Alternative TV – How Much Longer?

Alternative TV – How Much Longer? // You Bastard (Deptford Fun City) 1977. In 1977 Mark Perry, the creator of one of the very first punk fanzines (Sniffin’ Glue) and the frontman for ATV, was already decrying the conventions and apathy of punk rock in the song How Much Longer? I mean the corpse wasn’t even dead yet, but Mark already saw it as a bunch of trendy wankers who “don’t know nothin’ and don’t really care”. Of course he also had nothing but scorn for the hippies and straights but that was to be expected. Turning a mirror onto the punk crowd this early in the game today seems kinda excessive. I mean it can’t get much better than London in 77 can it? Well if Mark is to be believed, the good old days probably resembled today more than we would care to admit. It will always suck to be too cool for school. Them’s the facts. Mark dealt with this by taking ATV in a very experimental direction, one that I could never warm up to fully. But everything Alternative TV did up to and including their first album The Image Has Cracked from 1978 is a pure example of Action times Vision. The CD release has all of the early singles on it and really is a must have.