Sometimes you can still hear the ringing

I've been reading my The Clash Biography the past few days (the original price sticker said 45 quid, but I bought it for twenty bucks at a booksale) and this pretty much sums up their music. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones wrote some pretty controversial punk music in the 1970s, along with the the Ramones, the Smiths and the Buzzcocks. How I would love to alive half a decade ago and go for non-commercialized gigs which didn't blow a hole in your pocket. Where you could still smell the sweat.

The era of the Runaways, Velvet Underground and Patti Smith!

Anyway, this whole spiel on 1960s/70s music comes from what happened earlier today, when I was cabbing home from a 'study' sleepover with tag team Dayna and Clare. I was obviously half-dead from 'studying' all night and looking like death in my crumpled Rolling Stones magazine shirt (which sported a mean shot of the Eagles), and thinking about how my mouth tasted like a skunk had crawled innit and died when the raw power of Iggy Pop started to blast through my cabbie's stereo.

Pretty epic.

So anyway he was pretty impressed with my shirt and I checked out his dashboard decals. There were magazine cut-outs and old album covers all over the place. And we had a rather heated debate about whether the Clash or the Sex Pistols were better (as a devoted Clash fan, I gave it my all, but the Pistols have Sid Vicious. No fight there. After all, they were the ones who started the whole scene...) and other stuff which lasted the time it takes to get from Thompson to Bedok.

Turns out I was short of two bucks, which he waived off. And even gave me a Rolling Stones b-side!

I'm just really glad that even in Singapore, there are still people who are big fans of the 60s punk scene and are willing to fork out moolah to get original records instead of bootlegs. It really made my day :)

So I declare this week UK PUNK MUSIC week. Will stop myself from raving on about bands that have widely faded in the memory of people today and fall asleep to the riffs on Honky Tonk Women (thank you cabbie!)


I end abruptly here.


Now you can see why I don't study much at all