Do you recall 1977? I was 15 for the first half of it until July and spent it in the 5th year of school doing my ‘O’levels and CSE’s before going to 6th form in September
For three years, I had been part of a group of lads that I’ve written a lot about. We were known as ‘the rock lads’. We ruled the lunchtime turntable and we vetted records for their playability. It was that time in the early years of puberty which are very character forming and ‘rock lad’ was very much how I knew myself.
When you’re that age, a year lasts forever and I thought our identity was going to last forever because it was my life for so long. It never occurred to me that things would change until 1977 and the arrival into my rock world of punk rock.
I saw it as mainly a fashion thing, not a musical one but the two things were rapidly conflated. For us kids it just meant shorter hair (though still quite long) actually, straight legged trousers (though plenty still wore flares) and that was about it.
But we started to get punk singles and occasional albums brought in to play, instead of a constant diet of Gentle Giant and Deep Purple. This led to the sort of largely pathetic arguments about what was and wasn't punk. I liked The Stranglers because of Dave Greenfield’s keyboards, thus I maintained they were not punk rock. Others disagreed. Often violently.
It wasn’t made any easier or simple by the fact all the best-looking girls at school adopted the punk fashions. No longer could your Amazing Blondel or 801 albums work as a symbol of your coolness or as an aphrodisiac. Now you had to have a record by The Damned. Even my copy of Pink Flag by Wire was regarded as too wilfully nerdy.
I held firm to the view that this fashion would pass but of course hadn’t reckoned on how it would get distorted into a significant social movement against which future generations would be judged in a way that if you preferred UFO,which I did.
In 1977, largely in pursuit of those punky girls, I tried for about 18 months to be accessible to the music. Even then, I didn’t want to be seen as a narrow-minded kid. Russell had started buying the singles particularly, including the Sex Pistols ones that are super rare now, so I heard the music and kept connected and I even went to see Penetration but hated it. The girls were no compensation.
So my world had changed and it all started in ‘77. The rock lads were disbanded as we went to 6th form and met up with other schools’ rock lads and formed new alliances. By mid ‘78 I had totally abandoned any interaction with punk rock or its descendants and never regretted it.
Even now I hear people romanticising and eulogising that brief period,egged on my a selective press view, over-stating its significance. I have no beef with people who like the music, though I bet few listen to anything outside the Damned, Pistols or The Clash. If you want to listen to X-Ray-Spex and The Slits, fair enough but I remember what it was really like. More aggressive than idealistic, it gave people a place to put their anger, more a fashion than anything to do with music and over with much more quickly than many now recall.
It definitely changed my life but I wouldn’t say it was for the better. It created hard divisions, a lot of demarcation and mindless behaviour that hadn’t existed quite like it before. And that never really went away. You couldn’t say that about Gentle Giant now could you?
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