Review: Henry Rollins at The Glee Club, Cardiff, August 11th 2008

I must admit there are conflicting feelings when considering a night being lectured by a former punk. It happens to me in the pub every now and again and it’s in my top ten ejector seat moments. You see, old punks are no longer just angry, they are also now bitter. And bitterness is full of spite and petty squabbling and misjudged prejudices which is the last thing the punk wars were supposed to be about, the last thing its soldiers armed with; they were about the bigger picture, ripping the guts out of the world from the inside out. And gob. But now the original punks are in their forties and the world around them is different to the one they fought for. It is worse. So, yes, yes, yes, we all know we lost the punk wars. Capitalists are always going to be better organised in the ranks than a bunch of scowling kids with bad skin. The boardroom is always going to sway more weight than a basement club where the walls sweat. We all know this. So what on earth could a former member of Black Flag have to teach me? Bitterness and a yet another night of nostalgic stories of the punk generation is not my idea of a good night out.

But the truth is, we all know Rollins to be more than this. He is not the bore down the pub who wants it still to be 1977 so he can feel he is angry rather than cantankerous. Rollins is a thinking man’s punk – although he is not really a punk anymore. He has left that behind like so many others should have done and has evolved into a creature that reflects the road that should have been travelled when the ranks scattered. The idiosyncrasies and fires that drove him to punk as a young soldier are the same furies that drive him in his work now – it is a drive of passion, anger, ‘sticking it to the man’ and a fear of having to do a real job for a living were he to fail in his endeavours. That fear of the ant farm is common amongst the young, where it emerges from the universal western belief that we are all, as individuals, destined to achieve greatness on this mortal coil and die in a bathtub in Paris before our hair begins to recede. What Rollins has become is the essential Darwinian progression of this phenomenon. Rollins is what happens when you neither become boring or put on a suit and button the sleeves over the bad tattoos. He is the way, the truth and the light, at least while you watch him, because he stands before you like a pop-art Chomsky. His observations are hardly clinical, and he does not pretend that they are, but Rollins cannot be accused of anything other than being significant. He is reminding us, and most likely introducing some in the audience, of our responsibility as human animals to use our wits and abilities to judge our world for ourselves. It has never been smaller, and his travelogue, which takes up a considerable portion of the breathless two and a half hour show, goes someway to shaming all in the room for our ignorance of the world.

He also shares his views on his government and pleads the now familiar liberalist mantra that the world should not judge America by its leaders. When I first heard this some years back I had sympathy for it. Now, no matter how much I know from vast personal experience that America is overly endowed with good, kind, intelligent people, I am no longer extending sympathy toward them when it comes to this. It is America that looms as standard-bearer for a fecal League of Nations that is gang raping the planet and its people from corner to corner. As Rollins keeps reminding us with charm and wit, ignorance is no excuse and worse, is so unnecessary. That should count for Americans, also, surely?

Rollins’ passion and ability to hold an audience makes up for the fact that although he is funny and I belly laugh frequently, this is not a stand up gig. Occasionally through life (actually, probably not all that often, but it does happen) you meet people on your travels that are wonderful speakers. It is their manner, it is charisma, it is subject matter. What these people achieve is something far short of art and is less a talent as a force of character. It must be a common reaction to a Rollins lecture to think to yourself, ‘I could listen to him for hours’, only to look down at your watch and realise that you have been. Rollins covers much and is essentially trying to encourage the world to love each other, be understanding and to not judge anything until you either know the facts or have met the subject personally, shook him by the hand and scared his children. He talks fast and he talks long but such is his crackling story-telling, no bullshit oratory and general charisma, that two and a half hours of his musings makes the Dark Knight seem like a real time Golden Gate Bridge paint-drying instruction video. The way to sum up Rollins is to say that he is a little more than just very entertaining. He does make you think about the world and is refreshingly bereft of punchlines when tackling the heavier subjects. He does not tell jokes and his reminiscences of his travels to the killing fields in Cambodia hold the audience of a few hundred in silence for longer than any mere comedian could hope to do. This is an orator who is using his skill, his god given character to get a message across that he believes people need to hear. That is something of the punk ethos and his evocation of the punk gods at various points leaves us all fully aware of where he has been and where he intends to end up. He is a compassionate creature but fully intends to go out in a hail of bullets shouting ‘don’t forget to love me’ as he falls into the ravine. He is a complex character, and we all are (well, most of us) and someone who is so forthcoming and yet unanalytical with those complexities is only ever going to win you over.

For a man from a band so fondly remembered for the riotous audiences they inspired it is sometimes difficult to equate the past with the figure on stage who professes his anger but talks mainly of compassion and faith in human kind. But this is the charm of the man, he is real and he is proud to be so. All performers have a character on stage that is some variation of the real them. With Rollins you get the idea that if anything those roles may be reversed and it is the stage persona that is the real being. The Black Flag frontman is experiencing his forties with dignity and no dilution of spirit. It is nice to know punks can grow on in life without losing anything that made them great.