proto-Titanic and post-Titanic

I've posted here before about Mick Farren's famous "The Titanic Sails At Dawn" polemic. Appearing in the NME's June 19 1976 issue, the piece is legendarily claimed to have played a precipitative role in the punk uprising. It identified a malaise in rock: the loss of its connection to "the streets" and "the kids" that traverse them; the recline and fall of a rebel folk sound into mere showbiz. And in the process it birthed a mini-genre of explicitly or implicitly Titanic-themed jeremiads, which cropped up in the pages of the NME over the next decade (as well as the pages of zines populated by NME-wannabes).I've also noted here that six months earlier Mick Farren had written a very similar - and to my mind, sharper - argument in the first NME issue of 1976. A piece that no one seems to remember, and for whatever reason, it didn't seem to have any precipitative effect. Timing is everything. Talking about timing... Well, here's a funny thing: turns out Mick Farren wrote yet another…