Concert Review : From Rush to the Rezillos

I was at two concerts this week. Rush played at the SECC on Wednesday. Although open to considerable debate, I suppose you would generally classify them at the prog end of the scale. On Friday, I went to see The Rezillos at the ABC2. Definitely not at the prog end of the scale, and probably most easily classified as punk (although equally open to debate).

I had a great time at both gigs but I know of many people who struggle with the idea that I can accomodate both within the realms of my listening. Frankly, I struggle with the idea that they can't!

Even though the so-called punk wars took place thirty years ago history seems to have been written in a way that suggests that punk slayed the dinosaurs of rock. A look at the facts easily shows this to be utter bollocks.

Punk did provide a kick up the pants to the music scene and (as with just about every trend) left us with a batch of great bands that we remember with fondness and still listen to and even more that we've probably forgotten sufficiently to be embarrassed about ever giving them the time of day in the first place.

In any event, it always struck me that punk was more about attitude than either the music or the fashions of the day. It's greatest legacy was the proliferation of independent labels, and the acceptance that bands could do it all by themselves. This continues to this day, aided by the technological advances which mean that everyone's bedroom can be a recording studio and where the Internet allows you to get that music out to an audience at the proverbial touch of a button.

I was in my late teens when punk hit in the seventies and was just old enough not to be overly concerned with purging my musical past to make way for the new bands. I was happy to continue to listen to the Pink Floyd whilst loving the Sex Pistols classic run of singles. Happy to enjoy The Clash without feeling the need to worry about Elvis, Beatles and The Rolling Stones in 1977. And so it continues to this day with my concert double-bill from this week.

The irony, of course, is that the artists who rose to the surface via punk that survived and prospered were ones that, by and large, had a very fine grasp of their musical heritage and ultimately had no real belief that punk was any kind of Year Zero whatever their rhetoric might have been. That's not a problem to me as we are all no more than the sum of our contradictions anyway, although too often we damn our heroes because of theirs.