WHAT DID YOU DO IN THE PUNK WARS, DADDY?
Most of my own experience of London punk rock, such as seeing the Sex Pistols and getting recruited by the NME, is in this article. It was commissioned by The Word in February 2007, thirty years after punk rock took hold in Britain. I adapted some material from In The City, the book I was currently writing.
To flesh out the piece I interviewed several key figures from each side of the barricades:-
Lemmy of Motorhead
Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues
Andy Partridge of XTC
Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle of Buzzcocks
Colin Newman of Wire
Eugene Reynolds and Jo Callis of The Rezillos
Rick Wakeman
We are in London in the dying days of 1976. Picture a youthful idler, fag perhaps in hand, perusing his end-of-year issue of the New Musical Express. Like all NME readers, he knows this has been The Year Of The Punk Rock Revolution. The paper’s irreproachably groovy writers have repeatedly told him so. And now, as 1977 approaches, London is calling to the faraway towns. Let dinosaur rockers quake in their caves, and sellers of flared trousers look to their business plans! Wise up, you rancid hippies! The old rock game was over. And from 1977, new rules applied.
Or did they?
Our idler was, in all probability, still wearing flares himself. His favourite band? I’m guessing Genesis. For all the trillions of music press pages he’d read about punk, his collection of actual punk music consisted of just one single: The Damned’s New Rose. Last week he increased his holding by 100 per cent, buying the Sex Pistols’ debut, Anarchy In The UK. To be honest, he didn’t quite get the whole punk concept. Still, here in the NME’s back pages were some reassuringly familiar ads; one for “Continental Clogs”, another for denim dungarees, and yet another for sweatshirts bearing these suggested slogans – “Sex Appeal: Please Give Generously” and “Hi! I’m Mandy and I love Starsky & Hutch”. (The first mail-order bondage pants were not yet a gleam in the rag trade’s gimlet eye.) And what was this? A write-up of the NME’s prodigiously hip Christmas Party! Philip Lynott, it’s reported, showed his punkish leanings by wearing a small swastika. Someone else was pleasured by a girl from a record company. Oh, and they had a stripper on, too.
I wasn’t there that year, but I rocked up to many NME parties that followed. Suggesting we book a stripper, or wearing a swastika, would by 1981 have become too shocking to contemplate. (I think the girl from the record company was still invited, though.) The point is that the Glorious Revolution of 1976 took a long time to work its way through the hearts and minds of all who later claimed allegiance. Actually, it wasn’t a revolution at all. Punk was more what Thora Hird might have termed “a hoo-hah and a to-do”. And mostly it happened a bit later than the history books suggest – in 1977 rather than 1976. The world did not tilt on its axis, to be sure. But it was an extraordinary time. And it brought to the world’s attention some extraordinary boys and girls. If punk wasn’t everything, I have to say that I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
******
A sign scrawled in Biro was stuck in the clothes shop window. “New band. No flares. No cripples. Ask for Sid Vicious.” It took some courage, in the Summer of 1976, merely to enter Malcolm McLaren’s Sex shop in the Kings Road. To ask for someone or something called Sid Vicious must have taken nerves of steel. Perhaps nobody did. I certainly didn’t. In the end, Sid joined his friend Johnny Rotten in the Sex Pistols, after they fired Glen Matlock.
The Sex shop sat beyond a kink in the Kings Road, just where the fashionable boutiques stopped and a drabber stretch began. Further along was a Victorian pub that gave the immediate area its deliciously apocalyptic name, World’s End. It’s the special magic of London that it throws up spots like this, where guttersnipes and aristos might mingle; it’s what gives you those uniquely London characters from, Marc Bolan to Russell Brand, and punk itself was a hybrid of theory-driven art school and fly-blown sink estate. I’d known of McLaren and his partner Vivienne Westwood for a few years, having visited the shop in its Teddy Boy incarnation Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die. Nearly opposite, and equally intimidating, was the shop of Bryan Ferry’s designer Antony Price. I haunted both places – in a world of denim baggies and cheesecloth mediocrity, they shone as beacons – though they were not remotely affordable.
