The Band, As Constituted

Seven figures in ruffs and doublets against a black ground, several with hair spiked upright, holding pear-bodied fretted instruments with wooden bellies; one grey-haired man raises his overhead
Seven players, four instruments, and the plate that breaks the file's own rule: these bellies are wood, one with a round hole cut in it, one with a rosette, two with straight slits. A Renaissance lute has a bowl built up from separate ribs and a rose cut into a soundboard between a millimetre and a half and two millimetres thick.

Two complete lyrics arrived with this file, along with a record sleeve, twenty-seven painted plates and the claim that Galileo Galilei fronted the most defiant punk band of the sixteenth century — electric lutes, drums built out of Renaissance materials, and a Church that came after him for it. The lyrics are printed below in full, because they are the only part of the file that is any good.

Take the century first, since it is the cheapest objection and it clears a great deal of ground. Galileo was born at Pisa on 15 February 1564, which leaves the sixteenth century thirty-six years to run. Everything he is remembered for falls in the next one. A sixteenth-century band would have had to break up before its frontman first pointed a glass at Jupiter, and its best-known number is about a discovery it could not yet have heard of.

A heavy-set man in a black robe with a gold-embroidered collar and a jewelled cross, seated against a large gold disc and playing a banjo, flanked by two small men in full plate armour with pink crests holding banjos, a large drum at the left
The frontman haloed, two armoured players and a drum. The instrument across his knees has a skin head stretched over a bracketed hoop and no bowl behind it, which is a banjo. The only word either lyric has for it is lute.

Then the instruments. Most of the plates in the file show the same object: a hoop, a skin head, a fretted neck, and no bowl behind it. The lute is not that. It had grown to six courses and beyond in the last decades of the fifteenth century and to ten by the end of the Renaissance, sheep-gut strings running over gut frets tied round the neck, a bowl assembled from separate ribs, and a spruce soundboard between a millimetre and a half and two millimetres thick, braced so as to leave the right hand room. That soundboard is the whole argument. It is designed to be heard across a room by people who have stopped talking. It is the least punk object in the history of European music, and a player retunes it between pieces.

Which is where the file steps over the joke it is standing on. Vincenzo Galilei, 3 April 1520 to 2 July 1591, was a working lutenist, composer and music theorist, and he was Galileo’s father. In 1563 at Venice he began studying under Gioseffo Zarlino, the ranking music theorist of the century, and in 1581 he published a dialogue attacking Zarlino’s theories — the tuning systems above all. He did not win it with rhetoric. He hung weights on lute strings of equal length and measured what came out, and what came out was that pitch does not follow the tension but the square root of it — so that to sound the fifth, whose interval is 3:2, the weights have to stand at 9:4. It is, on the record as it stands, perhaps the first non-linear mathematical description of a natural phenomenon anybody wrote down.

So there was a Galilei who took on the standing authority in his field in print, and settled it with a length of gut and a bag of weights, in the house where the boy was growing up. He simply is not the one the plates have drawn with the mohawk.

Heliocentric Heartbreak

The first lyric is given below as received, in five parts, with a plate to each. Nothing in it has been corrected, cut or reordered, and the line breaks are the file’s own; the only editorial act is the labelling of the parts, which the file supplied and which is the one thing in the submission that behaves like a band.

Florence streets, under Tuscan lies,
Rebels rise, truth defies.
Lutes in anger, voices crack,
Cosmic danger, no turning back.

— Verse 1
A covered stone bridge on a single arch over a green canal between tall ochre houses, a second arcaded bridge beyond it, four small figures standing in the bridge's central opening

Florence, as the file imagines it. The water is the wrong shape for the Arno, which is a wide shallow river with gravel bars rather than a walled channel; the plate has built Tuscany out of Venice.

Heliocentric, world’s pathetic,
Truth’s our orbit, heretic aesthetic.
Dreamers, screamers, edge of the stake,
Dance on the line of a cosmic mistake.

