Venue:
British Library
Date: 12/08/2016
A free exhibition at the British Library, featuring a random but (to me) quite enthralling selection of memorabilia (much of it very carefully looked after). A good way to spend 30 minutes while you wait to do something else – go into the Reading Room or try their very reasonable cafe. They have a wall of singles and I reckon I had 75%+ of them, that copy of Zigzag too…and genuine punk graffiti (see photos) courtesy of Viv Albertine). No photos allowed apparently but I took one anyway – see it worked?! The pop-up shop was selling framed prints of the Clash for (I think) £800. Turning rebellion into money…hahahaha. Then onto see the Shakespeare in 10 Acts Exhibition – highly diverting
The audience:
Tourists mainly.
It made me think..
It certainly did….reminded me that while it may have happened anyway, for this provincial teenager punk was about experiencing things and thinking thoughts above my station – and today that Station was Euston but I did go down the road to marvel at St Pancras.
Excellent. I might just have that 30 mins on Monday! Ta
I wandered through it on two days the week before last on a flying visit to the British Library to look things up. I had no time to browse, not even for a coffee/scone (a pleasant experience usually), but it’s diveting if you like that sort of thing.
I’m still fascinated that people bang on about it so much, and ascribe (in my view) levels of significance/high art to it that weren’t there. It was a recalibrating of things – back to 50s rock structures, simplicity and the skiffle DIY ethic – and an explosion of teenage angst against a rather socially dismal decade. Nothing more, nothing less. The music, seen in the cold light of day, was almost entirely not very good. But yes, it did have its own design style – which any ‘movement’ needs to remain prominent in visual recollection. A bit like Che Guevara posters and Motorhead T-shirts.
I like that thought. That is was recalibration. That makes total sense to me.
The ‘high art’ bit is indeed laughable, but then…..the Albert Hall, the V&A, Somerset House…..they’re all at it. Makes me wonder whether we should ever take any of these places seriously again. I know I won’t.
I fancy a Robbie Williams’ retrospective at Buckingham Palace isn’t far off.
I’m waiting for the arena documentaries and V&A exhibitions on Timmy Mallet, myself.
Perhaps the real legacy of Punk is what happened after? The facilitation of the “I can do that too” attitude. The price of technology coming down to affordable levels with synthesisers and home recording coming into the reach of many more people.
Also the pushing of the boundaries of the ultra-conservative Rock world with interest in Art and music from around the world. Any movement that spawned bands such as XTC, PIL, Wire, The Slits, The Fall and many others can’t be dismissed.
The legacy is the bit often overlooked.
The beginnings were a groundswell of similar minded people (not a MASSIVE groundswell, as history has revised it), a realisation that they don’t have to be a virtuoso or highly talented, and a belief that they could just go and do it.
The legacy part is interesting.
On the one hand it spawned some really interesting bands, films. books, writers, and provided impetus for future “movements”.
On the other hand, it became a pure cartoon of leather, chains, safety pins and spiky hair.
My hope is that Punk In London is celebrating the former, but fear that the meedja will not be able to see beyond the snot and mohicans
Totally agree, as usual the amount of people involved in these ‘movements’ are tiny compared to the real numbers affected. If you believed the docs and some people, everybody in 1967 was in Paisley and beads with flowers in their hair and the same thing with 1977, only a few brave souls were in the ‘scene’.
But I would contend that 77 was as important as other game changing years (55,63,67,71 perhaps) not for the music, though some classic albums and songs came out but because of the legacy of that year.
