GB: The immediate flash of punk was obviously the main influence on post-punk, but there also seemed to be a confluence of talent that emerged at that time. Why do you think that was?
SR: I think maybe there's always that amount of talent around. Today there's people who make good music, music that is skilfully made and has clever ideas. I don't think the amount of musical genius around goes in waves or fluctuates massively. But the difference is that certain contexts create the conditions for certain types of interaction to occur. And one thing that was valuable about punk was its interruption of the idea of virtuosity. If you look at what was prevailing before punk, the records that were coming out even on cool labels... it was all totally chops orientated. Just through disrupting that equation, that idea of extreme skill being necessary, it allowed a lot of people into music who would have been intimidated. People who would have really interesting ideas, who a lot of the time were Eno-like people. John Lydon is a case in point, because here is a person who's got a very sharp ear and a very sharp musical sensibility, but he's not a musician, and I'm not sure he's ever created a melody as such. Some of his vocal melodies in PiL are very interesting, but I'm sure all the hooks in the Pistols were written by Glen Matlock or someone else. But without him and his sensibilities, PiL wouldn't have existed. And there are other cases. Ian Curtis played that role in Joy Division. He would listen to the riffs the guys came up with and he would be the one who'd say 'that's a good riff, we'll use that'. Mark Smith in the Fall is another really good example. He's not anyone who would have been allowed into music during the progressive era. Punk put him in a position where he could be the leader of a band, and where all that schooling himself in music he'd done, listening to records and developing these really sharp sensibilities, could really count. I think before punk to be the leader of a band you generally had to have really hot musical skills. So after punk you had this situation where because the role of virtuosity was downgraded you had all these groups forming where there were some people who could really play and some people who couldn't but had good ideas and maybe they were able to play well enough. And when the punk strictures declined a little bit you did get people who could secretly play really well, like Keith Levene, who could find more spaces in the music now that it had opened up with postpunk. I think what punk did was just disrupt everything and put a much greater premium on breaking with established ways of doing things and on moving forward, and not being so respectful of the correct way of doing things or the traditional way. That created a more fertile climate for these talents to interact.

GB: One of the most interesting points you make is that they were really striving to make a new music, one that didn't have any antecedent. Do you think they succeeded in that?
SR: Well, it's a difficult thing. In the book I was torn. Because one of the functions of history is to point out continuities, but on the other hand if you want to also honour the sense of how it felt at the time, which in itself is a historical fact, then you have to sort of emphasis the sense of novelty and breaks as well, the discontinuity. So it was a difficult balancing act. I think in some ways it's quite funny to point out that with Gang of Four, two of the bands they were most influenced by are in some ways the least likely. Like Free, this bluesy, hard rock band, they were a band Gang of Four all loved, and so were these pub-rockers, Dr Feelgood. The fact is in some ways Gang of Four were a pub rock band. I mean, they liked to drink a lot and they were playing this white, aggressive, amped up version of black music. But obviously at the same time they were able, by the way they used technology and by exaggerating the spikiness of Wilko Johnson's playing in Dr Feelgood and bringing in a dub-aware sensibility, and just by all this theory and the way they approached things with this incredible premeditated cold-bloodedness, they were able to create something that did feel without precedent at the time. The only things it reminded me of at the time were certain disco records, and it was such an abstraction of those disco records, so stripped of what disco was about, it just seemed totally new. So I'm hoping when I wrote it I managed to convey that newness, while also pointing out the real links to the past that there were. And the thing with PiL was that reviewers and critics at the time did mention 'Oh, PiL are obviously very influenced by Can'. I remember reading that and I rushed out to buy a Can record. It wasn't the best way of getting into Can, unfortunately. It was a compilation Virgin put out, which was not their best period, more sort of whimsical. So I couldn't really see any relationship between PiL and Can. Later, I heard the proper Can stuff and I could see the relationship better. But to say PiL were influenced by Can is not equivalent to the way you might say today of a band that they're influenced by Can. It's a whole different order of relationship. Bands today, when you say they are influenced by earlier groups, on the whole it seems like it's much more of a replication. At times it's almost citational, like even though they're not using a sampler, they have actually got the sound. They have somehow got the precise sonority, they've worked out what production effects or instrumental techniques the original band used. PiL's relationship with Can was much more alchemical or mutational. You can see the link between Can and PiL intellectually, but when you listen to PiL's records you really don't hear Holger Czukay in Jah Wobble's bass playing. So I think that feeling of newness was a real thing, and a justified thing that people felt at the time. It's the same with Wire. Obviously there's some affinity between Wire and certain Syd Barrett-type music, but it's nothing like a band today who rips off Syd Barrett.

