Where the Halling Valley River Lies, Carl Halling [urban books to read txt] 📗

the mainstream.
Spearheaded by acts as diverse as Alice in Chains, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Smashing Pumpkins and above all, Nirvana, this movement could be said to have been Rock’s final desperate outburst of sedition. And after its passing, Rock finally took its place alongside Classical, Jazz, Folk and World as just another music genre, where once it had been little short of a religion of youth.
While the sheer intensity of Nirvana’s later music continues to startle, it’s been wholly shorn of its iconoclastic power; and it’s available for anyone of any age to access via the simple click of a computer mouse. And the same could be said of the Sex Pistols, whose one-time bassist Sid Vicious has emerged as Punk’s leading icon, and the quintessence of Punk nihilism.
Is this development in some respects a fulfilment of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the transvaluation of all values?
There are those cultural commentators who would insist that this is indeed the case, and that far from being a positive move towards universal tolerance, it’s a tragedy beyond compare, although rather than Nietzsche, it’s the Book of Isaiah they might feel moved to quote from:
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”
But there was a time that such a revaluation met with enormous resistance, and the British public’s outraged reaction to Punk in ’77 was a perfect example of this.
As for the Teds, goodness knows they were no angels. But to them there as something uniquely rotten at the heart of Punk, while the Rock and Roll they loved possessed all the purity of a classic art form.

On New Years Eve, Jay and he went to a party in London's swanky West End. It was the last in a long series of celebrations he'd gone to throughout '77 mainly as a result of friends from Welbourne reaching the landmark age of 21. It was also one of the last times he ever saw Jay.
Before arriving, Jay and he met up as arranged with future oil magnate Chris, and as soon as the introductions were over, Jay saw fit to offer a solo display of his lethal street fighting skills:
"I'm suitably impressed", said Chris…and he was, although he was no wimp himself; but Jay was something else, and few would have benefited from crossing him…but they got on like a house on fire that insane night which at one point saw David pouring a full glass of beer over his head. What the beautiful dancer he'd spent most of the evening with thought of a nice guy like David doing a thing like that she didn't say.
In those days, David knew so many people who’d have done anything for him given half the chance, and yet his one true passion appeared to be the creation of endless drunken scenes, and a party wasn't a party for him unless he'd caused one, after which he simply moved on.
It was the spring of ’78 that he moved on again…this time to the city of Fuengirola on Spain’s Costa del Sol, with the intention of helping set up a sailing school with Adam, a young Englishman whom his father had recently befriended in London; but despite having been pre-arranged between them, the project came to nothing.
However, David stayed on, living first in an apartment Adam had kindly set him up in, then in a little hotel in town, and finally, rent-free, with an American friend, Scarlett, one of a handful of US ex-pats living in Fuengirola alongside young people from Australia, Britain, Ireland, Germany, South America and other parts of the world.
It was a hedonistic scene, and David wasted little time in becoming part of it. He spent his nights at the Tam Tam night club, where he set about establishing himself as Fuengirola’s very own Tony Manero…in Punk Rock attire.
It was his first year as a full-time Punk, in point of fact, and among the clothes he favoured were a black cap-sleeved wet-look tee-shirt, drainpipe jeans of black or green, worn with black studded belt, festooned with silver chain filched from a Spanish restroom, and kept in place by multiple safety pins, fluorescent pink teddy boy socks, and white shoes with black laces like the ones he’d seen on the cover of an album by London Punk band 999. At one stage, he even wore a safety pin – disinfected by being dipped into a drink – in his left earlobe, but he removed this once his lug had started to pulsate.
After a few weeks, he became lead singer for the Tam Tam house band, and would typically wear so much make-up onstage that one occasion, the microphone became smeared in lipstick, but the patrons liked him, and he’d pose and pout and throw his spare frame about for their benefit.
He was always short of money, but could order anything he wanted from the Tam Tam bar, and when he was flat broke, his close friend Laura bought him toasted cheese sandwiches to keep him going.
Laura and he were rarely on the beach, but would sometimes hang out at the famous Campo de Tenis, while David spent a lot of time rehearsing with the band. And in the evening, he was often to be found at Laura’s parents’ house, putting on the slap, and perhaps even painting his nails a gaudy shade of red, before heading along to the Tam Tam to do his gig.
One night her dad, a charismatic former tennis pro, was awakened by their antics, and upon spying the pair of them, with David possibly wearing more make-up than his own daughter, incredulously asked:
“What is this ****, Laura?”
However, some nights they preferred to get away from it all to another part of town, and for David, it was such a thrill to be alone with Laura in the demi-light of the Disco, while the evening was still young, hopelessly unaware that such moments are rare even in youth, and get steadily rarer as life forges on.
On one occasion as they were strolling through town by night, the legend that was racing champion James Hunt called out Laura’s name before emerging from the darkness. They exchanged a few words before Hunt vanished back into the night as suddenly as he’d arrived. David could scarcely believe his eyes, but it was that incredible a summer.