Sex, especially, was a cultural crash-course, thanks to its bizarre assistants, the spooky mural of an upside-down Piccadilly Circus, and the range of strange shirts, emblazoned with pictures of Karl Marx and Third Reich insignia. There were pornographic trappings, too, but no atmosphere of sex itself. The key to it all was probably extremism, whether aesthetic or political. Even in 1976, when sensitivities were lower than today, Sid’s phrase “no cripples” looked unfeeling. But McLaren’s little charm school excelled in calculated offensiveness. “No flares” underlined the ideological purity of it all. There was not a punk movement, as yet, but I kept coming back to this shop because it felt like something – something undefined – might kick off here.
Then I saw the Sex Pistols and, finally, everything made sense.
Here is how it happened. Oxford Street is long and straight, like a New York Avenue, and facing due west it offers glorious sunsets. One evening I turned from the blood-soaked sky that hung above the site of Tyburn Gallows (the broken bodies of martyrs and malefactors were dragged along this way to meet their grisly end). Stepping down to an old jazz joint the 100 Club, I was expecting to see a band called Roogalator (who were pretty good, though their cutesy name already smelt of 1975). For some reason, however, Roogalator were not playing and the Sex Pistols were. These Pistols were incredible.
Tourists stood about the wide, shallow room and stroked their beards uneasily. They wore clogs and dungarees like the ones advertised in the NME. Some fool probably had a sweatshirt saying “Sex Appeal: Give Generously”. Almost nobody in the audience was dressed “like a punk”, because the style was not yet established. There were some Roxy Music/David Bowie types, and I remember girls in Cabaret styles, with swastikas on their cheeks. Most of the crowd were average rock boys, in cap-sleeved T-shirts and wide jeans, drinking lager from plastic beakers. Only the Pistols, on stage, were conspicuously dressed by Westwood and McLaren. And when they began to play, the noise bore out the same spirit of violent dislocation.
Johnny Rotten sang an old Small Faces hit, changing its lyric: “I want you to know that I HATE you baby.” There was a Muppet drummer behind him, a thug guitarist on the right and a perky bass player on the left. Another song was something to do with anarchy; it name-checked paramilitary groups from Ulster and Angola. The sound was chaotic but brutally exciting. It bristled with references to life outside of the self-regarding Californian rock consensus. It seemed desperate, pinging between extremes of euphoria and anxiety. If the tunes were crude, they were stirringly melodic. And between numbers, Rotten hung limply from the mike-stand, dazed and panting. He was always staring, but at nothing. He kept blowing his nose: I‘d never seen anyone do that on stage. It was extraordinarily hot in that basement. Now stupendously bored, he stood upright and looked around for Malcolm: “Mow-currmmm! Mow-currmmm! Can. I. Have. A fakkin’ drink. Pleeeeeze…”
Then he slumped, suddenly, like a firing squad victim. “Rasta-faaarrrr-iiiiii,” he groaned, weakly. The truth is that nobody in the whole room understood what they were watching. I’ve seen an old newsreel of Elvis Presley on stage, young and outrageous, and the audience are laughing – actually laughing – because they hadn’t yet learned what rock’n’roll was supposed to be. So it was with those Sex Pistols shows. Some laughed, some fled. Most of us just stood there, transfixed. Fascinated. Perplexed. Here, indeed, was a terrible beauty being born. Or maybe still-born. Who could say? And the next week I came back for more.
A couple of times that summer I got the same Northern Line tube home as Johnny Rotten, who sat by himself, drained and vulnerable. Punk was still a secret thing, and Rotten unknown. To everyone else in the carriage, I think, he looked like a disagreeable little weirdo. His hair alone was a sort of provocation – short and turbulent instead of long and placid. The narrow collar, the skinny tie, the Steptoe trousers, were all at odds with everyone else. None of it should matter much, I know, but there was a menacing atmosphere in Britain back then. Lots of people had a feeling 1977 would not be good year. There was tension across the country, and the Sex Pistols’ singer – that runty, furtive, vaguely disturbing boy – would become a sort of lightning rod in the storms that lay ahead.
One forgets, in time, how much hatred was swilling around in those days. Some of it found expression in street politics, of the left and the right. On tube trains we wore out our thumbnails trying to scrape away the horrid little stickers the National Front put everywhere. They used good glue. There were always strikes, and picket lines, which turned into pitched battles. There was inflation, unemployment and a sterling crisis every two weeks. The Labour government seemed old and confused. Talk of a right-wing coup was taken quite seriously, even at Westminster. And the communists were always presumed to be plotting something. For the first time since World War II, there was a general sense that something drastic was about to happen. And, what’s more, had to happen.
