If you know what it is, punk is everywhere nowadays - in fashion,
in TV ads, in loads of books and in retro mags. And as the
characters aren't waxworks but in many cases living beings, some
have staggered, tramped or even rocketed back into public life.
It's a bit tricky to sort the crap from the class but this unusual
book deserves the latter tag. If your world was influenced by
Crass, the Levellers or Adam & The Ants, Let's Submerge is for
you (Berger has written the definitive work on Crass and also a
biog of the Levellers). The anthology is more than memoir - it's a
personal take on punk and its place in Berger's life. Built on a
superb, rangy interview with Crass linchpin Penny Rimbaud and
including in-depth talks with mavericks such as Mark Perry, Marco
Pirroni, the late Steven Wells and Spizz, it seeks to unearth what
the movement/phenomenon was about and how its protagonists fit with
the Berger view that punk was "a place where misfits could be
accepted and conformity didn't rule." His choice of subjects might
make consensus likely but that is not the point as an unflinching
style gets the best out of his interviewees. A key passage in the
Mark Perry interview has the priceless line: "My old mate Danny
Baker, erstwhile Sniffin' Glue colleague] did an advert for Daz
They're a major corporation Give us a break They're destroying the
fucking world - why are we working for them? I'm not a particularly
political person . . .." Perry also tells a great tale of how he
was asked to appear on Baker's edition of This Is Your Life and was
chastised by his ma for turning it down. "Even people I respect
didn't understand. I don't live by those rules." Wherever their
careers have taken them, all have consciously avoided settling in
the mainstream. Berger's writing career took him to 3am (not the
Daily Mirror column, but 3ammagazine.com - "Whatever it is, we're
against it") and the pieces he contributed are to me the hard core
of Let's Submerge. They are a riveting set, composed with passion
and spiked with insight and humour, covering an unexpectedly wide
terrain - drinking at the Ritz, flag-waving nationalism, the
virtues of Jeffrey Archer, Crass redux and voting among others.
There's also an equally spiky and humorous memoir of a spell of
horse-drawn life in Ireland, and quite a bit more. In conclusion,
an illuminating interview with the author puts the foregoing into
historical perspective. The impression is that while Berger wants
to "draw a line" rather than march on as a modern-day torchbearer,
the light is unlikely to go out.
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