— Chorus
A painted wheel of gold concentric rings on deep blue, a radiant sun at the centre, small orange discs spaced round the rings, roundels of robed figures in the border, and bands of illegible lettering

A sun at the centre and everything else in rings around it. The bands carry lettering that is not a language in any hand; whatever this object is, nobody was printing it in Florence in 1610.

Earth stands still? That’s their drill.
Through our scopes, we seek thrill.
Strumming hard, drumming loud,
Stars won’t hum to the Vatican crowd.

— Verse 2
A night street between arcaded houses with lit shopfronts on both sides, a huge full moon hanging above a bridging arch at the end, figures in long robes walking away from the viewer

The moon here is a smooth disc with soft blotches on it. What Galileo drew in 1610 is the opposite: a ragged terminator, and peaks he put at four miles and more by measuring the length of their shadows.

Rebels inked with stars and sin,
Science loud, our punk spirit within.
Inquisitors hunt, but we won’t hide,
In truth, we surf, on reason’s tide.

— Bridge
A night canal between tall houses with crowds on both quays, and a broad orange fireball with a long tail crossing a star-crowded sky

A comet over the roofs, and the one part of the sky Galileo got badly wrong. Against a Jesuit who put the comets of 1618 beyond the Moon, he wondered in print whether they were an optical effect. They are not, and Tycho Brahe had the better method.

Lutes louder, drums our march,
In science, our arch.
In cosmic break, we stake our claim,
Galileo’s punk, forever aflame.

— Outro
A church interior; a white-bearded man in gilt armour and a red cloak holds a burning torch above his head with one hand and a drumstick over a large drum with the other, armoured drummers and burning drum heads around him

Two of the heads in this plate are alight, which finishes the drum. A head is skin held under tension and the tension is the instrument — the same fact Galileo's father proved on lute strings in 1581, applied here by a man setting fire to it.

The First Verse, and the City in It

A grey-bearded man with a tall red crest of hair, in a black coat with a broad white falling collar and crossed leather straps, playing a banjo; a brass finial in the form of a lily stands on a red-draped table behind him
The brass lily on the table is a giglio, the arms of Florence, and it is the one object in the plate that could have stood in the room. The thing on his knee could not.

Florence is the wrong city to start a rebellion in, and the lyric picks it for the sound rather than the geography. Galileo was born at Pisa, joined the family at Florence at ten, took the mathematics chair at Pisa in 1589, and in 1592 moved to Padua, in the territory of the Venetian Republic, where he taught geometry, mechanics and astronomy for the next eighteen years. Those eighteen years are the productive ones. He came back to Tuscany in 1610 as court mathematician to Cosimo II de’ Medici, whom he had tutored between 1605 and 1608, and the post is the opposite of an insurgency: it freed him from teaching. The rebellion was worked out in a republic and cashed at a court.

“Lutes in anger” is the one line in either lyric that is literally true of the family, and the file does not know it. The rest of the verse asks for a scene — a street, a crowd, an instrument used as a weapon — and the reason it cannot have one is that the whole affair was conducted on paper. What the record holds is a licence, a book, a summons, a deposition and a signature.

The chorus then reaches for the stake, and gets the wrong instrument. Giordano Bruno was burned alive in the Campo de’ Fiori on 17 February 1600, naked, his tongue clamped for his wicked words — but whether his cosmology had anything to do with the sentence is genuinely disputed, and one scholarly line holds that in 1600 there was no official Catholic position on the Copernican system at all, and that holding it was not a heresy. Galileo was never in that danger, and “heretic aesthetic” gets the grade wrong too. The formula used against him was vehemently suspect of heresy, which is a rank below being one, and in a court that ran on formulae the rank was the entire point.

Scopes, and What Was in Them

A painted cosmological wheel: gold rings on deep blue with a blue and yellow disc at the centre, four orange spheres set at equal spacing on the inner ring, roundels of robed figures round the border
Four bodies on a single ring, which is nearer the mark than the plate can have intended. Galileo's letter of 7 January 1610 is the first mention of them; he had three at first and the fourth within days, and naming them took longer than counting them.