GB: It's interesting that they seem pretty well versed in movements such as Futurism and Situationism. But on the whole they were not highly educated.
SR: Well, yeah, it was a bookish culture. I think a lot of it has got to do with something that is hard to recover now. Life was really boring in the 70s, in terms of what there was to stimulate you. It's unimaginable now. In Britain, there's so many things for kids to do today, there's video games, DVDs, the web, loads of TV channels. In Britain during the 70s, it was like three TV channels that all closed around 11.30 at night, and were off during the afternoon, when there was just a test card. There were a couple of local radio stations and one national pop radio station that was really pretty bland during the day. No videos, no internet. So people were incredibly bored. And if you were of a bright mind there was not much to do except read, go to the library, or read the music papers cover to cover. People would get them on Wednesday and read every single word. Which is why they were so important. And then there was night-time Radio One and especially John Peel. And there was your local record store. And the other thing was going to films. If you lived in a reasonably sized city there were film clubs and all-night cinemas where you would have avant-garde foreign films and trashy B-movies all night. It was a really big thing during that period. So these things were like mind food, stimulus, something to grab onto. If somebody was at all bright or had any curiosity there would be a convergence of these things, certain kinds of fiction and certain kinds of theory converging with music converging with an emerging canon of films, maybe a little art as well. It was just to make your life exciting and expand your horizons, because everything was desperately dull and depressing and bleak in Britain in the 70s.

GB: You give a lot of credit to the UK music media of that period. What was it that left such a strong impression on you?
SR: Well, firstly, it was the only place you could read about music, really. There were a few people who wrote for newspapers who would cover pop in a fairly desultory way. And there were a few pop TV programmes like The Old Grey Whistle Test and Top of the Pops and things like that. There was a little bit of radio. But it was so much harder to access this stuff. So the source of information and news really was the music papers. And that's one of the main reasons people would read them, just for the news and the gig guides and things like that. But because they sold so well, and also because they had a lot of pages to fill because record companies didn't have many other places to advertise in those days, this made them very profitable and the companies that owned them kind of just let the editors and writers do their own thing. So they were like this autonomous cultural space, and there was this period when--with the NME it started when a whole bunch of people who'd been in the free underground press of the 60s moved into the music press just to earn a bit of money -and of course because they loved rock music, coming out of the 60s they thought it was a zone of emancipation and cultural struggle and so forth. So the music press was this weird space where some of that old counter culture talk was still going on, along with rock journalism, which was much more freer in those days--there was much more access to stars and rock journalists were on the same level as the stars in a lot of ways, fraternising with them. And because of the plentiful ad pages there were all these editorial pages to fill, so they could do all these interesting things, cultural articles and thinkpieces and essays on lost musicians. And really, really long record reviews. So in a way it was like you'd get a little bit of the best of what a magazine like Mojo or Uncut does mixed with what Rolling Stone would do back then-- cultural journalism--but also gossip too. So altogether it was a great package, and everything was connected; it would deal with other things--politics, films, books--but always in a way that was somehow connected to music, or seen through the prism of music. So the music would then be embedded in a--dare one say it-- counter culture! It did feel like an oppositional thing, music in those days. But it wasn't like everyone agreed in a cosy countercultural consensus. There were great squabbles and dissensions in these music papers. And people would fight with people on the other music papers, like NME would have arguments running with Sounds. But also within papers there'd be debates.

So it was just this tremendously stimulating thing to read, and again it's being in this cultural vacuum, especially for people like me who grew up in a small town, or other people who grew up in the provinces away from the capital. The best day of the week was when the music papers would come out. They gave a context for the music, and created this web of argument that heightened everything. Everything was intensified by them. So that's why I have this fulsome tribute to the papers in the acknowledgements section of Rip It Up. I quickly gravitated towards particular writers, who were my touchstone figures, and people whose influence when I started out as a writer I had to struggle to absorb and then cast aside in order to be myself and not just clone them. So those guys--the three main ones are Paul Morley, Ian Penman and Barney Hoskyns--I always knew they were great. But when I went back to re-reading the British music papers for research, what impressed me was the other writers. Just how great the reporting was. I was really kind of freshly amazed that such a thing as the UK music press had even been allowed to exist. Those magazines weren't driven by market research the way they are today. The combination of being owned by a company that at that point let them do what they want, and the amount of money that came from the record industry in advertising, it kind of made the papers very cocky and gave them this sense of entitlement that was ultimately their downfall. But amazing experiments were done with language and how to structure pieces and with design and stuff like that. Also, the other thing for me was some of these writers were bringing in theory, ideas from contemporary philosophy and connecting them in a way that made them really exciting. If they were groups you already liked and someone manages to weld Bataille or Barthes on to that, it immediately gives you a way into those thinkers.

The other thing is, my experience was far from unusual. A lot of people read them as intently as I did. That was what made them so important. When I interviewed bands I was surprised how often the names of specific journalists came up. I think it was Gavin Friday from the Virgin Prunes, he said, 'Oh yeah, we used to read Morley, he was gospel.'. I remembered that these writers acted like they were really important, and the fact is they were: they influenced bands. Apart from the quality of the writing, it was the sheer power these guys had that inspired me to do this for a living. Of course, by the time I got to be doing it, it wasn't nearly as exalted a job, but these guys made a real contribution back then. They really kind of helped shape how music and culture moved forward.