I agree with all of the above…..To be fair although the BL setting imposes a kind of “high culture” gloss so much of it was down to teenage hormones… in many ways the late 70’s were quite crappy time, especially for a late developing teenager(like me), but they were also kind of wonderful … a lot of the music may be forgettable but the there’s this….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTfyUqVqX-0
The most fascinating thing, to my mind, about the legacy of punk is the long-game, the largely concealed struggle for supremacy (for wont of a better word) between, on the one hand, pseuds who want to claim more for it than there ever was (the sort of people who turn up in documentaries – Morley and that reggae DJ guy) and, on the other, the true living legacy, which is less visiible on docs and in Faber & Faber books but much more visible in down at heel venues and the ‘Rebellion’ festival in Blackpool every year – namely, thoroughly lived-in versions of Jimmy Pursey, Nick Cash of 999, and many many others from those couple of years in the 70s who never managed to transition into photo bylines, fiction or BBC4 talk-shows, but who are still out there bashing out yobbish three-chorders to their 50-something peers.
….and then there are the bands who started then who are still around and producing interesting new stuff – Wire and The Monochrome Set being personal favourites but there are others….I did enjoy 999 at the time; many of us blamed Sham for introducing nf skinheads to “our” gigs. But I also enjoyed reading Paul Morley in the NME and later for Propaganda (see comment on Bowie book) and Don Letts was part of Big Audio Dynamite who did some good stuff….Personally I prefer that to standing in failed watching the Lurkers of the UK Subs. Does that put me on the side of the pseuds? I hope so 🙂
Lurkers OR the UK Subs…..Freudian slip? 🙂
Punk was, in the main, for teenagers. For those of us who were there it epitomised the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll and was thrilling. Those emotions will always be most intense at that age. The punk and new wave bands were making the best rock music of that era some of which stands the test of time, and if it doesn’t who cares?
I think these old men performing at punk revival festivals is as laughable as a 30 something Mick Jagger seeing himself as a rebel in 1976. If you like the music then fair enough but today it is just another branch of the light entertainment industry.
Youth culture is an easy thing to market and there is nothing wrong with going to an exhibition for a bit of nostalgia. It brings the crowds in. I don’t think that the people who go to these exhibitions see it as high art at all. They were great days. I moved on decades ago but punk rock, I’ve still got a safety pin stuck in my heart for you.
Beautiful last line.
Ye Olde Punke Rockers, seen on postcards and happy to pose with the tourists for a photo, are now as much a London tourist attraction as the Beefeaters. But I really don’t seem them or the ageing Pursey clones that Colin mentions as the legacy of punk. Dinosaurs more like it.
As Rigid and Ip comment, the true standard bearers of the spirit of 77 are those who have been inspired by the DIY, anything-is-possible philosophy. People with limited resources who’ve been inspired to go out and create something new of their own. And most of them probably aren’t playing guitars in 2016. Some of them may not even be playing music but exploring other forms of expression.
Pussy Riot springs to mind.
God save Putin and his fascist regime.
There ain’t no future and Russia’s dreaming?
As if to prove your point at this moment the bloke who used to being Cabaret Voltaire and is now w wildlife sound recordist is presenting”Tweet of the Day” on Radio 4.
Well, at least something good came of punk then! 🙂
I think punk was the moment afdter which music became self-conscious in a way that was rarely apparent beforehand. Everything after seemed to be in some way a reaction to things instead of existing in a state of musical freedom – just people making music because that was the kind of music they wanted to make. Everything became somehow cynical or contrived after it. People made music that was consciously ‘not THAT music’ or ‘against THOSE idea’ etc etc. Which seemed, initially, to mean a lot of pale looking people playing really dour, scratchy, joyless music. And when you see some of those ‘post-punk’ people in doccos these days they are STILL dour, joyless people.
Remember punk this way:
I would contend that Andy Partridge, Colin Newman, Peter Hook and many others are far from “dour, joyless people”. But other opinions are available.
I don’t know Newman, but I’ll give you the others. XTC never seemed reactionary, to my mind. There’ll always be exceptions! They were just a classic British pop group, drawing from the 60s as much as using the sonic ‘vocabulary’ of the after-punk era. The dour, scratchy lot are best exemplified by the Gang of Four, Auteurs, etc
Do you mean the Au Pairs? Luke Haines of the Auteurs is a 90s artist and can’t be described as dour.