Punk was brewed in that environment, and to begin with you didn’t know which way it might go. Culturally it appealed to a mini-generation – the later contingent of the baby boom – whose outlook was shaped by darker influences of the early 1970s (A Clockwork Orange, Ziggy Stardust, sexual decadence), rather than the optimistic idealism of their hippy elders. You had heaviness on the streets, and Nazi chic in trendy circles, both of which attached themselves to punk. The far right and the broad left competed for punks’ loyalty, and though the Sieg Heilers lost out eventually, the result was far from guaranteed. When the NF marched in strength through London it tended to concentrate the mind. Flirting with swastikas for the sake of style no longer looked very clever. In 1977 the politics of race, emblemised by the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism, proved decisive in swinging the punk vote leftwards.
Soon there were routine denunciations of rich “rock czars” who’d chosen to live in tax exile. Slowly punk was forming a distinct look and a particular point of view. Some were orthodox leftists, others adopted the actual creed of anarchism. A lot of us were hypnotised by reggae’s Biblical militancy. Others again were simply stylists – butterflies, not Bolsheviks. Where the rhetoric reached unanimity was in its contempt for the musical establishment. The Rolling Stones were especially disliked; Eric Clapton condemned; prog-rockers ridiculed. The only traditional rocker of much standing was probably Bruce Springsteen, but his career was stalled by legal matters in the punk years, which kept him out of the war-zone. John Lennon, likewise, who might have held some sway, spent the late ’70s in New York isolation. The credible elder brother, really, was David Bowie. In these years he made three LPs (Station To Station, Low and “Heroes”) that lacked nothing by way of anguish and bleakness, not to mention downright strangeness. They immunised him from charges of superstar complacency.
And of course 1977 was the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. The whole nation was suddenly bedecked in Union Jack bunting, which punks instinctively rejected. They’d already become an outcast tribe, after the Sex Pistols’ notorious appearance on Bill Grundy’s early evening show in December 1976 – the night Malcolm McLaren would later term The Big Bang. Add their anti-Jubilee leanings and punks became an endangered species, physically, even as the commercial world woke up to their money-spinning potential. Ultimately, however, the doom of the punk movement would not come from the fists of bigots, but the fatal bear-hug of show business.
******
Punk changed many lives before it died, including mine. Back in the summer of ’76, my head still spinning from those 100 Club shows, I answered an NME ad for “Hip Young Gunslingers” to join its staff. After posting the required sample review, I made the short-list of 16 from around 1,000 hopefuls and trooped off to the publishers’ ghastly high-rise office to be interviewed. My interrogator, the late Tony Tyler, correctly surmised I was nobody’s idea of a gunslinger, but deemed me young and hip enough to write for the paper – almost certainly because I kept insisting the still-unsigned Sex Pistols were the most important band in the world. I doubt that he agreed, but it was what the NME wanted to hear. It told them nothing about your musical taste, but everything about your tribal affinities. Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill got the first staff jobs; I was taken on later. Thanks to punk rock and the Sex Pistols, I have earned a living from writing half-baked nonsense about pop music ever since.
Through ’76 and ’77, punk spread outwards from London to the towns and hamlets of Great Britain and Ireland. From Manchester to Londonderry it struck root and produced local variants, some of them truly inspired. Boys and girls adopted the look as best they could – the first mail-order bondage trousers were beginning to appear – and some of them formed groups. Then there were the existing bands, like The Jam in Woking or XTC in Swindon, who seized the moment to re-define themselves. These were among the great bands to come out of punk, because they were not just imitations of the Pistols. Too many others took punk to mean a template, instead of a licence to create your own ideas. Grim it was, in those times, to hear Northern boys singing in a Cockney whine, as if Johnny Rotten’s voice was the only type allowable.
From penthouse and pavement, the West London aesthetic dominated punk in its early years. (Its dull East London counterpart, called Oi!, came a few years later.) As XTC’s Andy Partridge recalls: “To our managers at the time, our not coming from London filled them with horror. They knew that I could hide my Swindon accent better than the others, so they said ‘Right, you do the interviews.’ When the others opened their mouths it was like The Troggs Tapes. We were told not to say we were from Swindon. But I actually liked coming from a non-place. It kept us out of the rabble.”
