Let's Submerge

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.