Yes, those guys – a particularly scratchy, whiney OGWT appearance with a bizarrely clenched-buttock guitarist spenetically shuffling around.
What a fabulous piece of music. It reminds me of John Foxx’s ‘Europe After The Rain’ a little.
now yer talkin’!
Picture this. A Twelve year old boy in charge of a PA system of a large indoor/outdoor pool at the height of summer 1978 cueing up Systems of Romance.
One of the reasons I headed this “Punk in London” is that the exhibition was very London/Pistols focussed (it was also the title of a rather strange German documentary). While London/Pistols were obviously important that had more or less crashed and burned before most of the rest of us were even aware of what was happening – speaking as a denizen of the sleeping suburbs/regions which didn’t catch on a quickly as, say, Manchester, Edinburgh or Sheffield…but fair shout that almost anything at that point would probably have sparked the teenage hormones back the …
I know of a chap (a friend of a friend) who’s writing a book arguing that punk began with a load of hairdressers in Northern Ireland. Really.
Interesting premise – not sure the argument would stand up to close scrutiny (I may be wrong, of course).
Complete b****s – not Ian Penman by any chance – he made Paul Morley sound Like Garry Bushell 🙂
No, not a name writer/experienced writer – it seems a pretty ludicrous premise to me too, but let us see what he comes up with. we might all be surprised!
Is the chap from The Idiots? I had a conversation with him a few years ago about a very similar thesis.
Yes, I believe that’s the guy.
Saw it while in London the other week and, while enjoyable, it didn’t really present anything that I hadn’t read already via Jon Savage, Greil Marcus or even Mojo. The Shakespeare thing downstairs was better.
As for the legacy issue, having been too young for punk at the time, I feel that, more than other postwar fashions, a concentration of media and academic professionals since the 1980s have sustained it as a privileged moment in national culture, for a mixture of legitimate and more self-mythologizing reasons: The use of semiotics and identity politics tied punk into cultural studies, but it also gave the baby boomers something else to boast about to their students. And a lot of the records really aren’t that great.
I think you’ve expressed my view on the matter very well, more clearly than I did, Pess. Punk was a moment that lives on because it has been surrounded by an ongoing slew of people in academia. It is, in many ways, a still-blank canvas onto which any number of pseuds, researchers, documentary makers etc can paint an interpretation. It is, for a sector of people who (by their nature) need to publish in print or in vision, the gift that keeps on giving.
It also has the attraction of being (a) hip and (b) close enough in living memory to have acres of primary source material/access to principals.
The fact that there have only, I believe, been two books written from an historical perspective about skiffle – arguably Britain’s first teenage/DIY cultural moment – and neither of them by academics is extraordinary compared to the forest of punk studies. I put this wholly down to reason (a) above. There is absolutely no hip kudos to be gained from being a chronicler/interpreter of skiffle in the 21st century.
I’m sure your both right Colin and Pessoa (all agreeing here) but just because something got hijacked by sociologists and sub-cultural studies doesn’t change the fact that it still resonates for me and some of my contemporaries because I felt part of something at a very impressionable age – hormones so hard to beat. Maybe others feel the same about skiffle or Britpop – good for them – Other Youth Movements Are Available! Start an Exhibition of your own!
This is a word
This is another
Now make a BBC4 documentary 🙂
PS AND I enjoyed the Shakespeare exhibition too (though it was bit dark & cold) – surprised they didn’t make more of “Jubilee” – now that’s what I call cultural hi-jacking but so what?
This is a word
This is another
Now make a BBC4 documentary ?
Very good!
I forgot the third word too……
—–such a fine line….
The musical legacy is the least important aspect of Punk.
