Stewart Home Interview, Part Two

Part 2 (of 3) of our exclusive full length interview with author Stewart Home, conducted in November 2023 in London by linxi and CF. Full Transcript!

PART 2: Brucesploitation, Genre Theory, Glam & Punk.

In this second part (of three) Stewart discusses his fascination with Kung Fu movies and Brucesploitation, Genre Theory, Glam and a dialectical take on Punk Rock. Check out the video version of this interview on our Noise & Politics YouTube channel:

Christoph Fringeli: We ended the part one of this interview with you spending your time during the art strike 1990-1993 reading Hegel and watching Kung Fu movies.

Now, one of your most recent books, published in 2018, is about Brucesploitation movies titled Re-Enter the Dragon. Tell us about your fascination with Kung Fu, Bruce Lee – and what is Brucesploitation?

Stewart Home: Going through the first four questions, I think one of them was about why I was into Bruce Lee and had subsequently done this book about Brucesploitation films, films that riff on Bruce Lee’s films or that have people, clones of Bruce Lee, almost pretending to be Bruce Lee in them. And I guess part of that goes back again to my teenage years. There was obviously the Richard Allen book, Dragon Skins, because the Kung Fu craze was huge. So in the early 70s, I’d been very into glam rock, loved Marc Bolan and T-Rex, all the glam bands, Slade, Sweet, Alice Cooper as a kind of slightly darker element of that.

Then even the stuff that hadn’t been hits, you know, there’s songs now that are quite big as part of what’s known as Junkshop Glam, which is a kind of genre that’s been invented after the fact, like Freakbeat for the music that became between Beat and Psychedelic in the mid 60s in the UK.

But you’d just hear on the radio say Rebels Rule by Iron Virgin, which I couldn’t believe it wasn’t a hit. I mean, it was fantastic, but now that’s a big Junkshop Glam tune. So I’d like that kind of stuff, but that Glam sound had kind of fallen away in ‘74. So I was listening to old 60s stuff like the Downliners Sect or The Pretty Things and even 50s rock and roll.

There wasn’t anything exciting happening in music, but Bruce Lee was huge and I absolutely loved Bruce Lee’s films as a 12 year old. They were rated X for over 18s only in the UK. But as a 12 year old, I’d go to the cinema and try and get into the X films. And if it was Bruce Lee or a Kung Fu film, nine times out of 10 you’d get in because you were paying the adult price because you were claiming to be 18. And I think the cinema managers didn’t think they should be restricted from kids seeing them. Being Hong Kong films, there was no big sex scenes or anything in them.

The first X film I saw was actually Enter the Dragon. I got to see all the Bruce Lee films and a lot of other great films like Kung Fu Girl with Cheng Pei-pei, also directed by Lo Wei, who directed the first two Bruce Lee films. But you try to get into something like Confessions and Window Cleaner – “No way, son, you’re too young” – because they think a 12 year old shouldn’t be going into see a sex comedy with nudity in it.

So I just loved the absurdity, I guess, of Bruce Lee as well. As I got older, I found the films more and more absurd. One guy can’t beat up a whole dojo of Japanese fighters successfully because someone will come up behind them while they’re dealing with someone in front. But that’s what the film showed.

I’ve just always loved those films since I first saw them. I don’t ever recall seeing the Green Hornet with Bruce Lee as Kato in it as a kid in the 60s. But Batman had a guest episode with the Green Hornet and Kato in it. So I’ve seen Bruce Lee in that. You’d see karate in various films, TV shows. I did judo as a kid. We had an art teacher who was a black belt at karate, but the headmaster at my school had been in a Japanese prisoner of war camp, so he wouldn’t let the art master teach us karate, although we all wanted him to. We’d all be looking at him doing his katas in the school hall when he had it to himself and stuff.

So there’d always been that fascination with martial arts. And obviously boxing was huge. When I was a kid after football, the big thing was boxing. Obviously Muhammad Ali, but for British kids as well, Henry Cooper was a huge star alongside all those footballers like Jack Charlton and Bobby Moore, who’d won the World Cup in ‘66.

And I also like wrestling, which was on the TV on a Saturday afternoon, which is a more showbiz version and in some ways very like martial arts films because it’s completely worked out in advance who’s going to win and lose. It’s faked in a certain way, but you still have to be a great athlete to be able to do it.

So all those things just fed into those interests and they were just part of a kind of general culture around me at the time that I absorbed. And again, with the Brucesploitation films, I started off just being interested in martial arts films in general.

