Killing Bono by Neil McCormick Page B

listening to the aural equivalent of an avalanche. “ Don’t know what I want but I know how to geddit …” The lyrics invoked an almost incandescent, fearfully righteous anger at the state of the world. “ I wanna destroy the PASS-A-BOY …” Something physical seemed to shift inside me. This, I knew instantly, was my music, before I even knew what kind of music it actually was. In his characteristically understated fashion, Peel announced that we had just been listening to the debut single from the Sex Pistols, a group at the vanguard of the punk-rock scene. And so it was that, at fifteen years old, I discovered that I was a punk. Now all I had to do was find out what a punk actually was.
    If you read the rock-history books, they will tell you that punk rock was either: a) a sleazy New York pop-art scene of the mid-seventies; or b) an aggressive, sociopolitical London youth movement circa 1976. Whatever, punk’s originators and instigators, jealously guarding their role at the core of the phenomenon, tend to argue that it was all over bar the shouting, spitting and pogoing by 1977. Well, it might have been over for a tiny King’s Road elite. But for those of us out in the sticks, far removed from the pulse of the metropolitan underground, it was just getting started.
    I initially approached with great caution. The (very) few punks occasionally featured in slightly bemused TV reports or hysterical tabloid newspapers looked a dissolute bunch: spotty oiks with the dress sense of psychotic hobos. The whole punk aesthetic was designed to provoke, annoy and upset and those elements of society inclined to knee-jerk reactions were duly twitching away like demented Cossacks. My own principal concern at that early stage was from the perspective of a hormonally active teenage boy: would girls go out with me dressed like that? Not that they were exactly queuing up to run their fingers through my curly locks or make admiring comments about the cut of my flares. But, in 1977, the only people who did not seem to find punks stomach-churningly disgusting were other punks. And, frankly, there weren’t a lot of them about in Dublin. A few of the older blues bands (notably the Boomtown Rats) swapped their denim for leather, shaved off their mustaches and played their songs a bit faster, but that was about it. Punk simply had no real presence in Ireland. It was not played on radio or television. It could not be heard in the discos. The groups were not welcome in the show-band halls. And even if they had been I would have been too young to gain entry. Apart from tuning in to John Peel’s show, the only place I could actually hear punk rock was in Advance Records, a dingy, independent basement record shop in the city center, where I would sometimes hang about for a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, staring at the posters and listening to the latest releases on the in-store speakers until the owner told me to buy something or fuck off.
    My first purchase was the Ramones’ debut album. With their power chords and floppy fringes, the Ramones to me were irresistible, like a buzz-saw Beatles. Afraid my parents would disapprove, I hid the sleeve under my bed and slotted the precious vinyl into the back of a Don McLean album my granny had given me.
    Despite punk’s cultural invisibility in Ireland, there was one invaluable source of information: the British weekly the New Musical Express . You could not buy this periodical in the local newsagents, so I had to make a bus trip into the city center to pick it up. It was worth the journey. The NME (and sometimes, if that was sold out, its rivals Sounds and Melody Maker ) was my gateway to a parallel universe populated by bands with strange names and stranger haircuts. I read it from cover to cover, running my fingers over pictures of snarling young men in leather jackets splattered with painted slogans and girls in torn fishnets and badly applied makeup,