Various Artists — Action Time Vision: A Story of UK Underground Punk 1976-1979
This massive, 111-track collection of late 1970s punk songs from the U.K. skips the big names — no Clash, Pistols, Buzzcocks or X-Ray Specs here — while trawling through the second tier (the Damned, Stiff Little Fingers, Sham69, Adam and the Ants) and below to great effect. A tight three-year frame of reference keeps these four discs eminently listenable as mixes, and a temporal sequencing gives you a sense for the evolution of brash two-chord punk into art punk, new wave and post-punk. It’s a lot of music, though, best suited for dipping in and out of, rather than plowing through all four discs at once.
The set is named after Alternative TV’s 1978 anthem, with its vamping guitar racket and oddly pop, harmonized chorus. Appearing midway through (opening cut, disc three), it’s a good bit slicker than most of the box set’s material. Stiff Little Fingers’ “Suspect Devices,” (second disc, 16th cut) is more in line with the general tone of things, guitars subsumed in a roar of distortion, drums scrambling to keep up, vocals hoarse with rage and aggression. There is, incidentally, quite a large contingent of punk bands from Belfast, not just SLF, but Victim (with a carousing, whoa-oh-oh chorusing “Why are Fire Engines Red?”), Outcast represented by a blustery, but nicely sensitive “Just Another Teenage Rebel,” hearts-on-sleeves Protex with a yelping, crooning, near rockabilly “Don’t Ring Me Up” and a very Clash-like Rudi with “Big Time”.
Besides the title cut, the best known track is likely The Damned’s “New Rose” which kicks disc one off (they are in order by date, and it’s the first-ever punk single), but all four discs have at least one iconic late 1970s cut. There’s a demo of the Boys’ “New Leader” and that first Stiff Little Fingers single on disc two, the Alternative TV cut and Sham69’s “I Don’t Wanna” on disc three and the Cockney Rejects “Flares ‘N Slippers” on disc four. Yet, the real pleasure comes in the lesser known and not-yet-arrived artists that fill in between. My favorite cut on disc one is “Love and a Molotov Cocktail” by the Flys, a band that opened for the Buzzcocks, recorded briefly for EMI but otherwise seems to have left hardly a ripple.”Time Tunnels” by the English Subtitles is another good one, a nervy, jittery, burst of art-addled anxiety that hints at the post-punk movement just gathering steam in the off-wings. And speaking of post-punk, the set also includes early appearances by bands that would define that genre – the Fall and Joy Division to name two.
You can also catch a number of artists on their way to becoming something else. Certainly Adam and the Ants sound a good deal more ragged and razory than they did during their MTV heyday, but also here’s Patrik Fitzgerald working out the contours of something like anti-folk on “Safety-Pin in My Heart,” Billy Bragg fronting a rip-snorting Riff Raff in “Cosmonaut” and future Cure bassist Simon Gallup slashing away at Lockjaw’s “Radio Call Sign.”
Action Time Vision doesn’t dig as far as the Messthetics series into the various regional sub-scenes of U.K. punk but it does give a pretty broad overview. It is, regrettably, almost entirely male, which seems off in an era when Delta Five, the Slits, X Ray Spex and others were thriving. But as with the Still in a Dream set documenting shoegaze, it’s nicely packaged with terrific detail on all the band, contemporary photos and album art and an essay by Kris Needs, the editor of Zigzag Magazine and an early chronicler (and proponent) of British punk. Zigzag’s Small Labels Catalogue, an annual compendium of UK DIY output, gave early exposure to dozens of the bands included in this set; many are represented by their first-ever single. The last edition of Small Labels Catalogue came out in 1981, by which time, money had changed everything.
Says Needs of that final edition, “The introduction commented how the independent scene was changing ‘both for better and for worse… some labels born out of the freedom of the mid-70s now act as pale imitators of the corporate monsters they once despised.’ This vibrant era was essentially coming to a close as the 80s kicked in but here, in all their ragged glory, are four discs bulging with the fruits of an era when the power was in the hands of the people not rich enough to buy it.”
This is wonderful stuff, both as pure entertainment and a document of a vanished era.
