The gospel of punk…

…According to the Barbs, recent visitors to these islands from the UK, has as much to do with music as a fashion attitude. This partly explains why the band was brought in for a series of concerts by Pony Footwear, the same outfit endorsed by such diverse personalities as Eminem and basketball star Dirk Nowitzski of the Dallas Mavericks.

Punk in our generation started in the late ’70s to early ’80s, just as on the other side of the globe the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Jam were literally kicking out the jams, and soon enough Pinoys followed suit through Betrayed, the Jerks, the Twisted Red Cross recordings and the overflow slamdancing crowd at Katrina’s in Ermita. Them were the days. And who could forget Romeo Lee who made it to the cover of Who magazine, draped in all his Pinoy punk finery? Myo would go on to form his own bands, burn down the house with his rendition of Wild Thing, and to this day still has his Brown Briefs. Punk was, and still is, music, fashion and attitude.

The Barbs, though, are neither pure fashion nor mere retro nostalgia. Of course many of us thought that punk, as we knew it, died when Sid Vicious overdosed and later Joe Strummer croaked, Paul Weller branched out to a folksy jazz and other demiheroes –perhaps bored with it all –plain dropped out of sight. As the saying goes, we saw neither hide nor hair of our past accumulated angers until the Barbs came along with their unique brand of punk, sort of like the Cars meet Sonic Youth with a dash of B-52s thrown in, and what we get is a simmering cauldron of music and noise that could tide us over through sheer velocity.

Quite a pair of guitar players, front duo Tim Box and Amy Casey of the Barbs are. They got their hooks down pat, guitar lines alternately ringing and scathing like fingernails drawn across a blackboard, with the right blend of sustain and reverb. A song like Massive Crush comes at the listener like a lost command, same with Danger Man. Occasionally the band switches to cruise mode, as in About Her with the teasing double entendres in which Tim sounds a lot like Ric Ocasek, or the semi-unplugged, a la Velvet Underground Moon Boots. If the Barbs’ album Lupine Peroxide (Mother Tongue Records) sounds at times like a cross-reference of punk influences past, present and future, what makes the band distinctive then? For precisely the same reason Tim, Amy, bassist Jim Tucker and drummer Simon Hartop are musical chameleons blending in with the ever shifting, nearly amorphous landscape of pop noise, their songs a concurrent send-up, tribute, parody, rhapsody.

But just as the hippies had their hippie’ng kulelat or jeproks, the punks too must have their punk goat. Do the Barbs qualify? We’re not sure, but surely top contenders would be those who would form a posh pit at their concerts, whipping out a chain or two and complete with pardible on ’d nose.

In our old age, we prefer the safety and comfort of home and the CD unobtrusively playing in a corner of the living room, but then it gets us to think, isn’t that anti-punk? Because it meant an attitude and a fashion and three-minute songs that took no prisoners, punk invariably led us out to the streets in all our youthful exuberance and anger, on the lookout for a hit or a trick or any small thing that could keep us a bit warmer. The local band Yano in its younger days captured this sentiment well in a verse in Esem: "Paamoy amoy/ di makabili/ nakayanan ko lang pambili ng dalawang yosi."

In this vein, the test would be: Does the music and noise of the Barbs remind us of the time when we had just enough money to buy a couple of sticks of cigarettes to make us forget hunger? Now that we mentioned it, it does, but only because one can afford to be angry all the time when one is young, and these days we no longer have the bohemian luxury.

The Barbs in this aspect are a beautiful aberration, because they give us an excuse to pound the city streets in tight-fitting shoes, and for a nanosecond relieve us of the weight of years. Only time and its relative subjects will tell if the band is a manufactured commodity, or if it will outlive the hype and billboard of the contrived moment.