All is Vanity.

Magazine’s song The Light Pours Out of Me pre-dates Coen Young.

Much of front man Howard DeVoto’s lyrics had a snarky bitterness to them, a legacy to the ‘bonfire of vanities’ that punk yearned to be. DeVoto’s earlier musical life was with the Buzzcocks, whose anxieties were somewhat less existential – for them it was fast cars and orgasm addiction, although one of their ‘hits’ seems well suited to the current millennial slackers… “What do I get?”

With Magazine, the pH level of De Voto’s lyrics and music dropped a notch or two, the whole pitch became more layered and sophisticated as the nihilism of punk gave way to a slightly sullen brand of existentialism.

The theatrical negativity of punk was unlikely to have sustained much of Young’s attention. I’m well aware his energy is more Camus than Rotten and yet there is something ‘quietly punk’, if that makes sense, about his significant suite of works, collectively titled Studies for a Mirror. It is not simply that these works resist many of the orthodoxies and imagined responsibilities of a painting, rather it’s that they refuse a position and then set about questioning ours. They exist as endlessly mutable veils of refusal – evading form, and abnegating image.