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There is nothing new to discover, surely, about the birth of punk. But perhaps it depends where you look. Written between 1977 and 1981, the teenage diaries of Angela Jaeger crackle with life. Published as the book I Feel Famous, the New York and London punk scenester’s writing gives us a real-time immersion, with zero revisionism, into not only what happened and who was there, but how it felt to a musically fanatical teenage girl.
Diary entry for 9 May, 1977, about a Bryan Ferry/Talking Heads gig being sold out: “Shit, damn, piss forever!! What can you do but kick and curse cause you CAN’T GO! It shits bricks solid!!” By 27 June, she’s a dedicated anglophile, a Sex Pistols and Clash obsessive, searching for an identity and asking the big questions: “Why should we be expected to live like everyone else does? What are the reasons behind TEENAGE REVOLUTION!”
“I was rebelling against school, against conformity,” she says today, now an enthusiastic, stylish, 65-year-old New Yorker drinking tea in a cafe in Finsbury Park, London. “The music was so different. The pace, the energy, the style but also the attitude: society sucks!”
Growing up in New York’s East Village with older, musically passionate siblings, for her it was right place, right time, right age and the right kind of creative, searching spirit. A music and poetry-loving kid by the age of 11, she’d grown up in a liberal family appalled by the Vietnam war and was, by 16, beguiled by the beatniks and misfits strolling by her family home. The iconic CBGB’s nightclub was a brief walk away. Initially her friends weren’t interested, so she’d go alone, drawn to Talking Heads, Blondie. “This young girl walking along Bowery, in little high heels,” she recalls, “into CBGB’s with full-on rock’n’rollers, Stiv Bators, Dee Dee Ramone.”
At 17, she had a journalistic instinct to document everything: “I knew it was vital, in some way.” A shy schoolgirl driven nonetheless by passion, she’d arrive at gigs with a cassette recorder, approach the bands and ask for a few words. “I have a great interview with Lux Interior [of the Cramps]. His favourite texture was skin.”
Information came mostly from the British music press, imported copies of NME and Sounds. “Two weeks old,” she laughs. “Oh my God, Johnny Rotten’s on the cover! I’d see pictures of the Clash: look at the jackets, the stencils! I was flabbergasted. The visual expression, the characters, the personas. New York was so different: bikers, 1950s, glammy, leather, black jeans.”
I Feel Famous tracks her adventures from fascinated onlooker to ardent devotee, becoming friends with Lydia Lunch and following the noise and the clothes to London in autumn 1978. She would return many times, the diaries a compelling zigzag between the punk/post-punk cultures of Manhattan and London: hanging out with the New York Dolls’ flirty frontman David Johansen, a sarky Johnny Rotten and a complimentary Patti Smith, who approved of Jaeger’s ponytail.
She followed the Clash on a UK tour, was kissed by both Joe Strummer and Billy Idol – “I had a crush on everybody!” – and “fell in love” with the Slits, becoming friends with key members Ari Up and Viv Albertine. “I’d never seen girls like that before,” she says, marvelling at the confrontational British combo, more used to US girls emulating glam TV cops Charlie’s Angels “in spandex”, and all-female trad-rock troupe the Runaways: “That’s what we got.”
The diaries chart her evolution from angry teen towards thoughtful self-assurance, with some vividly descriptive writing: “Here I am sitting in this shitto-position, cocoa in my brain, waddling through the late hours air. It’s probably raining in London now like it is in New York – vehicles driving down the streets (roads they would say) in both places.”
The culture evolves, too, as post-punk reconfigures the UK mainstream. Jaeger boggles at Top of the Pops on 19 October 1978, featuring Buzzcocks, Sham 69, the Jam and Pil’s debut single Public Image. “That first single,” she notes, blurting out a rendition of the famed frenetic bassline, “characterises the whole mood of the times.” By 1979 she’s loving the Specials, Madness, Joy Division, Tubeway Army, and performing in various bands (she would go on to join instrumental jazz-pop collective Pigbag as their singer in 1983).
There were shady scenes, too: drugs, skinhead violence, stabbings, the inevitable presence of opportunistic men around young women. “Sure, they were checking you out,” she says. “But I had my wits about me: 70s New York wasn’t gentrified at all – my dad gave us police whistles to wear. I got lucky, I think.”
Punk was both her foundation and salvation, informing her through a creative lifetime as a singer, writer and music teacher. “Punk was perfect for me, the timing,” she concludes. “I really needed it to happen. Things have their time, but they go on in your spirit.”
She doesn’t see such maverick characters dominating culture today. “I wish I did.” But she’s wary of saying, as she does in a goofy voice, “Oh, it was better back in our day …”
But it was!? She cackles uproariously and whispers: “You’re right.”