It acted as a catalyst for all kinds of stuff – most of my peers as a young man knew each other as a result of Punk & it’s aftermath. Being in bands, having a sense of style, a certain relishing of confrontation on occasion, lack of deference and an engagement in basic politics all stemmed essentially from it. In most cases, females were regarded as equals, race was not an issue ( not a minor factor back then) & people who working stuff out for themselves sexually were tolerated.
In retrospect I think it was most of my pals’ first actual taste of exposure to art as well, in the sense of art being something one could actually participate in or create as opposed to a subject at school or that belonged in a gallery.
Obviously they/ we may well have discovered cinema, the Beats, wild Jazz, Dada, the trash aesthetic & much more besides without Punk, but it definitely galvanised a sense that there was part of a tradition of such stuff & it wasn’t just an anti Hippy pose adopted by snotty 14 year olds.
Obviously more pretentious bilge has been written by the Pseuds Corner brigade about it in proprtion to its’ worth than almost any aspect of pop culture, but that doesn’t detract from the genuine ripples it caused.
That all sounds grand, Jungo – no complaints there. My problem is all the pseud stuff – Morley and his endless Kirkegard-ing, tyhose berks from Bromley and the like – and also a ‘Year Zero’ idea that *still* holds water with some people: the idea that everything pre-punk was crap. Pure nonsense.
On a personal level, it barely affected me at the time. All I remember was one guy at school (I started secondary in 1979) who was into it, but it was all a bit ‘punk’s not dead’ by then. I think he was expelled after 4 or 5 years. Funny thing, though, it was as if he was really *trying* to be all snarly and I-don’t-care. There was another side to him that was perfectly normal. He even took up my suggestion to read the Lord of The Rings in second or third form. I daresay that wouldn’t have gone down well at the street corner he hung out at with his older I-was-there punk mates.
I still say most of the music was rubbish. Or does it just need a reappraisal?
But isn’t most of the music that comes out of these ‘movements’ not very good? Probably a lot of the skiffle that was around back in the day was pretty poor. The same with Psych,Rock,New Romantic, Dance or any other ‘scene’ we could mention.
And all are looked back on using rose-tinted spectacles by most people that were there.
As it was fleeting, it’s really best summed up with a clutch of 45s, the Pistols ( never underestimate their B-sides), The Clash & the early Damned can trade blows with any genre. As for albums, the only ones I ever spin are ‘The Clash’, and ‘Pink Flag’ by Wire.
The pseuds thing is now a real blight, if anything. I feel the ‘professional’ nostalgia peddlers must have told the same yarns so many times they MUST be sick of it themselves, even if it provides them a few quid for the ‘talking head’ documentary footage.
Morley, I confess, makes me laugh & I can’t help feeling there’s an element with him that he’s actively seeing how far he can push the ‘Punk was essentially our form of German Expressionism’ or similar claptrap without being called on it, but nobody making making *those* documentaries ever does.
Jon Savage writes well on Punk, & even though he’s very precious about it, does an excellent job of getting across how many people were desperate for ANYTHING to happen as they were bored rigid & grabbed the chance to essentially make their own fun when the opportunity arose.
Pseudery abounds most obviously where it can be claimed that there’s ‘ a message’ of course, & as this can then be argued against, it’s an almost self generating as infinitum.
I’d far sooner read Lester Bangs rant about The Clash than most of the dreck from ‘luminaries’ like Greil Marcus.
Punk wasn’t a movement or a philosophy but something that had essentially gone by the time anyone attempted to define it.
Personally, I’ve always liked the quote, possibly from Edwyn Collins – ‘Punk to me was buying ‘Rocket To Russia’ and ‘Pet Sounds’ on the same day’.
I’ll go along with that!
I think you’ve hit several nails on heads there, Jungle – been and gone organically/explosively before it could be defined. Which, alas, hasn’t stopped Morley and the gang filling that non-gap ponderously and pretentiously for years thereafter.
