Customer Reviews

Cranked Up Really High - Genre Theory & Punk Rock

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Home champions the fast-and-loud end of the punk-rock spectrum, covering groups from the Early Days that don't usually make it into the more recent "History-of-Punk" tomes. Intelligent without being over-intellectualized (Greil Marcus this guy ain't), opinionated but not self-consciously so, not afraid to cover topics such as Oi! & Skrewdriver (and even less afraid to point out the absurdity of same when need be; the chapter on the latter is a hoot), entertaining, and quite readable. Half the price of the latest Punk-bandwagon-jumping book and at least twice as good.

This book is the perfect cure for the people who think punk started with green day, this book will also wipe the smiles off the faces of the hippie/punk historical revisionists who try to make punk out to have been some kind of leftist political movement. In this book stewart covers all the street level english bands that really made up the scene back in the day. He also goes into the REAL politics and psychology that dominated the minds of the early punks. Can you say OI?

Stewart Home is a card-carrying member of the underground death-art corprophiliac cult called the Lettrists, formed out of fans of the proto-punk French band The Situationists. Home is a shady and frightening character who has way too much fun doing his thing, but this book tells a good story that connects Queercore to Ian Stewart's Skrewdriver. Is he serious? That's not the point. The point is to buy his book so he can age gracefully with those royalty checks coming in the mail.

This book claims that Ian Stuart was gay. No proof, no evidence, just the author`s personal opinion. The author obviously didn`t know Ian and didn`t look into Ian`s history. Ian Stuart is on record of being engaged to his long time girlfriend Dianne Calledine. Also, Ian`s lifetime friend John (Grinny) Grinton, who was married with children, remembers Ian having many women and about 4 steady girlfriends in his (Ian`s) life (Dianne being one of those steady girlfriends). Now, if the author of this book hasn`t spent time reseaching the subject of Ian Stuart and just assumes things, then you really have to wonder if he`s done the same thing for other topics that he`s written about, and you really have to question and judge this author`s credibility. I also noticed this alot in this book, that this author would just assume and guess things, and obviously hope that the reader will automatically believe him. There are definately more books avaliable on the history of punk rock that are much more truthful and better than this garbage. Maybe this is why this book is so hard to come by and why it hasn`t been reissued? Because the author now realises that there is provable lies in his book. Save your money and look for other books on punk rock.

Don`t waste your time and money to buy this book. I found a lot of it just based on the authors personal opinions of certain bands he did not care for and took a hard-leftist stance while writing the course of the book instead of just taking an unbiased style and wrting about the 70`s and 80`s punk scene the way it should be written about. If you want a much, much better book on the British street-punk scene I would recommend "Spirit of 69, A Skinhead Bible" by George Marshall.