On hearing that it was 50 years since the Sex Pistols’ first concert, my immediate reaction was to demand a recount. That couldn’t possibly be true, could it? But sure enough, newspaper archives confirm that the band gave their debut live performance, as a 15-minute support act before an audience of about 20, on November 6th, 1975.
Oh well. I can take some consolation from being recently enough out of a pram at the time that the event, and the Sex Pistols in general, did not quite impinge on my consciousness yet then. Nor did such other major musical milestones of that Autumn as the release of Pink Floyd’s album Wish You Were Here.
[ The mysterious Limerick man on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the MoonOpens in new window ]
But within a year or two, I would be a pretentiously budding Prog Rock fan, listening to Shine On You Crazy Diamond as if it was divine revelation. And soon after that, I would become an apprentice angry young man, thrilling to the vocals of Johnny Rotten as he snarled out God Save the Queen (“She ain’t no human being!”) and Pretty Vacant.
I wish I could still feel as excited by new music today as I did one Thursday in November 1978, when the artist formerly known as Rotten, by then restored to the Irish surname of Lydon, made his post-Pistols premiere on Top of the Pops.
The ill-fated Sid Vicious (aka Simon John Ritchie, who was said to have been a gentle soul in real life but borrowed his stage name from Lydon’s bad-tempered hamster) had already launched a solo career with a cover of My Way: a deserved send-up of an insufferably smug song.
But even if he hadn’t come to a bad end soon afterwards, Sid was not designed for musical longevity. He had been included in the Sex Pistols mainly for his comic-scary appearance. As a bass player, he was somewhat short of proficient. It is said that, in a band not noted for sensitivity to fans, his amp was often left unplugged during concerts to spare the audience.
The more thoughtful Lydon, meanwhile, responded to the madness of the previous years with a new “anti-rock” band under the cynical name Public Image (inspired by a Muriel Spark novel, apparently), later to acquire the suffix “Ltd”.
And hearing their eponymous debut single on Top of the Pops that memorable night was probably all the more thrilling because I was just in from Mass at the time. No, I didn’t go daily – it was All Souls Day. From such juxtapositions were Irish teenage consciousnesses formed back then.
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I was still reeling from the revelation of the Sex Pistols’ half century when an email arrived from John Fleming, a subeditor formerly of this parish, with the reassuring subtext that old punks never die.
An award-winning radio dramatist in his spare time, who has had half a dozen plays broadcast by RTÉ and BBC, John is also a musician, now performing alongside Niall Toner jnr in a band called The Prongs.
Technically, they identify as “post-punk lit rockers”, having spent formative years in 1980s London. But in imagination at least, their new single, Hey! Dandy, goes even farther back than the Sex Pistols, to a pre-EEC Ireland and the early days of Dublin’s Dandelion Market.
The “lit[erary]” part of their self-description is fully justified. In a distinction few rock bands can claim, the band’s name was first mentioned unwittingly in An Irishman’s Diary by Fleming in 2019 (he was writing mainly about libraries).
The Prongs then developed into characters in his novel The Now Now Express. But separately, in the shape of Fleming and Toner and the spirit of Flann O’Brien, the protagonists were stepping out of the pages, to record actual music and perform concerts.
Hey! Dandy follows the trendsetting pair as they leave Dublin in the early 1970s, have various misadventures on the Continent in the name of art, and return armed with winkle-pickers and Kraut officer coats to revolutionise Ireland, or at least open a stall in the Dandelion.
Their mission statement is expressed in the opening verse: “Hey! Dandy, what you got in that sack?/Books by Camus and Jack Kerouac/No 50s migrants, no building site Mick/Let us present pre-EEC Celtic beatnik.”
The song has already been championed by BBC’s coolest station, Radio 6, which seems to be in love with all things Irish these days. A reviewer for the music and culture website Louder Than War, meanwhile, already an admirer, hailed it as The Prongs’ “latest idiosyncratic masterpiece”.
Fleming and Toner are a ferment of ideas, clearly. I’m told that they are also nearing completion of a “Celtique-noir gangster feature film called The Unlikely Assassination of a Saint” [St Patrick to be exact], which will feature former Horslips drummer Eamon Carr and many veterans of Irish punk rock.
In the meantime, to mark the release of the new song, The Prongs will play a show in Dublin’s Grand Social this Saturday (November 15th), with special guests from Cork, Big Boy Foolish.
