I met his mother the other day. She is pleased he has a hobby, but still has hopes of getting him to college. She continually searches out stranger and stranger institutions that might appeal to the youth’s oblique sensibilities.

Greg has been taking an active interest in politics, attending weekly assemblies at an “Anarchy Centre”, in Wapping of all places. Nat says that its official name is the “Autonomy” centre; a good “Guardian” word. It seems that the band will have to perform there soon. Jim is none too pleased; he would like to take up some of the more lucrative, if as yet tentative offers.

I cannot understand Nat’s position in all of this. He seems to want to play the middleman, balancing the extremes. Greg seems to persuade him quite easily and together they overrule Jim. It is all done in the most subtle and subdued of ways. Several passages from the record have been played on the radio. It was a late night programme broadcast nationally, and Nat was surprised that it was obscure to me. It is extraordinary to contemplate that Nat’s voice is travelling out into the universe. Indeed, I now feel it an immense relief that he failed to transfer his horrid ululations and ear-splitting squallings from the primal therapy onto tape, vinyl, radio; who knows where else?

SUN JAN 17

Nat’s band have been playing numerous gigs at the Anarchy Centre. Greg is most keen on the political aspect. Nat relishes the journey on the underground, under the great river Thames to decayed, ripe-for-renovation Wapping. Actually, you have to go as far as Rotherhithe to pass under Old Father Thames, but I didn’t care to disillusion him.

The quaint sight of weirdly garbed faithful wastrels trekking nomadically over the snow to their place of worship pleases Nat immensely. He loves snow, “not as poets and the puerile populace love it, for its great equalising propensities; contrariwise, I find it makes things look vastly different to one another”. He was upset at not having seen snowflakes for years and suggested that only children can see such things!

The social side of it he despises: “Macho young men, spikey-haired and leather-clad with their painted punkettes … high ideals lost in a haze of alcohol, nicotine, solvents and lysergic acid diethylamide”. Nonetheless, many of these “fragmented and demented” souls never fail to appreciate the band’s “doomy riffs”.

I am sure that most of them will survive the excesses and reckless experiments. Nat cynically tells me that virtually all of the first punk generations—’75’, ’76, ’77—have gone back to “normal” lives, with the one or two notable exceptions being those who managed to exploit the commercial potential of the subculture. Opinion is divided as to whether or not music should address itself to anything other than anarchy, but music cannot be tied down: the harder you try, the more it surprises you with its boundless variety.