Not everybody took to it, of course, but you seldom hear them talk about it. It’s like the French Resistance: after the war, everybody seemed to have been in it, when clearly they couldn’t have been. Chief among the champions of Vichy Rock, so to speak, was the defiantly old-school Derek Jewell, rock critic of the Sunday Times. On 28 November, 1976, he wrote: “Punk rock is the generic term for the latest musical garbage bred by our troubled culture, British and American… Punk is anti-life, anti-humanity. You will probably hear much more about it, although not from me, for it will be exploited by writers desperate not to be thought ‘old’ and record companies without shame. When it dies, it will not be mourned.”
In the Melody Maker, Allan Jones declared: “Honestly, if either Patti Smith or Johnny Rotten represents the future of rock – and I don’t think they do – then I’m off with the old lady to the air raid shelter until it all blows over.” Meanwhile on Sounds’ letters page, an unimpressed reader frowned: “I consider it somewhat of a joke that the [New York] Dolls should be compared to such notoriously incompetent no-talents as The Ramones and Sex Pistols.” So wrote young Steven Morrissey, from Manchester.
If rock was based on rebellion, punk rock was the first internal rebellion against rock itself. It sought not only to change music, but savaged the system and its figureheads. Established stars responded in different ways. Phil Lynott embraced the new wave (his band Thin Lizzy, like Mott The Hoople and The Faces, were the sort of laddish outfit it was hard to condemn as aristocratic and out of touch). Ray Davies wrote a smirking satire, Prince Of The Punks (“he acts tough but it’s just a front”). Lemmy of Motorhead says: “The punks loved us. The only reason we weren’t in that lot was because we had long hair, so obviously we must be heavy metal. That was the thinking, but a lot of kids heard us without seeing a picture so they thought we were a punk band. Whatever. I always thought we had a lot more in common with The Damned that we did with Judas Priest.
“I used to love The Damned,” he continues. “I went down to the Roxy to find out about the punk number and all these punks are sitting there with needles through everything and I walk in with me flares on. I’m at the bar and this voice behind me goes, ‘Hawkwind! I used to sell acid at your shows.’ It was Johnny Rotten. He used to sell acid at the Kings Cross Cinema, when he had long hair and a big Army great-coat.”
Justin Hayward of The Moody Blues, who were by 1977 the least punk band imaginable, was stolid and tolerant: “Oh I loved all of that. I didn’t feel it as a threat. We were so far along our own road that it didn’t really affect us. That was the time when we were having mega success in America. Just as there was an explosion of young people making music in the ’60s it happened again in the ’70s with punk. And I was proud of it because I was English. In America punk was more of a fashion, whereas being English I really identified with the boys and the girls in the tower-blocks, or even the lower middle class like I was. I could see it. Sid was so fantastic, and for it all to end so tragically… but it had to, I suppose. His My Way: if I were able to, without people just laughing at me, I’d put it in my Top 10, it’s a masterpiece.”
Weep ye not for the “dinosaur” bands”; as Rick Wakeman says, they adapted and survived (“there was always somewhere in the world you could go and play”). Spare a thought, instead, for the baby bands whose tender growth was crushed through bad timing. Lest we forget: Racing Cars, The Count Bishops, Cado Belle, Deaf School, City Boy, Easy Street… Or the groups who were nearly punk but not quite punk enough: Eddie & The Hot Rods, The Hammersmith Gorillas… And admire the dexterity of bands who were plainly not punk at all but somehow smuggled themselves on board like stowaways: The Stranglers, The Police…
In fact, once the punk movement grew out of its nihilist early phase, through 1977 it broadened quickly and was increasingly called New Wave. By lowering the barriers to entry, it had liberated raw talents that might otherwise have gone unheard: The Clash, Buzzcocks, The Undertones… And by overturning standard notions of glamour, it raised the wire for some invaluable misfits to scramble underneath: Elvis Costello, Squeeze, Joe Jackson… None were punk, but punk made their success more possible. (For my NME trial I’d written a tribute to Kilburn & The High Roads, a cult pub-rock band; I never foresaw their elderly, disabled front-man Ian Dury ending the decade as a Smash Hits pin-up.)
Was it a sex-less phenomenon? Historians have judged it thus. Although McLaren’s shop was called Sex and displayed rapist masks and T-shirts of well-endowed cowboys, the implication was always of contempt for eroticism. A few new female acts – The Slits, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex, Ludus in Manchester – used the new atmosphere to thrive outside of the sex-kitten strategies of predecessors like Suzi Quatro and The Runaways. Feminists often approved of punk. And the most successful punk girls, namely the early Pistols follower Siouxsie Sioux and the New Wave star Chrissie Hynde (who had once worked in Malcolm’s shop) had a hard, assertive edge to them. All the same, human nature is enduring. Twice at punk gigs in the Nashville Rooms, my wife was colourfully propositioned by Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols. At the same venue, she was invited by Iggy Pop to accompany him and Elvis Costello to the latter’s flat “to play some records”. As we say today, “Yeah, right”.