Verse two is the good one, because “scopes” is doing real work. The first glass Galileo built magnified eight to ten times and the one he used for the observations magnified twenty, and with it he produced Sidereus Nuncius, printed in Latin at Venice on 13 March 1610 by the printer Baglioni. It reported three things. The Moon is rough and mountainous rather than a polished sphere, its terminator smooth across the dark regions and ragged across the bright ones, with peaks he put at four miles or more by measuring how far sunlit summits stood out from the shadow line. The Milky Way and the constellations come apart under the glass into hundreds of stars nobody had seen. And four bodies go round Jupiter.

That last one is where the anthem’s politics fall over. Galileo’s letter of 7 January 1610 carries the first mention of the Jovian moons; he called them Cosmica Sidera, Cosimo’s stars, and then, on a secretary’s advice, Medicea Sidera, so as to honour all four Medici brothers at once. Naming your discovery after your employer’s family is not an act of insurrection. It is a job application, and it worked. The names that survived — Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto — belong to Simon Marius, who had them from Kepler and printed them in 1614, and Galileo refused to use them for the rest of his life.

The observation that actually did the damage came at the end of 1610 and is not in the song at all. Galileo watched Venus run through the full set of phases, sent Kepler the anagram Haec immatura a me iam frustra leguntur to hold the priority, and published it in 1613. The Ptolemaic arrangement keeps Venus on the near side of the Sun, so it cannot ever show a full disc. One quiet observation, and the old system was not wrong on a point of interpretation; it was finished.

A vaulted hall with a large gilt armillary sphere hung on a cord above a round table; a white-bearded man in a blue mantle and black cap stands at the table holding a fine wire that runs up to the sphere, surrounded by some twenty men in red and black robes and academic caps
The sphere hangs on a cord and the man beneath it has hold of the cord's lower end. That is the most Galilean thing in the whole file: nearly everything he settled, he settled with a weight on a string or a ball on a board.

Two of his telescopes survive, along with the framed objective lens from the one that found the moons of Jupiter; they are in the Museo Galileo at Florence, on the Piazza dei Giudici, which took the name in June 2010 for the four-hundredth anniversary of the book. The middle finger of his right hand is in the same building, under glass. Whatever else the man became, he did not become a legend that stayed abstract.

Stars and Sin

A colonnade open to a night sky with a full moon in the left arch; a white-bearded man with an orange crest of hair, in a red mantle with a gold medallion, stands over a barrel of burning wood with both arms flung wide, watched by nine onlookers in Renaissance dress
The burning barrel, which is the wrong machine. The instrument used against the Dialogue was a list: it went onto the Index after the 1633 trial and stayed there until 1835, thirteen years after the theories in it had been allowed back into print.

Bridge and outro are the file’s manifesto, and the manifesto is where a real fact is available and unused. “Rebels inked with stars and sin” wants a subculture. What Galileo had instead was a printer and a decision about language.

The Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems came out at Florence in 1632, from Giovanni Battista Landini, with a licence formally approved by the Inquisition — and in Italian. That is the radical act, and it is a choice about who is allowed in the room rather than about what is true. Latin was the fence round the argument. Written in the vernacular and staged as a conversation between three named men, with Salviati for Copernicus, Sagredo as the intelligent layman and Simplicio holding the line for Ptolemy and Aristotle, the thing could be followed by anybody who could read at all. Nine years earlier, in The Assayer of October 1623 — printed at Rome and dedicated to the newly elected Urban VIII, who was then a friend — he had already written the sentence everything else hangs on: philosophy is written in the book of the universe, and it is written in the language of mathematics, in triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which one wanders around in a dark labyrinth.

The warning had been on file for sixteen years by then. On 24 February 1616 the qualifiers found heliocentrism foolish and absurd in philosophy and formally heretical; on 26 February Galileo was ordered to abstain from holding, teaching or defending it in any way whatever; on 5 March the Congregation banned the books that advocated it. The outro’s “forever aflame” is therefore the file’s one accurate prediction, though not in the sense it means. The prohibition burned on paper, for a long time, quietly, and by the calendar rather than in a square.

