| Oh, good old pogo-ing. Great. Jumping up and down on top of people. Spitting at the band, that was de rigueur. Just like eels, like eels wriggling about in a bucket. |
| I do remember punk like nothing else. Everything else was just a fashion, but that was something else. |
| I was sixteen and I hadn't really been a teenager yet and rebelled and been wild, which is what kids are supposed to do. I thought 'Perhaps this is it, perhaps that's all there is to it. A few nice LPs and the NME every Wednesday and that's youth.' But suddenly this happened and, you know, you wanted to be offensive. You wanted to upset people. |
| Punk brought together a style of music that had evolved in the US, a style of dress that came from the London arty avant-garde and a philosophy that came from the streets. It was acutely self-conscious, the first authentic teenage revolt to be chronicled and dissected by its own trendsetters while it was happening. It was full of paradox: a synthesis of puritanism and anarchy; avowedly anti-intellectual yet tireless in its efforts to analyse itself, its ideas, its antecedents, its symbolism; determined that there would be 'no leaders', yet ever ready to follow anyone who seemed to know what was going on. Above all, it was a genuine if short-lived revolution, in which teenagers recaptured their own culture through do-it-yourself fashion, music, concerts, record-production and magazines. |
| There is a very simple explanation of punk which, although it begs more questions than it answers, is nevertheless important because it is what most punks believed they were all about. It goes like this: between 1974 and 1976 the rate of unemployment rose from 2.6% to 5.7%, with young people the worst-hit group. At some point along the way, the number of kids who saw themselves as having no future in 'straight' society reached critical mass, and developed a collective attitude which refused to accept the equation 'unemployment equals failure'. ‘If society doesn't need us', they said, 'we don't need society; if they deny us employment, respect and rewards, we shall make ourselves as unemployable and unrespectable as we can, and we shall reward ourselves in ways society does not understand; we shall find our pride in the very fact of our worthlessness.' |
| At the heart of this rationale there was a dishonesty. 'We don't care what people think of us', they proclaimed, loudly and often. But it wasn't true. Punks' central preoccupation was what people thought of them. They simply said to society what teenagers had said to their parents from the beginning: 'Now look what you've made me do!' They set out, quite consciously, to be a living reproach, a spectre at the feast. Without the shock and outrage there would have been very little point. |
| In 1971 an ex-art student called Malcolm McLaren and an ex-teacher called Vivienne Westwood opened a shop at 430, King's Road, Chelsea, selling Teddy boy clothes to a small but dedicated clique of fifties revivalists. They called their boutique 'Let It Rock' and the chemist next door complained about the noise from the juke-box. In 1974 they changed the name to ‘Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die' and started selling leather gear to rockers. By 1975 they had changed again; this time the boutique was called 'Sex' and the stock consisted of offensively rude T-shirts, rubberwear and bondage trousers tied together at the knee. |
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| They employed a sales assistant called Jordan Hook who wore plastic leotards, a black suspender belt and thigh boots, but styled her hair and painted her face to look like a corpse that had spent some time on a rubbish dump. |
| The aim was not to look sexy, it was to disgust people; in fact it was a 'statement', and what it said was something like: 'You thought this kind of gear was sexy, you filthy old pervert? I'll wear it and make you puke and then maybe you'll realise that teenage girls are not on this planet for middle-aged wankers to drool over.' The art students loved it. By the autumn of ‘76 the glam rock decadence that had dominated the London art-school fashion scene was changing rapidly under the influence of this new 'Let's be disgusting' style of chic. New Society described the look: |
| Their hair is cut close to the bone, often dyed bizarre colours. Make-up is worn by both sexes: white faces, blue lips and green eye-shadow suggest the appearance of puppyfat refugees from a Venusian cabaret. Some wear black vinyl or see-through black fishnet vests. Drainpipe lurex trousers and stiletto-heeled shoes are popular with the girls, while the boys wear shirts with the arms torn off at the shoulder, or T-shirts slashed as if with knife-thrusts. Body jewellery includes leather straps, chains, razor-blade pendants (implying the use of cocaine), and earrings in the shape of scissors. The overall impression is of Clockwork Orange meets New York sado-masochism with just a hint of Weimar. |
| Many of those who dressed in the parody-of-porn style described here would have understood that last sentence; some of them could have written a ten-page critique of it; maybe they did. But as punk style spread, its exponents forgot where it had come from and worried instead about where it was going. |
| Fashion at the time was basically just to wear anything that would shock or outrage. Girls would go around with zips across their chests, undo them and show a large amount of bosom, which absolutely shocked the grandmothers. |
| One thing I did crave after was plastic sandals. I went everywhere to get plastic sandals and in the end I got a pair and they were beautiful. They were a kind of nicotine plastic and they're horrible. I love them. |
| There were certain ways of looking horrible. I mean, you could tell the ones who looked good and horrible and those who just looked horrible. They had no idea, basically. And you could be obnoxious and rude, you know, and throwing up in public places was not unheard of - just upsetting grannies and worrying people, but never really confronting major problems of the day with your dress or anything. Yeah, you couldn't get into clubs or pubs, you just generally were thrown out, and by being thrown out like that you did link up with more people and become a bigger group and a stronger group. It was all very incestuous. |
| When people wore swastikas, I think that was more to shock than because of any racist overtone. The time when Sid Vicious went round a Jewish area in France wearing a swastika T-shirt, just to shock and outrage all the people there, I thought that was going beyond whatever line you shouldn't go beyond. |
| Oh I had a very fetching hair-style. I had a quarter-inch crop all over, and a long straggly blonde fringe which lent itself very well to food colouring, so that one could choose one's fringe according to one's outfit. One could use strawberry food colouring, green food colouring or whatever. Or all of them. And what was best about my hair-cut was that it made me look so awful. My mother wouldn't walk down the street with me. I think I liked that idea. |