And now it’s all as distant from us as World War II was in 1976. People pay lip service to the punk legacy, but it’s amazing how much the new groups resemble punk’s arch-enemies. The Feeling, The Darkness, Orson, Scissor Sisters… reading their press you find them approving of, or being likened to, The Bee Gees, Queen, Wings, Supertramp and Elton John. Even Madonna has just had an Abba phase. As insurrections go, punk was a bit of a flop. And all those Stuff The Jubilee T-shirts were nostalgic oddities by 2002, when Queen Elizabeth racked up yet another 25 years. More hurtfully still, I once heard Bob Geldof suggest the true political heir of punk was Margaret Thatcher -– individualist, iconoclast, slayer of institutions, headbanger and all-round go-fuck-yourself specialist.
Still, for a time, it all added to the gaiety of the nation. A hoo-hah and a to-do. I know Bob Harris got beaten up in a nightclub, just for the crime of being Bob Harris, and nobody wants to see that happening again. There were some thrilling records made, a vast amount of rubbish talked, some careers curtailed and various scoundrels handed a meal-ticket. The self-destructive Sid, having made the punk classic My Way, destroyed himself in February 1979, which was the true ending of punk. But as the great Nik Cohn once wrote of Merseybeat: “seen now only as a farce, an embarrassing lapse from sanity… Still, I enjoyed it. Right now, I wouldn’t mind swapping.”
ANDY PARTRIDGE (XTC)
Thirty years ago! I feel so old. I’m sat here on the sofa and my prostate woke me up twice last night. I’d be dead wood in a punk universe – in fact “dead wood” is what punk meant. Or “the anal playboy of the king-pin in prison.” The Americans probably used “punk” in that “worthless wood” sense, because they carried on a lot of old English words that we forgot. Anyway what do want to dig all this up for? Let sleeping Slaughter & The Dogs lie, I say!
In 1976 I felt very disconnected from the norm. I tried to make the band look modern; I customised a white shirt by tearing little triangular bits out of it and writing “Rip” under each one. I had a black tie which I cut short and wrote in white paint “Snip”. We did gigs wherever we could, but not at the places where journalists and the music industry would hang out and say “Ooh, they’re good.” So people thought we were comedy music, playing short, noisy songs without 20-minute drum solos. It was the time of mud-sodden loons with the bottoms rotted off, and ex-Army greatcoats and shoulders hunched to make the hair look even longer. I know it sounds stupid but I wanted a new world. Everybody of a certain age felt they wanted their own thing, not this flatulence.
For wearing the clothes I wore in ’76 and ’77 I was threatened in my home town a lot. You’d be walking along and a lorry would pull up, the window down: “You punk bastard!” and they’d spit at you. And you’d think, “What do I represent that upsets them so much?” Was it to do with the Jubilee? Not in my case. How very English to get annoyed about royalty. It was too far removed from me to get annoyed about. Why get annoyed about the Queen? She was just a harmless old lady.
In fact I thought the whole political thing was complete nonsense. When things really blew up in ’77 all these pretend-political statements got put into music and I thought that was fake: “Let’s talk about Yoof! Unemployment!” It was horribly fake. When you’re that age you want to pull girls, drink beer and make some noise. Politics was from another planet, it was for older people. But the country was a hot house. England was shut in like Kew Gardens’ palm-house, and you could notice the growth in inches per day. Bands were forming and disbanding like amoeba on speed.
The more headlines it got, punk was like a big dumb battering ram that banged the door down and suddenly anything that came through was considered punk. If you played accordion in 1977 you were punk accordion. Or a pub R&B band became punk-pub. Punk-opera! Punkabilly! Everything had to be squeezed through, like a Play-Do Fun Factory with only one shape. And I disliked all that.
Was it a good thing? It was a necessary thing. Like any music movement when you look back, the majority is rubbish and 10 per cent is really good and fresh and will stand up for ever. But so necessary and unstoppable. Back then there was only Top Of The Pops and The Old Grey Whistle Test, which you sat through in disgust because it was Rita Coolidge or some Eagles knock-off, and you had to find bits and pieces where you could.