The Inquisition Inquisition

The second lyric runs to six parts and is the better of the two, in the narrow sense that it has an argument in it rather than a mood. It is printed here exactly as it arrived, and it is worth reading against the dates, because it is arguing with a court that never did any of the things it accuses that court of doing.

Crack the dawn with a rebel yell,
In the shadow of the Vatican’s cell.
They preach peace with a fist in glove,
We counter with tales from the stars above.

— Verse 1
A vaulted hall; some fifteen men and women in steel plate armour and black clothes stand in a row holding swords and thin blades before a huge red disc bearing a black eight-pointed star and a band of illegible marks

Nobody in the record wore any of this. The sentence handed down on 22 June 1633 came in three parts and none of them required a blade — an abjuration, a term of imprisonment, and a ban on the book.

Inquisition Inquisition, what’s your mission?
Spreading fear or seeking submission?
We question more, with punk rock vision,
In the face of your dark imposition.

— Chorus
A grey-bearded man in a black shirt and half-armour stands with both arms flung up beneath a glowing red compass star, in front of a long table carrying papers and small instruments; two armoured men are seated at its ends and a dozen more stand behind, and a black dog sits under the table

The pose the file calls the Two Spheres stage dive. The drop it refers to comes from Viviani's life of Galileo, composed in 1654 and not printed until 1717, and most historians hold that it never happened.

Torches lit in the square tonight,
Not for witch hunts, but for our fight.
Galileo’s lens, our beacon bright,
Against your might, we claim our right.

— Verse 2
A cobbled street at night under a band of Milky Way, a bell tower behind, a crowd in dark robes and white head-cloths standing in the roadway, and a fire burning in a shallow pan on a trestle at the right

The sky over these roofs is painted as a band of milk, which is what it looks like. Put a twenty-power glass on it and it comes apart into separate stars — the least contested of the 1610 findings, and the only one nobody argued with.

They say we’re heretics, for seeking the truth,
In a world that’s broken, we find our youth.
With every chord and every line,
We dismantle your divine by design.

— Bridge
A vaulted chamber; eight men in black leather and steel with starched white ruffs stand and sit round a plain table carrying two enormous open books, a glass of red wine and a quill, more figures behind them

Two open books and a pen, which is the correct instrument. What ended the argument in 1633 was a signature under a text of abjuration and a term of formal imprisonment that lasted one day before it became house arrest for life.

Under starlit skies, we make our stand,
With science and music, hand in hand.
Your questions loaded, our answers free,
In this inquisition, we’re the key.

— Verse 3
A long-haired bearded man in armour and a black cloak stands on a stone plinth with both arms out, holding a thin rod in each hand, before a great gold sun-disc; a woman in a red headscarf sits at a lectern to the left writing in an open book, and armed figures raise rods around him

The woman at the lectern is the only person in the plate doing what Galileo did for a living: writing down what happened, in order, while it was still happening.

So hear our words, and feel our beat,
In every alley, in every street.
The Inquisition Inquisition, can’t hold our ambition,
In the end, it’s you who’ll face the final inquisition.

— Outro
A vaulted hall on Corinthian columns; a knight in full plate with a gilt sunburst behind his head raises a sword behind a table strewn with torn papers, a white-bearded man in black with a gold chain gesturing beside him, armoured men seated along both sides of the table, a small white dog in front of it

The papers on this table have been torn across. In the actual case nothing was destroyed: the book went onto a list, and the further ban on anything Galileo might write was not announced at the time.

Torches, and Who Was Holding Them

A stone crypt; a young man in full plate wearing a spiked silver crown and a white ruff stands at a table with an open book, flanked by four men in red tabards and ruffs, one holding a brass disc and one a thin sword; a gilt standard hangs above
The book on this table is open at a blank leaf. Every text in the affair went the other way round: the Dialogue got its licence from the Inquisition and was printed at Florence in 1632 with permission, which is what turned the reversal into a scandal.

