I wanted to move to Seattle, sell my ass, and be a punk rocker, but I was too afraid.
The Stiff Little Fingers were a band I got turned on to well after their own hey day. 1978, when Suspect Device came out as an explosive little 7 inch rocker, I was turning 7 years old, fairly blind to the “The Troubles”, though four years later the hunger strikers in Long Kesh would crack into my own little Catholic School boy consciousness.
“Music had just become so bloated. It was all these leftover sixties guys playing stadiums, you know, being treated like they were very important people, and acting like they were very important people. It wasn’t Rock & Roll, it was like some kind of stage act. It was all about the lights and the poses.
—
Richard Hell Please Kill Me, p. 119
Let us put our trust in the eternal spirit which destroys and annihilates only because it is the unsearchable and eternally creative source of all life. The passion for destruction is also a creative passion!
— Michael Bakunin: Reaction in Germany (1842)