Interpol
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But there’s a distinction to be made between the natural emulation that a group might begin with while finding its own sound and the calculated sort done for the immediate nostalgic thrill. In the 50s Britain was awash in cheap copies of American rock ‘n’ rollers. Young rabid fans of American R & B, rock, and blues tried to reproduce note for note the music of Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent, or Muddy Waters. But somebody somewhere upped the tempo on the American imports to keep up with the speeding internal rhythm of the mod masses, and soon the Brits were in a race to outdo one another with the loudest volume, the heaviest sound, the neatest studio tricks. By the end of the 60s everyone in America was trying to one-up Sgt. Pepper’s.
If there is magic in rock, it is that attempts at reproduction sometimes result in a lucky mistranslation. That blues riff is durable ironically because it rarely comes out the same way twice. Bands are not Xerox machines, and if they nail one stylistic detail they’re just as likely to completely flub up something else. The Sex Pistols, generally hailed for raising the punk flag and walking 70s rock off the plank, started out playing music that was barely a decade old yet. “I was interested in the mod energy,” John Lydon says in the liner notes to a ’95 comp. “We had to begin somewhere, and that was as good a place as any to start.” At least one early Pistols set included only a few originals, snuck in between the Who’s “Substitute,” the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction,” and “Through My Eyes” by the Creation. But the band sometimes changed the lyrics for shock value, and took the overdriven guitar to nasty extremes. Put on the bondage pants and you’ve got a blueprint for much of the confrontational antipop to come.