Second verse, second lyric, and the picture it draws is a raid. There was no raid. “In the shadow of the Vatican’s cell” is the image the record will not carry: the sentence of 22 June 1633 did include formal imprisonment, and it lasted a single day before being commuted to house arrest for life. He served it first at Siena with the friendly Archbishop Piccolomini, was allowed back to his villa at Arcetri in 1634, and died there on 8 January 1642, having in the meantime got another book out of the country.

The bridge is closer than it knows. “They say we’re heretics” is exactly the word the court declined to use. And “we dismantle your divine by design” describes something real, but the dismantling was procedural rather than rhetorical: he obtained the imprimatur, printed under it, and the licence did not survive contact with what had been licensed. That is a bureaucratic reversal, and it is the reason the case still gets argued about. Nobody had to break in. Somebody had signed.

A red-crested, white-bearded man in black plate armour with a heavy gold livery collar and a red cloak, holding a banjo whose neck stops almost at the body; a gold ewer on a table at the left
A livery collar of the kind worn by men in a prince's service, and an instrument whose neck stops at the shoulder. He did take a prince's service, in 1610, and it is what let him stop teaching for a living.

Then the outro turns the word round on the accuser, and this is the part the file gets right — but only if you are willing to wait three hundred years for the payoff, which is not a punk timescale. The general prohibition on books teaching heliocentrism came off the Index in 1758. The Dialogue itself came off in 1835. The Index was active from 1560 to 1966; its twentieth and final edition, in 1948, carried four thousand titles; and on 14 June 1966 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith announced that it no longer had the force of law or its penalties. In 1992 John Paul II named the error, and named it precisely: the assumption that our understanding of the physical world’s structure was imposed by the literal sense of Sacred Scripture.

As for the last word — the muttered e pur si muove, the line every version of this story wants — it is not in the trial record, and it is not in Viviani’s life of his master, written by the man who was closest to him at the end. It first turns up in English in 1757, in Giuseppe Baretti’s Italian Library, a hundred and twenty-four years after the event. A painting bearing the words and dated 1643 or 1645 surfaced in 1911 and turned out to be all but identical to a canvas of 1837. The best line in the story was written by somebody else, later, which is also true of most of the best lines in punk.

The Sleeve

There is one more object in the file and it is the most eloquent thing in it. A record sleeve came with the lyrics: a skull under a red halo, hands reaching in from a crowd of shouting men, and two words in gothic capitals across the top, in red, where a band’s name goes.

A record-sleeve design: a skull with long black hair and a bleeding tongue beneath a red halo and a red ring, hands reaching in from a crowd of shouting men below, and two words in red gothic capitals at the top that spell nothing
The sleeve, printed as received. The two words at the top are HOEIELION and PUNCK, and they are not words. It is the only object in the file that attempts to spell the thing it belongs to, and it cannot.

They read HOEIELION and PUNCK. Neither is a word in any language. The sleeve is the only item in the whole submission that tries to name the band, and it fails at the second letter — which is a fair summary of the file, and no worse than the rest of it: a Florence built out of Venice, a moon with no mountains on it, and lutes that keep turning into banjos.

What Actually Happened in 1976

A man with a red crest over long grey and black hair, in gilded half-armour and a dark blue coat, seated against a large gold disc and holding an orange mandolin and a banjo at once; two young people with orange spiked hair stand behind him in Renaissance dress
Two instruments and one player, and a gold disc behind the head borrowed straight from an altarpiece. The man it stands for spent the last eight years of his life confined to a house at Arcetri, the first stretch of the sentence having been served at Siena in the archbishop's palace.

Punk did not need a mohawked frontman either, and the actual history is more useful to this file than the one it invented. The subculture starts in New York in 1974 and in Britain in 1976. The Ramones’ first record came out in April 1976 on Sire. The Sex Pistols had already played their first gig on 6 November 1975 at Saint Martin’s School of Art, and on 20 and 21 September 1976 the 100 Club festival put them on a bill with the Clash, the Damned and the Buzzcocks. “Anarchy in the U.K.” was released on 26 November 1976 by EMI, reached number 38, and was the only Sex Pistols record EMI put out before dropping the band on 6 January 1977.