But now there’s the availability of pre-chewed pap to keep everyone happy. I must admit I want kids to possess their own music and I don’t see that spirit now. I mean the do-it-yourself, grab it, skin it and wear it yourself. Kids today. No rebellion! Too busy playing with their Game Boys. Couldn’t afford Game Boys in my day! You had to make do with your penis.
STEVE DIGGLE AND PETE SHELLEY (BUZZCOCKS)
Steve Diggle: 1976 was a powerful year. I remember growing some tomato seeds in my Dad’s back garden and they grew just like punk rock did. It wasn’t even a garden, it was just clay, really, and I didn’t think they’d grow but they did, all over the place, and to me that was the Biblical thing: the tomatoes have grown and we’re gigging with the Sex Pistols.
Pete Shelley: Howard [Devoto] and I were doing Iggy Pop songs and then we read about the Sex Pistols doing a version of No Fun, so we thought, Good, there’s someone else. Cos everyone else was just standard rock. I was on the National Union of Students committee and I got the train fare to London for a meeting, then Howard said we could borrow a friend’s car and use the money to try and find this band. So we set off and scoured a copy of Time Out but there was no mention of any Sex Pistols playing. So we rang the NME and I believe we spoke to Nick Kent, and he didn’t know of a gig but said their manager had a clothes shop in the Kings Road. So we arrived just as the shop was closing up. Malcolm was bemused by these people from Up North trying to find the Sex Pistols. But they were playing that weekend so we drove off and we saw them. It was a revelation: it was the kind of music that we were aspiring to. The next night we talked to them and Malcolm said he wanted to get gigs outside of London, so we said we’ll try to get you on at the Bolton Institute of Technology, but they weren’t interested so we put the gig on ourselves.
SD: I used to live in a house with people who took acid and I thought, It would be great to see a band like The Who again, with three-minute songs, that smash up their guitars. That concept was way, way gone, it was all about Yes and Emerson Lake & Palmer. But I wanted to be in a band that was relevant to our generation with coming up for a million on the dole. I was on the dole myself cos I was a conscientious objector to work, but in the meantime I was in the library reading poets like William Blake and trying to write music. Next thing I met Pete and Howard and away we went. There was two gigs at the Free Trade Hall, within three weeks of each other; Pete Shelley was collecting tickets on the door and I was outside waiting to meet this guy to form a band like The Who. Next thing Malcolm McLaren approaches me and says, “They’re inside, the Sex Pistols.” And I said, I’m gonna form a band like The Who and he says, “Well, the Pistols do Substitute.” He took me in and I met Pete and we had a rehearsal the next day. We plugged in the one amp and to quote Yeats a terrible beauty was born, screaming and shouting.
PS: We weren’t part of any Manchester music scene, we didn’t know anybody else, so it was a surprise that there were other people who liked that kind of music. They wanted to do their own bands but didn’t know how. “There must be a law against it”: that kind of mentality. But then you realise that there’s nothing stopping you but a lack of imagination.
SD: So we played at the second Pistols gig three weeks later, we opened up for them, and that was where the punk rock atom was split, even more than London, because all the London journalists wrote about the Pistols and about a local band, the Buzzcocks, which they didn’t expect. So that was groundbreaking in making local scenes. People realised they could have their own punk scenes in their own towns, it wasn’t just about going to London on your hands and knees looking for a deal.
PS: The fact it turned out the way it did beggars belief, but it was screaming to happen. The best inventions are the ones where people go, Why did nobody else invent this?
SD: Once the Daily Mirror got hold of it and it was all plastic bin-liner parties at colleges, and it was all seen as a bit of a fun, then I thought the initial force and questioning was disappearing and it turned into a parody. But it changed my life, and the audience. It took me a while to come to that conclusion: for many years people would say, as if you were Jesus, Well show me how it changed, turn the water into wine. But it was an intangible thing, a feeling, and people you meet to this day, in TV or wherever, say, “If it wasn’t for punk rock I wouldn’t be doing this.” People took a spirit from it. The whole country was shaking from “What’s this punk rock going to do?” It was like a life-threatening assault on the senses.
PS: It was a very exciting and creative time. I remember when I went with Steve to see 24 Hour Party People I said, If I’d known it was going to be that important I would have paid more attention.
