New Wave NLP

"New Wave NLP", Rapport 38, p40 (1997)

by MarkMcKergow

"Dancing in the Street - a Rock and Roll History" says:

"By the 1970s rock music had started to take itself very seriously indeed. In Britain the predominant trend was for "progressive rock", performed in vast stadiums and released as "concept albums". If a song wasn't at least twenty minutes long, it wasn't worth playing. In America, many successful musicians of the Sixties had by now settled into comfortable Beverley Hills lifestyles, playing music for the all powerful FM radio. Typical of such bands were the Eagles, who came to epitomise a radio-friendly Californian rock sound. At its most powerful, rock and roll had always appeared to offer a way of life, yet the lavish trappings of mid-Seventies rock culture suggested it was in danger of becoming just another leisure industry. The music needed a new injection of energy....and it got it."

Lenny Kaye (the Patti Smith band): "Rock and roll had gotten very compicated. Progressive rock - a sense that rock was an Adult Medium, a sense that complexity and song cycles and instrumental prowess and musicianship were the driving force. The fact that you COULD play three chords and get up on stage within a week was being lost."

David Byrne (Talking Heads): "Punk wasn't a musical style - or at least it shouldn't have been, for many people it turned into a particular musical style - it was more of an anyone-can-do-it attitude. If you could only play two notes on the guitar, you could figure out a way to make a song out of that. That's what it was about."

Malcom MacLaren (manager, the Sex Pistols): When I came back to London armed with that experience, I created a shop that I entitled Sex, and at the same time as selling all these more obvious leather and rubber artefacts, I had to express my own desire and designs and feelings.... and the best way I thought I could start was to write on the simplest T-shirt two lists - one list that I thought were dreadful and horrible and one that I thought were cool and perhaps generated a new idea."

John Lydon (formerly Johnny Rotten): "Up until then anarchy was mind-games for the middle classes. We just chucked it right in there - into the wonderful world of pop."

I was walking down the street the other day when I was passed by a youth wearing a battered T-shirt. And on it was inscribed the following slogan:

Are you a boring old fart or a new waver?

Mark McKergow is interested in doing more with less, philosophically and practically. He is an experienced consultant and trainer, and a founder member of the Bristol Solutions Group.