And then I got particularly interested in the Brucesploitation films when I started looking at a lot of them because they started turning up on DVDs for a pound in Poundland. Some of them I got to see the first time around. You saw them on VHS, you saw them at the cinema, you saw them wherever. Obviously by the time they were turning up on DVD, that was, you know, there was internet and people were writing about them and realized there was just a huge amount of confusion about what the films were, who was in the films, which film was which.

Often they had multiple titles and there’d be other films which would share a title with a different film under one of its variant titles. So it was just a huge amount of confusion about those films. And I just started watching through them to figure out for myself what was what and I decided to watch through all of them as far as I could, which obviously means going into the grey market and getting bootlegs or semi-legal versions because the films had never been released in European territory.

So you’re maybe getting a bootleg of an Ocean Shores VHS because it’d been issued either with English subtitles or with an English soundtrack in Hong Kong or Asia. But that stuff goes around through people with an interest so I was able to track down pretty much all the films I wanted to see and write them up and sort them out.

I’d also always been very interested in genre and how genre works and how it changes over time, what’s considered part of a genre can kind of, something can fall in or be brought, you know, brought in, fall out. So that led to the book on Brucesploitation many years later but, you know, I’d kind of gone from Mark Bolan to Bruce Lee, Mark Bolan being kind of androgynous and Bruce Lee being this example of hyper-masculinity.

That often turns into its opposite, it becomes a kind of, it’s like a lot of kind of bodybuilding culture and muscleman culture. There’s this kind of worship of the male body and a lot of that can turn into gay desire. I found it really fascinating some of the stuff that went on in Kung Fu films where you have this notion of double penetration in porn, which we all know what that means now.

But in various Kung Fu films you’d see this thing where the kind of hero would get, have a sword go right through their body, piercing them and then they kind of jump against the villain to penetrate the villain, which was this kind of Kung Fu penetration which was one of many things to do with kind of hyper-masculinity turning into something else that fascinated me in that material.

So it was just good to kind of write it all up and talk about what made a film a Brucesploitation film, what tropes it required and then to rank the films according to how much they met the tropes of Brucesploitation so that you could organize the films into kind of core, semi-periphery, periphery and outer limits so that you had an idea of how much Brucesploitation was in the film because often people would say, oh this is a Brucesploitation film because it has this actor in it who also was in Brucesploitation films but then the film they were talking about didn’t have any of the Brucesploitation tropes.

I’m just interested in defining things and understanding things and I loved those movies, they’re absolutely fantastic and I could have gone off and covered, I mean, Godfrey Ho and the IFD cut-and-paste films Film Mark as well as another Hong Kong company doing that and the ninja movies that could have been something else because when we all moved into VHS and I go down to Brick Lane where there’d be a stall selling old VHSs which is where I got a lot of mine for 50p and you pick up these films like Scorpion Thunderbolt which is a Godfrey Ho cut-and-paste ninja film where they buy an existing Southeast Asian film and then cut some ninja scenes into it to be able to sell it as a ninja film and try and marry the two narratives.

I bought Scorpion Thunderbolt down Brick Lane, took it home, stuck it on my VHS having spent much of the day reading Hegel, it just blew my mind to have this complete insanity thinking where did this come from but then once you start watching a lot of those films you see how they’re put together and how some are better than others and I think, you know, back in the 80s when I watched that or maybe it was early 1990 whenever it was, I think it was issued on VHS here around 88, you know, whichever cut-and-paste film I’d seen would have been great.

I was just lucky to see what is absolutely one of the absolute best ones as the potluck of the first one that turned up when I was buying crap off a stall in Brick Lane and yeah it was worth writing about like a lot of music is worth writing about.

Genre Theory and Punk Rock

CF: Speaking of genre theory, in 1995 you wrote a book about punk rock called Cranked Up Really High – Genre Theory and Punk Rock which differs a lot from the usual canon of books about punk. Tell us more about your perspective on punk and punk rock.

SH: I wrote Cranked Up Really High in three weeks because I didn’t consider it worth spending a lot of time on a book on punk rock but having said that I probably had spent more than 20 years thinking about it and listening to the music. Obviously following on from Bruce Lee the next kind of major subcultural event for me was punk and we were waiting for a new kind of music to to come along.

I was 14 in 1976. I’d been into Mott the Hoople and they were on So It Goes so I thought I’ll watch that and it seemed like a good show. There weren’t that many episodes of the show and it wasn’t shown in all TV regions. I think it was only shown in one. It was done in Manchester Granada TV and it was shown on London Weekend. It could have been on Thames, but anyway I was in the London area for TV so we had this show.

