ACTION: How Britain’s most brutal comic laid the real ’70s bare

Bigmouth.

AGGRO! In the long, hot summer of 1976, ACTION comic’s blood-crazed sharks, spy thugs and football yobs warped young minds across Britain. Creator Pat Mills tells JOHN NAUGHTON about the comic The Sun called the Sevenpenny Nightmare.

In the recent trend for publishing books based around specific years, no-one has yet laid claim to 1976. Like visitors strolling past a boss-eyed mongrel at Battersea Dogs’ Home, prospective authors have failed to see the appeal of a year that began with 15 people murdered in Northern Ireland before the Christmas decorations came down and continued in grindingly grim fashion with front pages dominated by endless tales of industrial aggro or Cod and Cold War stand-offs. Civil war raged in Angola and bombs exploded throughout London. Is this the MPLA, is this the IRA? Yes, on both counts, Johnny.

Action’s most infamous cover, as seen in High-Rise.

Listen closely and you can hear the tectonic plates…

View original post 4,199 more words

1926 after D.H

we are among the ruins

and could return to life again,

it was their natural atmosphere

not daunted by either art or ideal politics

out in the open world,

she could use her sexuality to have power over him,

her orgasm and her crisis

amazing, the profound

fulfilled before they knew promise

a vibrating thrill inside the body

and the soul she could not get rid of,

succumbed to the strange male power

a well bred social anarchy

one of the curious obsolete,

she went by without looking at them,

alone he was a lost thing

whole act took place in a vacuum,

why should they last

with layers of dissolution

like geological strata,

sideways, and downwards the light fell on him

he was burningly, poignantly grateful for these

pieces of natural

as was his outcast soul,

they lit the candles in the hall

of unfinished tender flesh

an erasure poem derived from a novel that caused much controversy D H Lawrence Lady Chatterlys Lover