COLIN NEWMAN (WIRE)
At some point in ’75 I’d cut my hair and started wearing straight trousers. I remember turning up at a party and being told I looked like a convict. There was something oppositional. There was this whole sense that a new music was coming but nobody knew what it sounded like. You couldn’t hear any examples.
Punk was a fantastic media hype. It’s hard to imagine that Britain had four weekly music papers; it was your major source of cultural information if you were a young person; you couldn’t get it from the TV or radio. It was American punk at first, The Ramones and Patti Smith, Jonathan Richman. That was exciting and actively deconstructing pop music. In 1976 New York and London were quite close, culturally; there are points when they touch or move apart. The Ramones had this cavalier attitude, they were like heavy bubblegum, and that was fantastically transgressive at the time.
My friend arranged for the Pistols to play at Middlesex Polytechnic. There are certain bands who are like a line in the sand, you’re either with them or against them. It’s not about whether they’re any good or not, it’s a cultural identifier. And that kicked in in ’76.
By the time Wire was starting up it was already obvious that there were lots of punk bands, so we were thinking about being the next thing. The Sex Pistols were hugely entertaining, they were in many ways a comedy band, cartoon-like. But it hasn’t aged well. By the time Pink Flag came out, in late ’77, it was obvious that you wanted nothing to do with that, dear. You distanced yourself from the pack. British bands tend to be long on style and short on content; the great British things that have longevity tend not to come out from those movements.
The interesting thing was post-punk, a way of looking at the world that irrevocably changed in ’76 and ’77. You had to do more than say you were new, you had to be new. That was the energy of post-punk, that produced the biggest bands world-wide. I really don’t subscribe to any concept of a movement; it’s rubbish. It just remains the easiest way for four spotty boys or girls to get in a room and make a very satisfying noise on a basic level. In the ’80s early techno was also a kind of punk rock of its age, where people can get the technology cheaply enough to make a noise. You always have to have that entry-level music. People of 19 and 20 may not have much money and if you want to make your impact you’re going to choose whatever comes easiest. Today I suspect it might be folk music.
Punk was also responsible for creating the next generation of dinosaurs. No punk, no U2. Or Simple Minds. But that’s just par for the course. I refuse to say that any one period of youth culture is superior to any other. The one that you experienced is obviously going to be important to you.
Punk created possibilities, however, even for bands to play live. A guy a few years older than me said, “You are doing covers, aren’t you? You won’t get anywhere with original material, you won’t get gigs.” That was the mind-set, and punk cleared that away. I remember seeing The Jam, who had come up from the working-men’s clubs and they were still doing Route 66. They were a turn, basically.
I thought the Pistols handled the comeback thing so badly; people were hungry for them to come back and be good. Instead it was, “We’re just trying to be clever and rip everyone off.” It’s sad, that attitude deprived the world of something that could have been interesting. I know so many people at that gig who were disappointed. Everyone has to deal with the legacy of what they’ve done, and if people genuinely loved it then don’t fuck with it. You can do anything you like but just don’t be crap.
EUGENE REYNOLDS AND JO CALLIS (REZILLOS)
Eugene Reynolds: We were in Edinburgh when it happened. We were already playing in a band and though we fell under the auspices of “punk rock” we really weren’t. It wasn’t like we heard the Sex Pistols and thought, Oh, we must do that. But it helped give validation to what we were doing. We just thought, Hold it, there is something happening that is very similar to what we’re doing. I was walking around in white winkle-pickers from the 1950s, with green drainpipe trousers and wraparound glasses, because I liked that look, and Fay [Fife] was wearing mini-skirts and Mary Quant eye make up when people thought it was nuts. But we wanted to be different.
Then, to be told by people who were wearing de rigueur clichéd punk clothes that we weren’t real punks, you just thought, Oh fuck off, you don’t know anything. I think Malcolm McLaren represented the most commercialised aspect of it. Maybe the Sex Pistols at the time didn’t make much money but the way Malcolm McLaren and Boy and all that thing was managed it was about making money. It was packaged. And once a movement becomes pigeon-holed then it’s dead. But we’ve never changed our ways, we’re just the same as we always were. Before 1976 you’d hear American acts like the MC5 or The Dictators, but you didn’t think of it as a movement; we were all for taking influences from everywhere and reinventing it. Before it became defined by fashion, you had people in shirts with Rezillos written on them but also Motorhead or Deep Purple.
