much that was original, certainly not musically, but there is something 'real' about his performance, at least in this early footage. Perhaps inadvertantly he introduced a large number of British people to things they otherwise might not have discovered, or considered: Garage Rock, Reggae, Krautrock, Disco, wearing something other than flares and hooded tops.

He isn't a grown-up, over-educated, upper class pretty boy Thom York 'doing' John Lydon twenty years later, he really is a mishapen, angry little boy who, rather than earn millions of pounds, dollars and hearts for 'portraying tragedy, anger and confusion', earned himself stabbings, arrests, death threats and beatings for simply commenting on how exciting it can be to try something new, how useless the royal family are, how corrupt politicians are, how mental life seems, how injust, how unfair it is that the 'beautiful / rich people get all the breaks' , ideas that we now take largely as common sense.

To this day that boy is still perceived as some kind of ugly, angry, egotistical southern art student. Ugly, yes. Angry, yes. But he wasn't an art student, he grew up in the rat-infested, impoverished slum that was 1950's Finsbury Park, and you have to put the boy in context to understand that to look and behave in that way in Britain during the mid 1970's was pretty much a death wish. Virtually everybody in Britain from 6 to 66 wore flares. Everybody had bad mod haircuts. Everybody thought the Beatles were great and The Queen was lovely.

John earned the nickname Rotten, because his teeth were rotting in his head, because he dressed in rags, and lived in a squat. Not by choice, not to make a statement, just because that was the hand he'd been dealt.

John wasn't a punk, because there was no such thing when John was growing up. He lived for Reggae, Hawkwind and Kate Bush, folk music, Iggy Pop, Can and The Kinks - regardless of whether they were considered cool or not.

Now of course, everyone can have slightly unconventional hair, and in many ways it's considered quite 'cool' to be working class. Certainly, being a technically proficient musician is seen as a bit naff these days.

On monday I spent about £15 I didn't really have on a new DVD compiling some audio visual highlights from the odd career of that odd young John. He's a grown up now. He's learned to walk a little bit straighter, but his hair, and his stare, still manage to look somehow wonderfully 'wrong'. Nowadays no one takes him seriously, which is ironic considering he's always been a joyous, funny character at heart. He's grown up to resemble a scruffy, surrealist Kenneth Williams: very British, very entertaining, anachronistic in the sort camp, music-hall way he probably always aspired to.

I'm fairly sure I'll be repeating a similar process soon with the new releases by a certain woman called Kate.

The Mekano Set