Once David Cristiansen started at college, he made it pretty clear than the nice clean-cut young man who'd auditioned the previous year had been a curve ball, as he was making no further attempts to conceal his Punk image.
This was compounded by a bizarre hyperactivity that occasionally degenerated into outrageous and even disruptive behaviour. It was as if he was determined to convince the world that he was an artist with a capital “A” and therefore entitled to incessantly attract attention to himself with aberrant behaviour and clothing.
And among the items he favoured were slim jim ties, drainpipe jeans, florescent Fifties-style socks, and white leather brothel creepers, but the pièce de résistance was a pair of tight plastic snakeskin trousers which he actually only wore the once.
As if all this weren't enough to cause eyebrows to raise among the authorities, he insisted on wearing make-up even in classes, although to be fair it was subtly applied, except for gigs and parties, when he really piled on the slap…foundation, eye shadow, blusher, lip rouge, the works. Talk about lipstick, powder and paint.
On one occasion, in the course of a mime class supervised by Don Donovan, a quirky bearded professional mime artist who'd been a regular on children's TV for a time, the compact he usually carried about with him at all times for sporadic touch-ups fell out of an inner pocket of his jacket during an exercise, before hitting the floor with an embarrassing clatter. All eyes went to the compact, and there was a mortifying silence, which the manic Don mercifully broke by retrieving the offending article from the floor, and furiously daubing peoples’ startled faces with glittery blusher.
Still, his days of wearing slap were numbered. It was as early as ’79, in fact, that he developed some kind of allergic reaction to a certain brown eye shadow, which caused his eyes to become so swollen and sore as to verge on the porcine…yet, he’d only worn it a little time before, and suffered no ill-effects.
This was during that first gig held in the basement of the nearby Lauderdale Tower and a few days after his 23rd birthday as part of one of the Folk Nights held occasionally at Silverhill in those days. And he was singing for a band he’d named Narcissus, one of several he was involved in at Silverhill.
And through one of them, The Rockets, he was talent-scouted as lead singer for a guitarist of genius called Don Taylor, who was hoping to form a band himself, and clearly thought David would cut it as a front man. But for some reason, it never came to be.
Don went on to play and write for one of the world's leading Rock superstars, but at one point he briefly joined a Silverhill-based Jazz-Funk outfit with another then friend of David’s. That band would go on to become one of the most successful Pop acts of the eighties, chalking up one hit after the other in a Britain in which Jazzy Dance music was favoured by flash boys in white socks and tasselled loafers. David was even invited to an early rehearsal, at a time when they might have done with a front man like himself…but of course, he didn’t go.
Through Narcissus, he found only disgrace and humiliation, and not just the once. Narcissus played a grand total of two gigs, both of them fiascos.
The first time they played together was just prior to the forming of the Rockets, and although it had been a disaster due to his drunken upstaging of the other band members, piano player Perry was sufficiently impressed by him to ask him to front the Rockets.
And it was through the Rockets that he was offered the job of front man for Don’s mooted musical project. However, rather than wait for the call from him, David went on ahead and re-formed Narcissus with original members Simon on guitar and John on percussion.
David piled on the make-up, and Simon and John followed suit, but being relatively untainted by personal vanity, the results were unsettling. Sweet-natured Simon painted his Botticellian features like an ancient pagan warrior, while gentle giant John saw fit to smother his with military-style camouflage. Not surprisingly, their set was accompanied by a riot of heckling which although far from malicious, ultimately provoked David to irritation, and he ended up tossing his plectrum into the audience with a sarcastic:
"Here's to all my loving fans!"
This petulant outburst may have caused no end of harm to his reputation, because the chutzpah of the natural leader who demands and gets attention and respect through the sheer force of his personality was never among his gifts. Rather he was blessed with the seductive charm of the social climber for whom alpha status comes through the subtle exercise of exquisite manners. In this respect, he was a little like Julien Sorel, anti-hero of Stendhal's "The Scarlet and the Black" who despite humble origins, succeeds in ascending to the very top of the social ladder, only to allow a single act of madness to destroy all his