As doomed prophecies go, the most famous slogan of the punk era, “No future”, is a classic. Triumphantly snarled by Johnny Rotten at the end of God Save the Queen, the Sex Pistols’ rowdy trashing of the silver jubilee in 1977, it encapsulated the attitude of a band that imploded when Rotten walked out six months after the record was released. But it is impossible to square, 30 years later, with the enduring reverence inspired by punk rock. As far as music writers are concerned, punk was, maybe still is, the future, and retelling the story of its origins and aftermath has become like a nagging riff that gets louder every year.
Over the coming month, two more volumes on the subject are due to be published: Pretty Vacant by Phil Strongman, and Babylon’s Burning by Clinton Heylin. Add these to last year’s doorsteps by John Robb and Al Spicer, plonk all four on the tottering pile propped up by Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming, and what you are left with is not just an unwieldy reading list, but a question. Given that punk is widely acknowledged to have been named and started in America, by the New York Dolls and the Ramones, among others, why is it that nearly all the authors who feel moved to write hefty books about it are British? Greil Marcus’s rambling meditation on anarchic impulses down the ages, Lipstick Traces, is the only American tome to compare with our home-baked encyclopedias. Where does this fascination with the idea of punk come from? The obvious answer is: from the declared influence it has had over many of the most charismatic British rock musicians of the past 30 years. Punk never amounted to a proper movement in America. By contrast, nearly all of the musical subcults that have flourished here since have taken their cue from it in one way or another, even those that haven’t obviously modelled their sound on the Clash or the Sex Pistols.
Boy George, a camp follower of the London punk scene in the late 1970s, took its other big motto, “Be yourself”, and became the first openly gay pop icon. The rave movement of the late 1980s proclaimed a punk aesthetic in its manic repetitions and adoption of rudimentary electronic technology. For the guitar bands, punk brought in an informal ban on tricky solos and most other instrumental showing-off that has never been lifted.
As Oasis demonstrated around punk’s 20th anniversary, the most potent music that we now had to offer — accurately dubbed Britpop — was all about playing catchy tunes very loud, with no frills. So it is today. Coldplay do it more quietly, but their biggest influence is Echo & the Bunnymen, formerly leaders of the Liverpool punk scene. The hottest guitar band of the moment, the Arctic Monkeys, bear a strong resemblance to that venerable Mancunian punk institution the Fall in their combination of scrappy chords and sarky spoken lyrics. Pete Doherty openly worships at the shrine of the Clash, and uses their guitarist, Mick Jones, as his producer.
The appeal of punk to the British, however, has always gone beyond the sound it makes. In fact, punk was our first significant contribution to pop culture that wasn’t mainly musical. The great British bands of the 1960s had supplied a memorable soundtrack to a movie that was usually showing somewhere else: the anti-Vietnam demos in the States that left four dead at Kent State, Ohio, say, or the student uprisings that brought Paris to a standstill in 1968. Even the uniforms of youth culture — from blue jeans to Indian smocks, and the Vegas-like glitter of the glam bands — had to be imported.
Punk, on the other hand, came with “Made in Britain” scrawled all over it. Initially presented as a kind of peasants’ revolt, a direct reflection of the economic decay experienced here in the 1970s, it had a real cultural story to tell. Allegedly. This soon turned out to have been a strategy dreamt up by a bunch of awkward, quarrelsome, mainly middle-class individualists who had usually attended that uniquely British clearing house for aspiring rockers, art school.
Whereas Lennon, Clapton and the rest largely flunked drawing classes to concentrate on their guitars, the punks figured that an eye for design and style was as useful as an ear for music. They were right. For most of the 1980s, the legacy of punk was more apparent in areas such as graphic design and street fashion than it was in the music, which, despite a handful of spiky hits, never sold in great quantities. Ten years after its wildly acclaimed release, punk’s greatest half-hour, Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols, had shifted barely 1m copies worldwide.
That punk rock was often too abrasive and sketchy to appeal to the mainstream was attributable to its arty agenda. The radical amateurism it espoused was rooted in one of the propositions of pop art: that traditional expertise, in this case musical, was no longer relevant in an age of mass production and general alienation. Some of the dumber punks, notably Sid Vicious, took all this rather too literally, turning themselves into living symbols of dehumanised vacuity, like walking versions of a Warhol soup can.
Not so their self-proclaimed leader, Malcolm McLaren, a former art student who ran a fetishistic clothes shop on the King’s Road with his girlfriend, the designer Vivienne Westwood. Having recruited a practically tone-deaf Johnny “Rotten” Lydon to sing with the Sex Pistols, “because this was the best selling point”, McLaren understood punk for what it was: an innovative approach to marketing. “If people bought the records for the music, this thing would have died a death long ago,” he once told The Times. And if his vaunted situationist rhetoric — culled from a French anarchist sect — flew way over the heads of most of the audience, there were lots of other cultural elements in the punk package that had a strong local appeal, and in some cases still do. The yobbish pose, for instance, and the recognition that public spectacles can feed off violence. In a country where football hooliganism was, by the late 1970s, attracting bigger headlines than the game itself, the mayhem at punk gigs seemed either significant or attractive — depending on whether you had spent your youth on the terraces or at art school.
Along with its love of a ruck, punk redesigned a number of other British preoccupations: our traditional fondness for dressing up, for instance, which, in the form of leather bondage gear and multiple body piercings, turned private sexual obsessions into fashion statements. With this came a new, more challenging role for women performers such as Siouxsie Sioux. The old canard about British class hang-ups was given a new twist by the mockney accents suddenly affected by everybody, irrespective of whether they hailed, like Johnny Rotten, from an estate in north London. Even the punks’ favourite put-down, “boring”, had a British flavour — no other nation takes such pride in its readiness to lose interest.
Punk’s most futuristic insight lay in its accidental discovery of the almost unlimited power of the media in the pop process. American television and radio blanked the nascent punk scene there, to the point that the Ramones were known only to their club audiences. After the Sex Pistols’ infamous outburst in front of Bill Grundy on primetime ITV, not even McLaren realised the significance of what had taken place. He thought the game was up. In reality, it had begun in earnest.
What was good for the Pistols was also, inevitably, good for media workers. The relationship between performers and reporters had shifted decisively. It was the advent of punk that, as well as inspiring a rash of photocopied fanzines, pushed up the circulation of the NME to nearly 250,000. Much has changed since, but punk still holds a special place in the mind of many of those who now make a living out of writing about pop music. Perhaps we should think of all those big, fat history books as long thank-you notes.
