WHAT WAS PUNK ABOUT, REALLY? FURTHERMORE, WHAT DID WE LEARN FROM IT?

First of all I have to admit that when punk happened I was too young.  This meant that I could not really put the music itself into context and it was quite hard to hear much of it.  Of course, John Peel was playing it but at that point I had barely even heard of him; his show wasn’t on until pretty late and neither of my parents was keen on what they had heard about punk.

Despite this nothing has influenced my life as much as punk.  To me it was about far more than a genre of popular music, an attitude or a fashion-statement.  Punk was about freedom and the non-acceptance of established power-structures, it was about creativity and taking control of your own destiny – or at least try to.  For me, this led me to becoming a singer and a musician, with an ardent interest in art, literature and politics, for others it meant many other things.  The key is that, for the first time it didn’t matter what your background, gender, sexuality or race was.  Okay, others may claim that all this had already happened in the 1960s, but that decade had been still rife with misogyny, racism, homophobia and classism.  The punk scene itself may have had symptoms of those old prejudices, but for the entire culture of punk was so confrontational that people were made to question their attitudes head on.  This is the real reason that the authorities hated punk, they could sense that it was about ordinary people empowering themselves.  Despite their resistance to punk they couldn’t stop its pervasive influence, the long-term side-effects of it are enshrined in law; improvement in women’s rights, the repeal of Section 28, equal marriage, anti-racism legislation, and lots more.  Punk could not be stopped, the generations of people who came after it had all been changed.

One of the key elements of punk was the famous DIY aesthetic; ‘here’s 3 chords, now form a band’.  This didn’t stop at people forming bands, however, it also fed into fashion (and I’m not just talking about Vivienne Westwood here), record labels, literature, theatre, film-making…  The attitude became if you want to do something just do it.

It would be deluded to think that it was now suddenly a level playing-field however.  This was never more amply demonstrated than by the mainstream music of the 1980s.  After punk had shaken up the music scene for a few months, the old rock dinosaurs came back and remained the biggest sellers – in fact some were selling at a greater rate than ever before.  The new bands were not much better, The Police (hardly ever a grass-roots band) became every bit as pompous as the prog-rockers they had supposedly replaced and in some ways as pretentious.  The same is true of many of the people who infested the New Romantic scene; striking a pose while playing a synth gave me little to relate to as a working-class lad from Liverpool, particularly during Thatcherism.  The Sheffield Scene was better of course, some great pop and lots of DIY creativity there but the leading artists of the New Romantics were people like Spandau Ballet.  Awful, ugly music.  They came across as Thatcherite even at the time; flaunting their wealth in videos like‘Gold’ and ‘True’.  The same was also true with the (admittedly more tuneful) Duran Duran, who spent seemingly all their time ‘swanning on beaches’ as Liverpool’s bard Pete Wylie put it.  Duran Duran were also painfully misogynistic, as a quick look at their early video ‘Girls On Film’ will attest.

The real early legacy of punk was that it to an alternative culture in the 1980s.  Of course, there had been alternative scenes before, with underground bands and a culture that went with them, but in the 1980s it was all taken one step further.  As a consequence of the DIY aesthetic, new record labels had sprung up and not only that, fanzines, clothing designers, graphic artists, and writers.  There was far more breadth and scope to this than anything that had went before, partly because it was mass media.  The community that made up this movement were working at grass-roots level, they knew what the true scene was and where the truly exciting were really happening.  Occasionally some of this scene would cross over into the mainstream without being too mediated by it.  The Smiths are the most famous example of this.  Even The Fall managed to have a couple of hit records, which would be hard to imagine now.

Those who had grown up during punk had learnt many lessons from it.  Dance music was fundamentally punk in spirit; most of the early music was homemade and released on independent white labels; it involved the community; it took advantage of the new cheaper technology that was being developed, both to create the music and promote it.  The dance music scene involved musicians, artists who designed flyers and logos and writers to promote events.  Furthermore the dance music was even more multi-cultural than the original punk scene had been. Raves could spring up seemingly without prior notice with the use of the new cheaper mobile-phones.   The fact that these could be organised so quickly and with such impact was not lost on the government who responded with the Criminal Justice & Public Order Act 1994 with its laughable description of rave as ‘sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats’.  The Act was immediately recognised as yet another encroachment upon civil liberties and it was widely protested.

Of course, the mass market quickly realised how lucrative dance music was and exploited it for its our ends.  The same had happened when the punk had first broken ten years before.  The years following dance music have seemingly been a mix of the retro and technology-led music, sometimes a combination of the two.  The contemporary music scene is so multi-stranded that it’s hard to track what is the prevailing trend.  It’s unlikely that a culture will emerge with the impact of punk or rave again.

Most of what we’ve heard about punk has been that it was a reaction against the boredom and staleness of the music scene at the time; West Coast country-rock, prog rock bands, serious musicians who had robbed popular music of its urgency and youth.  This only takes note of popular music, however and ignores other cultural trends.  The bulk of record sales are no longer to young people, they are now to the perhaps mythical £50 man/woman, who buys stuff from record companies back catalogue or new artists who seem modelled on the artists of his/her youth.  This audience would be unlikely to buy into a new burgeoning music scene, which may explain why record companies are now reluctant to invest in one.

So where will the new punk spirit emerge?  Has it now finally been forgotten or is still out there in the internet, but now manifesting itself as the Occupy Movement, ecofeminism, etc.  Has it now got bigger than a genre of popular music.  Rock ‘n’ roll has always been political in many ways but for somebody who loves popular music as much as me this is gratifying but also a shame if I’m being honest.  Music has always been a more serious matter than would first appear.