You’ve also inadvertently stumbled on the great Pistols album title that never was:
‘Never Underestimate The B-Sides’ 🙂
maybe Paul Morley thought/knew he was being funny and annoying at the same time- What ‘ave we got Foucault 🙂
Have an up for a great oblique Sham reference, Anton!
@JungleJim – only just seen our response -thanks I’ve been saving that one since 1979 (when I was supposed to be reading Foucault:)
Nice one, Anton – it was worth the wait & has matured nicely!
Northern Ireland hairdressers invented punk? I just love that idea and would read it just to see if he could convince me. But Colin, you really need to take him to one side and have a quiet word. All of us here know that punk rock was invented by Donovan.
You’d think people would know that by now, wouldn’t you?
Maybe Donovan introduced hairdressing to Northern Ireland and it sort of filtered down from there…?
You make a good point about the whole mushrooming punk industry, Colin.
Skiffle is clearly a genre that needs further exploration, not least on the AW. Any chance of you starting a thread?
‘do it yourself’ – I think that’s the over-riding message of skiffle!
no future for you after they stopped importing tea in big wooden boxes and switched to automatic washing machines 🙂
The wonders don’t care……
Mushrooming Punk Industry.
The Punk moment was a short time. Writers and fim makers are running out of stories to tell and people to talk to. As a result, new angles are being created. I have seen a documentary including an interview with someone titled “Friend of The Clash” (I don’t profess to know everything about The Clash but I’ve not come across their name before).
One of the new angles employed is the deification of lesser bands, such as the Julien Temple film of The Cockney Rejects and the Johnny Moped film – neither was a bad film, ideed both were quite interesting, but were they really that important?
if they were playing in the back garden I think you’d draw the curtains….to coin a phrase
Good night
I missed punk (I was only 6 or 7) except I did see the Bill Grundy TV interview broadcast live. There wasn’t at the time, and still isn’t now, much Punk Rock music I’d choose to listen to – I’m not sure the tag really applies to the Pistols, Clash, Damned (first album maybe) or Buzzcocks. I certainly could do without ever hearing (say) Eater again.
It did seem to spark a post-punk creative surge as anyone who could play a tune got rapidly bored with the 3-chord buzzsaw straightjacket. This coincided with my pre/early teens and was terribly exciting at the time. I’m still quite excited by it in my middle-age.
My life would be much duller without those inspired by punk – Buzzcocks, XTC, PiL, Wire, Devo, Pere Ubu, Joy Division, The Fall, (mid-period) Cabaret Voltaire, Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, Magazine, Talking Heads, Televsion, Dexys, The Specials, Associates, Soft Cell, Depeche Mode, ABC, The Human League, Orange Juice, Aztec Camera, New Order, Adam Ant, etc.
I recently read Simon Reynolds’ “Rip it Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-1984” and found it a real page-tuner. There were lots of avenues I’d not really explored at the time (Mekons, Swell Maps, the Pop Group). I learned lots about acts I thought I knew well. Quite a long book for a paperback, but not long enough if you ask me.
Rip It Up And Start Again is indeed a great book.
I foung itbtailed off a bit in the middle, but soon picked itself up again (maybe I was tired the month I read it).
Highly recommended
Seconded. I read it after Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming. Can I also recommend Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story by Richard Balls. It covers the Pub Rock years, morphing into punk and then post punk.
Another worth a read is John Robb’s Punk Rock: An Oral History.
Jon Savage is often cited as the “definitive” text, but I found Robb’s book easier going and just as insightful.
easy for you to say
that comment was meant for @Rigid digit
I also heartily endorse RIUASA, & it’s worth would be proven just for encouraging interested parties such as yourself to check out The Pop Group.
I still think of them as kind of ‘Crass versus James Brown’ & love them dearly ( in small doses) even now. ‘Y’ is a great sonic album , produced of course by Denis Bovell ( of LKJ & The Slits fame) & ‘ For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder’ is also still raw and terrifying – in the best possible way., of course.