I was listening to Chris Packham's series on the radio series eulogising punk rock. And while I can see it had a big impact on him both musically, emotionally and philosophically, everything he claimed for it could be fairly claimed for any rock fan in 1976. They way pre 1976 music is portrayed on such occasions it’s as if it was all played by Royal School of Music lecturers and that everyone was bored and the scene ‘needed some energy’
This is a total reworking of history and dismisses or more likely, doesn't even know about some great bands of that era. And it wasn’t all stadium bands. There was a legion of great bands strangled at birth by this Year Zero attitude. I could list them but you’ll know it’s true.
Obviously the music is subjective but I’d say Lone Star’s debut album in 1976 was better than almost any punk music of the whole era. Outside of The Clash, Sex Pistols and maybe The Damned, does anyone play any punk music? The odd single here and there maybe but I thought at the time, it was all about attitude, not music. And even the ‘anyone can play’ attitude claimed for it was no different to any band who aspired to be Status Quo or anyone. The DIY ethic was always strong in rock since the late 60s when the ‘fight the man’ mindset was far bigger, wider and impactful.
The counterculture got the anti-establishment attitude 10 years before punk, which ironically decried the hippies. If you want to talk about everything from ecology (which the punk movement never went near) to organic food, civil rights and alternative living, those were central tenets. Feminism grew in the early 70s out of a branch of that thinking. These were not exclusive to punk though it’s often claimed to be.
I thought at the time that it was\ for most, a fashion thing, more than music. It was designed to stock and it certainly did shock some but not us. We saw through it and didn’t take it seriously. There were a lot of straw men created but it didn’t last long. I’d say it had shrunk back to a hardcore by 1979. Three years at most.
Every struggling working class band had a DIY ethic and made do with whatever they could cobble together
That was another thing colonised and owned by punk but it was nothing new.
I saw Penetration at the Coatham Bowl in Redcar and frankly the lack of musicality and content wasn’t made up for by energy or volume. All the things now claimed. And the audience was violent, which just seemed pointless, indeed witless to me at the time.
While I don’t doubt the impact and identity it made on people like Chris, we were listening to probably Genesis’ best album, Trick Of The Tail and UFO’s Strangers In The Night and were no less passionate about it than punks were about The Clash.
It was also a very London thing. I felt that local kids were being led by a London culture and while some were super sincere about it, I thought then as now, that they’d backed the wrong horse in the rock n roll race. The girls in tight, straight jeans and red and black mohair jumpers felt nice though
It wasn’t that I was defensive or snobby about the basic three chord music and I liked the Stranglers but the records were largely boring and unambitious compared to what I liked. Preferring Barclay James Harvest over Eater might not have made you hip but it wasn’t a bad choice.
More than anything, what annoys me is the revisionism about punk and frankly the fictions that these 65 year-olds indulge in about it. By 1980 it was a small, largely irrelevant sub cult, much like the hippies at the time. They love to say how subversive it was but to what end? Thatcher was elected and the 80s was hardly a golden age of egalitarianism,
At its extreme edge people like Crass really lived an anarchist life but that wasn’t most people. I do blame it for dividing things into bitter tribes which in one way or another have remained in some form ever since. And too often those tribes became so deeply entrenched that people in the ‘wrong’ tribe were bad people who were stupid for liking what they liked. I bitterly regret that.
As I said I don’t believe beyond a few Clash records and the Pistos album, many don’t listen to most of the music now. whereas I still listen to UFO and Genesis. It was just a cultural hiccup which has been indulged by journalists and cultural historians ever since , many of whom are too young to even have lived through it and don't know what they’re talking about. I was there and I do.