Jo Callis: Once you got into the provinces and out of town, kids didn’t differentiate. You were allowed to do it all, whether it was punk or heavy metal. You’d see guys with denim jackets that said Status Quo and The Clash, in felt-tip pen, which was quite sweet. And you’d play out in the Borders of Scotland and there’d be guys apologising because they “didnae have the gear”: “We’re sorry, we cannae buy it in Castle Douglas.” They’d turn up in those 1970s suits with the big flappy collars. Brilliant.
ER: We’d had all the power-cuts, the work-to-rule and the three-day-week, and when we were touring with The Rezillos there’d be a firemen’s strike going on. And in a way, though it was all disruptive, you kind of miss all that. People just roll over and accept it now, it’s spun to them in such a way that it’s in their best interests. And nobody objects. After punk happened, from the music it would spin over into other parts of the media: magazines springing up, new people presenting TV programmes, little things like that. I suppose the downside is you start getting the commercial versions of what was street fashion in Miss Selfridge, but what the heck. The thing I loved living in Scotland was you’d see bunches of guys walking down the street in all their punk gear, not bothering anybody, just having a bit of a laugh on a Saturday afternoon. Whereas a few years before, they’d all have been in gangs, stabbing each other. Now they had something that galvanised them, that gave them a bit of purpose.
JC: For something that had that bad reputation of being violent, it was anything but.
ER: There had to be a smack in the gob for all those older bands, even if you end up being a bloody dinosaur yourself. Once you’ve been around long enough you become your own trademark and you deserve a smack in the gob from another band. It was all kicking against that, and it was interesting to hear established acts bemoaning that they couldn’t get a gig anywhere and no one wanted to do a record deal with them. It just collapsed over night, when punk came along no one was interested in that prog rock stuff. Not that it went away, but it certainly took the wind out of their tyres for a long time. It was back to basics and great music could be written with three chords, without fancy time signatures and all those histrionics.
JC: It helped create local scenes, too. When you had the Goth thing and the Bowie/Roxy nights mid-week at nightclubs, which were the platform for the ’80s New Romantics, you wouldn’t have had all that but for punk having happened just prior to it. It was self-styled, you made it up for yourself and that carried through into everything after that: post-punk industrial or Brit-funk or whatever. And there’s really only the Goths left now.
RICK WAKEMAN
We were aware of a change, which normally happens every 10 years. What came before prog rock were the pop bands, like Gerry & The Pacemakers, from a generation of groups who had come in and killed the crooners stone dead. When prog rock came in, that killed the pop bands. Then punk came and killed prog. I always look on music as the first thing that anyone really owns in their life. You inherit what your parents liked, but you don’t want that, so you try to kill it and discover something of your own.
So we knew something was going to happen, though I don’t think we expected the sheer vitriol that was directed towards anyone who could tune their instruments. This was an all-out attack. Punk didn’t completely kill off prog but it put it in its place. What was interesting that sales died overnight. Many bands went into retirement for a long time. That is, the bands who could afford to – those of us with various divorces couldn’t. But there was always somewhere in the world you could go and play. As Pete Townshend says, There’s always someone who wants you. South America, Italy, Eastern Europe, you could always work.
Certain bands from that era have stood the test of time. I thought The Clash were brilliant, and The Tubes. But it was a strange time. I’ve read a few articles by musos and they’ve said rather nice things about Yes. But the music press was suddenly taken over by a very young group of people who were promoting what was new as opposed to reporting what was happening. People were being told by the press, “You must like this and hate this.” You survive in the long term but it’s a real wake-up. Life is good and you’re doing what you want, suddenly things change and the record company doesn’t want you anymore.
Now we have a generation that was born long after rock’n’roll started and they don’t stamp dates on things; they’ll listen to everything. The punk era wasn’t new, The Who did all that. It’s a full circle. I started like everybody in the ’60s in a 12-bar blues band, then a few musos wanted to do a bit more outside of that structure, and it got so you had to be a virtuoso.
I’m still very much the old school, I like to play places where people can’t get to you. But you can never win in this business, and I got into trouble for playing Cuba. I got accused by some Americans of being a Communist sympathiser, and as a fully paid-up member of the Conservative Party I find that a little strange. Music isn’t political, it’s about people. I want to have some fun. In the studio recently I was using a lot of equipment that hadn’t been used for 30 years. A lot of it didn’t work, and some of it only played certain notes, so we had to write pieces around that. The most common sentence in the studio was, “Can you smell burning?”.
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