Johnnie Johnstone – Through The Crack In The Wall: The Secret History Of Josef K

Jawbone Press

Audiences love a debauched biography, be it the halfwit bacchanalia of Mötley Crüe’s The Dirt or never-ending tales of The Stones’ opulent excesses.

This is quite spectacularly not the vibe of Through The Crack In The Wall, Johnnie Johnstone’s tale of the legendary but unsung Edinburgh post-punk band Josef K. What you get instead is an earnestly written, lovingly researched analysis of one of British pop’s great near misses, but one of post-punk’s finest groups.

What the book does superbly is positioning the group as a product of their time period, whilst avoiding the great swathes of cliché that have swamped narratives of this era. It clarifies that, as much as punk opened the doors for bedroom Beefheart and Stockhausen obsessives, most of the groups that had any kind of commercial success were still largely in thrall to the glam tentpoles of Bowie and Roxy Music, as well as the tougher end of pub rock. It posits all this whilst articulating clearly how these influences percolated in the surrounding culture of the era, and how this created music that sounded so distant from its core initial templates.

It is these kinds of social histories that take precedence, primarily because the band aren’t exactly a treasure trove of anecdotes. Their largely ascetic lifestyle may have paid dividends in the long run, but it doesn’t necessarily add up to a barrage of stories. This, coupled with the band being marginally too surly in their heyday to give anything like psychological insight could lead to a dearth of anything interesting for anyone beyond the die-hards, but Johnstone’s later interviews with the band are more illuminating, more ready to afford insight and explore their emotions during those brief years the band were operating.

There is a certain assumption you are already a paid-up devotee of the band, not in the sense that Johnstone assumes the reader has extensive knowledge, more in the sense that he assumes the reader thinks they’re good. This means he allows himself to find interesting angles at broader histories. Most interesting is the perspective on the legendary Postcard Records. It is a story often told, but rarely from a band who quickly began to feel like an afterthought there. It feels a bit like telling the story of Creation Records from the point of view of Slowdive, and leads to a something properly insightful, and slyly emotional.

Biographies on the post-punk bands are by no means thin on the ground, it feels like it won’t be long until The Fall have their own section of Waterstones, but with a clear-eyed and affectionate tone that articulates a time with real verve, Through The Crack In The Wall provides a new insight into one of Britain’s truly underrated groups.

-Joe Creely-