| Discovering the best way of making your hair stand on end was one of the best-kept secrets of punk. You tried everything - sugar, toothpaste, glue, soap, washing-up liquid, cooking oil, lard, butter... It was before the mass-production of hair gels, you see. That was another thing to come out of punk rock - hair gel! |
| Every teenage culture consists of a wide circle of people who look the part surrounding a much smaller circle who live the part, so just as there had been weekend ravers and weekend hippies, there were now weekend punks. It wasn't only a matter of dress and hair-style; there was a punk way of speaking, a clipped, consonantal, smirking tone, very heavy on the t's, n's and r's. To hear a punk pronounce the word 'Crimplene' was to feel the very texture of the cloth. |
| Everybody was calling themselves punk. Everybody was like me. They put on a pair of tight trousers and their dad's jacket, three sizes too big, and their grandad's raincoat and a pair of fluorescent socks and started masquerading as a punk. |
| We were all weekend punks. We were all very clean punks. We didn't go round spitting. We certainly didn't wear razor-blades hanging from our ears, it would have been dangerous! But we wore very clean sponge-down vinyl trousers and very expensive loose-knit mohair jumpers in acidic colours - lime green preferably - and very tastefully-ripped tee-shirts with very carefully-written expletives over them. But it was all very contrived. |
| There was a strange kind of snobbery. You'd refer to people as weekend punks, the ones that wore very expensive punk clothing. I was rather snobby about that. They were just following fashion, they weren't real punks. Real punks were people with no money who drank cider. I was more impressed by bright orange Crimplene and horrible fabrics and disgusting bad-taste clothes which actually poked fun at the people like parents who actually wore these Crimplene clothes in all seriousness. You'd wear them and turn it around on them, which laughed at them. I think punk had a lot of humour which people missed. It was a lot of poking fun and winding people up and laughing at them, and if they reacted with anger it made it even better, because that was exactly what you wanted authority to do. |
| The first blast of press publicity for the cult came at the beginning of December 1976. The Daily Mail called punk rock 'the sickest, seediest step in a rock world that thought it had seen it all'. The Daily Mirror stressed the themes of violence, self-mutilation and sex: |
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| They dance to songs that preach destruction... devotion to the cult means wearing safety-pins through their nostrils... Other punk hallmarks include swastikas and hairstyles that look as though they have been created with carving knives... Punk rock girls, with lips painted black, are just as startling. Their outfits include shocking-coloured tights with just a G-string over them, and T-shirts with zips over the boobs. |
The following day the Mirror returned to the attack:
Who are these punks? They wear torn and ragged clothes held together with safety pins. They are boorish, ill-mannered, foul-mouthed, dirty, obnoxious and arrogant. They like to be disliked. |
| Again, the paper was particularly fascinated by those safety pins 'through their ears, noses or even their cheeks'. |
| Nah, there was ways of getting round it all. You can get a safety pin and by bending the hook piece back on itself you can make it appear to go through your cheek and out the other side. |
| Self-mutilation was a very important part of punk. There were all the tattoos that went with it, girls going out and being tattooed as never before... people being tattooed on their head and on their neck, and not just saying 'I love Mother' but saying other things... |
| Oh it was hilarious really. We were in London, just walking down Oxford Street, and we got these Jehovah's Witnesses coming up to us and they told us that punk was sinister and evil and all that, and we said 'What makes you say that?' 'Oh, we've read it in the Sunday papers.' And all the hyperbole in the Sunday papers was absolutely ridiculous. I think that encouraged punk more than anything. |
| Everybody knows about the famous Bill Grundy episode. I mean, he was goading them on to say the words he wanted them to say, they said it; he got a rollocking for it and they got the front page. |
| In fact it was the 'Grundy episode' that started the furore. In the course of an interview with the Sex Pistols (of whom more anon) in Thames Television's regional news programme ‘Today' on 1 December, the group had been invited to be outrageous and had obliged with the most outrageous words they could think of, which shocked some but did not surprise many. Grundy was suspended for two weeks, a viewer rang to say he had kicked in the screen of his new television, a delegation from the Transport and General Workers' Union asked EMI Records to cancel their contract with the Sex Pistols and the Daily Mirror launched a competition for the worst punk jokes (sample: 'What is pink, sickly and has a four-letter word all the way through it? Punk rock.') |
| Punk rock did indeed have four-letter words all the way through it, but there was more to it than that. Its musical antecedents were almost all American. During the sixties, the popularity of British groups in the US had inspired a rash of imitative 'garage bands' such as the Shadows of Knight, the Standells and the MC5. Their music, simplistic but energetic, came back into vogue in the late seventies as an antidote to pomp rock. |
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They were the first groups to attract the label 'punk rock'. During the seventies, an East Coast minimalist school of rock'n'roll had developed. Inability to sing had come to be regarded as a virtue, and indeed had failed to prevent the likes of Patti Smith and Jonathan Richman from making some charming, simple pop records. |
| At the same time, the decadent wing of American 'schlock-rock' had taken outrage on stage about as far as it could manage. Iggy Pop, of Iggy and the Stooges, regularly stripped off, cut himself with broken glass and fell into front row of the audience. The New York Dolls were a transvestite band who worked hard at untuning their guitars before every performance (the ubiquitous Malcolm McLaren had been their manager for a while). |
| The third ingredient was supplied by such groups as Richard Hell and the Voidoids and, above all, the Ramones, who delivered loud, fast, simple songs that lasted no more than two minutes and celebrated the joys of head-banging, sniffing glue and being extremely stupid. |
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