The machinery underneath all that is the interesting part, and it is the do-it-yourself ethic: records made and distributed without anybody’s approval, on labels the bands set up themselves, publicised in magazines they photocopied. Mark Perry started Sniffin’ Glue on 13 July 1976 with a print run of fifty; circulation reached fifteen thousand, and it ran twelve issues before he stopped it in August 1977. The famous picture of three chord shapes with the instruction to go and form a band was not his — it appeared in a rival fanzine, Sideburns, in January 1977 — and Sniffin’ Glue has been getting the credit ever since, which is punk enough.

The word for the mechanism is licence, and it is why the file’s premise is nearly good. Punk worked by removing one: no permission was needed to press the record. The 1632 case is that machine running backwards. Galileo did the licensed thing — imprimatur, named printer, open sale — and then wrote it in Italian, so that people outside the fence could read the argument. Both are decisions about who is allowed to be in the audience. Only one of them ended with a signature under an abjuration.

What Was Actually Loud

A grey-haired man with a high swept quiff and a white beard, in a black doublet with gold frogging and a red cloak, playing a banjo at a red-draped table; a small child in a steel cuirass with orange spiked hair sits watching at the left
A child in a made-down cuirass, watching. Galileo's eldest, Virginia, was born at Padua on 16 August 1600 and was placed in the convent of San Matteo just after her thirteenth birthday; 124 of her letters to him, written between 1623 and 1633, were found among his papers after his death.

The file ends on the claim that Galileo’s punk is forever aflame, which is a sentiment, and sentiments are cheap. What is actually still running is a plank.

After the ban, Two New Sciences was refused in France, Germany and Poland and finally printed at Leiden in 1638 by Lodewijk Elzevir, where the Inquisition’s writ was worth less. About fifty copies reached the bookshops of Rome in January 1639 and sold at once. There is no anthem in it. There is a wooden moulding twelve cubits long with a groove cut down it and one end propped up by a cubit or two, a bronze ball, and a vessel of water raised on a stand with a fine pipe soldered into its bottom, so that a run could be timed by the thin jet of water that came out of it. Repeated many, many times, at many slopes, it gave the distance travelled as the square of the time, with no appreciable discrepancy — and it is what the leaning tower is a poor substitute for, that drop being Viviani’s, composed in 1654, printed in 1717, and probably never performed.

Nobody screamed. A man rolled a ball down a board until the numbers stopped arguing with him, which is what his father had done to Zarlino with a lute string and a bag of weights fifty-seven years earlier. Two generations of the same household, one instrument each, and neither of them needed a chorus.

Plates: the remaining company

The four plates from the file that no part of the argument required.

Seven bearded men in black robes and white ruffs crowded round a table under a red cloth with six fretted instruments between them, a glass of dark drink and a bottle on the table, several wearing feathered crests and one a pair of curved gold horns
Seven players and six instruments round a table, with a bottle and a glass on it. The curved gold headpiece at the left belongs to no order, guild or faculty that has left a record.
Five men: a grey-bearded figure at the centre in a blue-grey robe with a heavy gold chain of office holding a lute, a crowned man behind him, and two men in brass armour with red mohawks holding round-bodied instruments
A chain of office at the centre, worn correctly. The court appointment it stands for is real — Galileo took one in 1610 from Cosimo II, whom he had tutored between 1605 and 1608.
A canal at evening between tall ochre houses with a bridge across it, two boats being poled along the water, and four figures in scarlet and black clerical robes standing on the quay at the right
Clergy in scarlet on the quay, watching a boat go under a bridge. The city under them is Venetian, which is the file's constant slip and, by accident, the right republic: Galileo's eighteen best years were spent in it, at Padua, from 1592 to 1610.
A grey-haired man with a swept-up crest and a long white beard, in steel and brass armour with rows of frogged fastenings across the breast, playing a mandolin with f-holes against an ochre wall
The fastenings across the breastplate are frogged like a cavalry jacket, and the belly is a plain wooden plate cut with two f-holes — violin openings on a plucked instrument, which makes it a twentieth-century mandolin. The beard is the only part of the plate trying to be 1610.