I think it was possibly the last show in the series, I’m not sure but in August ‘76 they had the Sex Pistols on the show and I was kind of fascinated because there was the clothing and guitars had all sorts of things on them. There was a Karl Marx image which immediately grabbed my attention because I’d wind up the teachers at school by walking around with a copy of Das Kapital that I borrowed from the library and that really pissed off the teachers.

So I saw that and I didn’t know what Anarchy was at the time. I had to go to a dictionary and look it up because the Sex Pistols performed Anarchy in the UK and then I discovered all these bands. You start looking in the music press and you discover the Stooges and you kind of knew about Lou Reed because he had a hit with Walk on the Wild Side and kind of had some vague idea he’d been in some other band before but then you go back and hear all the Velvet Underground stuff, Patti Smith, also got into the Nuggets Lenny Kaye compilation of 60s garage rock at that time because there wasn’t a lot of punk music about.

It was also quite frustrating because I was always very young looking for my age so when I got on the bus until I was 26 I’d get a half fare without asking but that did mean that when you were trying to get into a venue that served alcohol where you were meant to be 18 you get turned away, so I remember being turned away and being particularly disappointed. I really wanted to see The Stranglers for some reason who I did see in 77 but before I managed to see them I can remember being turned away more than one gig for being underage.

But eventually I started getting into all the gigs and obviously I was following the music through the records as well in the music press and that was just perfect. Before I came across the Sex Pistols and Punk Rock on So It Goes I’d already become an anti-monarchist and a book I had my own copy of was called My Queen and I by Willie Hamilton which was a republican tract which I’d always placed on the top of my desk at school which was another thing that really pissed off the teachers.

When I went back to school for the autumn term September ‘76 there was me and one girl in my class who got into punk over the summer and no one else. And you know the teachers couldn’t believe it so they’d line you up for the uniform inspection. The whole thing was boys liked to wear wedges at that time which were heels to lift their foot off the ground to make them taller. So they’d measure your heels whereas I’ve got completely flat shoes and your hair as a boy was only allowed to come down to your collar.

And the fashion for boys was to have these hugely wide ties they’d make the knot as big as possible so I came back with shorter hair than everyone, straight trousers when everyone was wearing flares and ottered bags, flat shoes and 60s kind of very thin tie in the correct school colours so it was great that they’d go down the parade of boys to inspect their uniform and they got to me and they wouldn’t bother measuring my hair because they could see it didn’t break the rules and nor did the size of my tie because it was a specified width that the knot in your tie wasn’t allowed to go beyond but obviously with a very thin 60s tie in the correct school colour I wasn’t breaking the rule.

Nor were my completely straight trousers or flat shoes but somehow by respecting the rules this managed to piss off the teachers more than anything I could imagine so it was one of those great punk rock moments and you know being told where did you get that tie Home, that tie is absolutely ridiculous. Because the rules were designed for kids pushing it one way and by taking it to the other extreme which was what punk rock did, it was absolutely fabulous so from a subcultural perspective. That was my ultimate punk moment!

It was more exciting in ‘77 to see bands like Dictators or the Dead Boys from the States because obviously by that time I’d managed to blag my way into enough of the English bands that they didn’t seem so exotic but that uniform moment was like absolutely one of the best.

The history teacher who was a very nice young lady called Miss Banks being absolutely shocked that me as an intelligent boy could get into punk rock was very amusing as well and the fact that absolutely pissed off the teachers that I detested was even better! That was the start with punk rock but I went through the whole thing of listening to a lot of different bands and always after ‘77 never bothering really to see the bigger bands.

I did see The Clash of Victoria Park for the Anti-Nazi League carnival in ‘78 but that was pretty awful. The sound was awful, it sounds okay on the Rude Boy film, but The Clash aren’t really a band I like and also the Sex Pistols. The attraction was much more subcultural to me. The music doesn’t sound great.

I like something with a bit more of a kind of pop sensibility probably in terms of that kind of music or something else to make it rock. Always looking for what was going to be the next kind of interesting thing and what not too many people going to.

While I was still at school it was also a problem with having enough money to go to the gigs. I did do some out-school work but there was never enough money to do all the things I wanted. I left school in June ‘78 and then I had more money. Then I was really going to see a lot of bands. I was going to about four gigs a week as soon as I had the money to do that and among the bands that I really like would be Chelsea who are now still going strangely but I haven’t seen them since 1980. But I really loved them with their kind of classic late 70s lineup. The lineup changed a lot, James Stevenson on guitar, when he left I kind of lost interest in the band.

