Despite the millions of words devoted to Elvis Presley since his death, this account from the class of UK punk in 1977 offers new insights
Neil Spencer - The Observer,
‘A mixture of the tawdry and magnificent’: Presley on stage in 1975. Photograph: John Rodgers/Redferns
Is there anything left to say about Elvis Presley? We already have numerous biographies, among them Peter Guralnick's magisterial two-part account, along with the memoirs of friends, musicians, lovers, relatives, his ex-wife and members of the Memphis Mafia, the courtiers who surrounded the King during his 22-year reign from 1955 to 1977. There are tomes devoted to individual concerts and records, to Presley's damp-squib encounter with the Beatles, to his wardrobe and to his funeral. Among the 14m entries produced by a Google search are sites dedicated to Elvis's gun collection, his cars and his pets. What's left?
Well, there's the reaction of the teenage Dylan Jones to the news of Presley's death in August 1977. Jones was on one of his forays into the punk netherworld of the Nag's Head, High Wycombe: "To me he was a fancy dress staple, a soporific crooner, the music of TV toilet cleaner commercials… How little I knew."
Much of what is original in Jones's playful romp through the mythic, bizarre and occasionally magical realm of Presleyana is drawn from personal experience. That Presley died amid the UK's punk insurrection – Joe Strummer had famously just declared: "No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977" – lent his death a frisson. Was he the epitome of the bloated, remote state of pop, or was he a rebel, pre-hippy antecedent? Jones deftly dissects the complex relationship between punk and early rock'n'roll, its mix of derision and admiration, along with the accompanying "punks v teds" wars
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Well, there's the reaction of the teenage Dylan Jones to the news of Presley's death in August 1977. Jones was on one of his forays into the punk netherworld of the Nag's Head, High Wycombe: "To me he was a fancy dress staple, a soporific crooner, the music of TV toilet cleaner commercials… How little I knew."Much of what is original in Jones's playful romp through the mythic, bizarre and occasionally magical realm of Presleyana is drawn from personal experience. That Presley died amid the UK's punk insurrection – Joe Strummer had famously just declared: "No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977" – lent his death a frisson. Was he the epitome of the bloated, remote state of pop, or was he a rebel, pre-hippy antecedent? Jones deftly dissects the complex relationship between punk and early rock'n'roll, its mix of derision and admiration, along with the accompanying "punks v teds" wars
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