another tuneless racket

All Another Tuneless Racket. Punk and New Wave In the Seventies Volume Four: The American Beat East
By Stven M Gardner
(Noise For Heroes)

The intention was to read this cover-to-cover before penning a review, but time got the upper hand. As it does. You need to know about it before the onset of the Festive Season proper so you can put it on your Xmas shopping/wish list.

I’ve been dipping into and out of this “Another Tuneless Racket 4”  over the past three months. It’s a punk rock “War and Peace” at nearly 690 pages but not a hard slog. It’s neatly compartmented into various regional musical scenes, so “ATR Volume Four” is ideal fodder, if your attention span is short or you want to dip in and out.

Notwithstanding it weighs a lot more than a mobile phone, you might find it essential Toilet Reading (or “Bathroom Reading” for sensitive Americans who think a bathing facility is co-located with what we Australians call The Dunny.)

Reading on the loo is probably a Bloke Thing but certainly not exclusively the domain of men or Australians. The bog is one place most people know they won’t be disturbed.

There’s a bonus if you’re getting on a bit and are not, er, as regular as you used to be, in that you can spend a long time combing these pages.  The hefty size of “ATR4” (it’s nearly as heavy as one of those extinct things called phone books) means that if you lift your copy past shouilder height a few times, you can skip the gym.

There’s a lot to be said for Toilet Books. A good one takes your mind off the government bowel testing kit that arrived in the mail and is sitting on your sink, unopened. If you’re a Westerner visiting Japan, reading is less taxing than working out what all those controls on the side of the cistern do.

Unlike Jinglish instructions or medical self-diagnostics, however, “ATR” is a labour of love that comes from Steve Gardcner, the same rock and roll obsessive who spawned the American zine “Noise For Heroes” in the 1990s, and the record label of the same name.

Another Tuneless Racket: Punk And New Wave In The Seventies, Volume One: Origins 
Another Tuneless Racket: Punk And New Wave In The Seventies, Volume Two: Punk
Another Tuneless Racket: Punk and New Wave In The Seventies: Volume Three: UK New Wave
Another Tuneless Racket: Punk and New Wave In The Seventies, Volume Five: The American Beat – West
By Steve H Gardner (self published)

The best intentions are often derailed by practicality. After being gifted Volume One of “Another Tuneless Racket”, the plan was to acquire and read the other three back-to-back and then write a review. A fine goal but one that slipped after realising their combined volume came to almost 2,400 pages and life was getting in the way…

After delving deep into the series, it’s clear that the beauty of “Another Tuneless Racket” is that once you get your bearings, you can dive in almost anywhere, pick up on a thread and keep going. As you'll gather from the titles, each volume zeroes in on a time and place in the history of punk and new wave music, and then takes up the story of key acts. The series serves as a roadmap through the twists and turns of punk and new wave across most of the western world. 

It’s meticulously researched but you’d expect that from author Steve Gardner, He’s a lanky Yank from San Diego who grew up on the US East Coast where he went to university before finding himself working in engineering. A music obsessive from an earl;y age, he'd been bitten by the punk rock bug by the time he blew out the candles on his 21^st birthday cake.