And also say bands like Adam the Ants who were very hardcore underground punk band at that time. That was the kind of bands that really interested me. Always looking for the smaller bands who you could see in a small small place, more intimate setting and if the band became big I stopped going to see them.

So obviously when Adam the Ants became a pop band and were really a very different group from the one I’ve been going to see I didn’t go and see them anymore. But I still listened to the records and with the Ants, to hear the songs that they played live you’d have to get bootlegs. They didn’t release a lot the songs for a long time although they did on their big pop hits put some of them on the b-sides which was quite amusing to see songs like Beat my Guest about sadomasochism on the b-side of a single that teeny poppers were buying. But to hear the original band doing it you needed a bootleg so I just followed through with that stuff and that maintained that interest.

In the 80s I was getting more into the kind of Electro, Hip-Hop, Go-Go, House kind of stuff which seemed musically more interesting and adventurous. I kind of gave up on what was coming up through the guitar based stuff in the 80s, but still listening to the old records and maybe checking out what was happening. And through people I knew ended up going to a lot of riot girl gigs in the early 90s, so I kind of kept up with that style of music, but it certainly wasn’t the only style I liked.

When I was at school the big musical subculture was Northern Soul for the hip kids and Disco for the less hip kids and I liked that music although my taste was a little bizarre and I didn’t realize that my taste veered more towards the mod kind of sound, the early Twisted Wheel on Northern Soul that was something I learned as I got older.

I just hated the way a lot of people wrote about Punk as well later on, so when you had Greil Marcus writing about Punk and the Situationists and talking about this thing called “the voice” which is like an idea of God, and talking about how it was no longer Johnny Rotten or Guy Debord talking. The voice had taken over…

I absolutely hated that kind of metaphysical bullshit and you know what the Situationists would call mystical cretinism basically as a way of interpreting both them and Punk Rock. I didn’t think Punk Rock from my experience of it had that much to do with Situationists either where people were making a big connection between it. So I just wanted to write a book with a different perspective and I wanted to look at how Punk Rock had maybe evolved dialectically.

So I’d liked a lot of the bands that fit into Oi! I’d loved Sham 69, Menace, Cock Sparrer you know, I’d loved those bands in in the late 70s. I wasn’t big on the Oi! scene when it started I didn’t go and see all those bands like The Last Resort and The 4 Skins in fact if you actually look at the gigs they did they didn’t even play that much, they weren’t really that easy to see but I wasn’t interested. I could have seen them if I’d wanted I didn’t have the interest. I heard the records I could see what they were about I preferred Menace.

But I thought it was worth writing about those more kind of smaller and also more working class orientated bands in a lot of instances. I mean the Ants got a lot of stick for being supposedly fascist which they weren’t. You know when Adam was partly Romany, Dave Barbarossa on drums was half black and half Jewish and they were like a working class band – although you could view Adam as having been slightly corrupted by his art school education, but that was something a lot of working class kids went through at that time. Not exclusively working class kids but he was a working class kid.

So I just wanted to write about punk from a different perspective and also say to me musically you know the Sex Pistols sound like boring rock music and I always loved the Captain Sensible quote about Anarchy in the UK when he heard it he fell about laughing because it sounded like a Bad Company demo with Old Man Steptoe on vocals. I mean I just thought that was one of the most no competition mate for your band The Damned. I just thought that was the most brilliant analysis of it.

Subculturally the Sex Pistols are extremely important to Punk Rock. As music to me they aren’t Punk and you know I might have thought they were Punk in 77 but you know I know who would want to even listen to the Sex Pistols, not me anyway. I mean apparently some people do but it’s you know so that was just to kind of get that different perspective and not talk about punk rock in this completely pretentious way and not talk about it in terms of mystical cretinism which was certainly what some of the people were doing.

In terms of you know books around that subject I mean I think the John Savage book on the Sex Pistols, England’s Dreaming is an absolutely amazing piece of research and a really useful book so I wouldn’t you know if you want to understand some of that history I wouldn’t bracket it the same as I would a Greil Marcus book or a lot of the other books but I just was astounded by the bullshit people were writing about punk rock and I wanted to write something from the perspective of a you know kind of ordinary kid who’d just grown up with it and then add in my dialectical take as well.

• Transcript of Part One of the interview with Stewart Home
• Articles by Stewart Home on datacide-magazine.com
• Stewart’s Youtube channel
• Stewart Home Society
• Wikipedia

SUPPORT DATACIDE – ORDER A COPY, TAKE OUT A SUBSCRIPTION OR MAKE A DONATION – You can do all this through the form on the right of this web page (on mobile devices scroll down), or by clicking HERE for more information and payment options. THANKS!

Related Posts