DEAD PUNKS SOCIETY

Reviewed - END OF THE CENTURY: THE STORY OF THE RAMONES"Norman Wisdom, Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee: good times!" So sang The Human League on their classic 1981 LP Dare. Who would have thought that little Norman would outlive those three founder-members of the mighty New York rock quartet The Ramones? Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields's documentary, featuring plenty of talking heads and a brief glimpse of Talking Heads, should have been an unalloyed pleasure, but, through no fault of the directors, the images are clouded by a stubborn fog of mortality.

Just when you have come to terms with the fact that 75 per cent of the original band is no more, the late Joe Strummer turns up to acknowledge the brudders' influence. A recent BBC documentary on Dad's Army had less to do with the dead.

Never mind. To paraphrase Woody Allen, The Ramones may not have achieved immortality through not dying, but their songs - explosive bursts of energy with titles such as Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment and Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue - should do the job nicely. Eternity may also welcome them for launching the fight-back against progressive rock, the most satanic musical genre ever to don spandex.

Virtually every documentary on the pre-history of punk contains the same sequence of the truly horrible Emerson Lake and Palmer torturing a mellotron during a week-long solo. That footage turns up again and it helps set the freshness and originality of The Ramones into relief. As Legs McNeil, the great chronicler of punk, remarks, this music "saved rock 'n' roll".

End of the Century, which was obviously made just in time, features interviews with all the principals. Detailing the continuing creative friction between singer Joey, a gentle liberal, and guitarist Johnny, a dour right-winger, the film, energised by plenty of agreeably scratchy concert footage, proves an invaluable record of a band whose success abroad was never equalled in their homeland.

The film-makers perhaps pay a little too much attention to the decades following the group's golden years in the late 1970s, but no sensible pinhead will want to miss this touching documentary. Hey ho! Let's go!