This wasn't supposed to happen

Last year I was reminiscing fondly about my young punk days to some people I’d never met before who hadn't 'been there' themselves.  I say 'fondly' because it was the first genre of music I got into, it was my entry point.  It gave me an outlet, satisfied something creative inside, helped me find my young teen identity, inspired me.  It was sealed in its relatively brief time, in my youth.

When asked about the violence so often associated with it I was happy to explain that this wasn’t my experience; there had been a great sense of camaraderie in our local scene out here in the provinces circa ’77 -’79 and no-one went around beating anyone up.   I was in with a peaceful bunch who just wanted to be left to our own devices and enjoy the music (and the look), a small group of united outsiders.  It was only afterwards when I reflected on it that I realised I’d misunderstood the question;  I’d answered as if the suggestion of violence was inferring that punks themselves were the protagonists and I’d missed the chance to explain how much we were the victims of harassment and aggression from strangers instead.

The reality was that everyone I knew had had some experience of confrontation.  Luckily in my case it was rarely more than people shouting boorishly at me in the street, usually corny stuff, like, erm...

 “Oi punk!” 

... (imaginative they were not).   More specific derogatory comments about my hairstyle and clothes were also so frequent as to become incredibly boring; just the norm.

Thankfully I was never on the receiving end of physical abuse (apart from being pushed to the ground in a park once by a drunk, overweight hippy... luckily he was so pissed, and so fat, that I got away).   My friends and I did once get chased around town by a gang of – this puts it into its era – Teddy Girls.  We gave as good as we got with the verbal sparring but one of them was decidedly bigger (and older) than us and when they threatened to ”bash us up” (oh, how quaint) we found ourselves in a ridiculous cat-and-mouse pursuit (we were the mice) through shops and streets.  We ended up at a friend’s mum’s where we took cover until they tired of hanging around on the pavement outside and went home to change their bobby socks.

But just about every male punk I knew at the time was less fortunate.  Being set on at train stations, attacked at bus stops, punched by bouncers, it happened.  And more often than not the assaults came from straight blokes – ‘straight’ as in not into anything in particular, just ordinary geezers who went down the pub and watched football who, for some unfathomable reason, found those less conventional than themselves to be a threat.  Is there not some kind of irony there?

How quickly we forget.  People hated punks. 

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Now we have 'Punk London', and it's being backed by Boris Johnson.

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Sean O'Hagan in the Guardian, 20th March 2016:

'...That Boris Johnson, a key player in London's ongoing hyper-gentrification and creative cleansing, sees no irony in his role as the most prominent backer of Punk London speaks volumes about our times.  It has given us an endlessly self-congratulatory culture industry, but no meaningful culture to speak of save for the tyranny of the art market. And, like an old Labour radical tamed by age, the spirit of punk has now been so drained of threat as to be an object of uncritical nostalgia.  It was not always thus.

Forty years ago, Sex Pistols so incensed Boris's Tory forebear, Bernard Brook-Partridge, Conservative member of the Greater London Council, that he declared:"Most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death.  The worst of the punk rock groups I suppose currently are the Sex Pistols.  They are unbelievably nauseating.  They are the antithesis of humankind.  I would like to see somebody dig a very, very large, exceedingly deep hole and drop the whole bloody lot down it."  Punk, like all provocations against dull conformity, revealed more about the nastiness that lurks beneath the veneer of conformity than it did about the frustration of those who railed against it.

And rail against it Sex Pistols did, more powerfully and more disgustedly than any pop group before or since....

...The group's singer, Johnny Rotten, was stabbed in the street, their drummer, Paul Cook, assaulted by a thug wielding an iron bar and punks across the country were attacked by outraged local citizens. It does not take much to reveal the nastiness lurking beneath.'

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 Did you see Joe Corré, son of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, on Channel 4 News last night, being interviewed by Cathy Newman?  I thought he expressed his views against 'Punk London' brilliantly.   He also talked about the real violence experienced by his parents and associates at the time and the controversy caused by the release of  'God Save The Queen'. He even managed to get in the story that Boris had undertaken the infamous Bullingdon Club initiation ceremony of burning £50 notes in front of a homeless person.  Cathy was quick to point out at the end of the interview that this was unfounded and merely an allegation, to which Joe replied, “Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?”  (and briefly it felt as if that original punk spirit was still alive and well.)

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Joe Corré in the Guardian, 16th March 2016:

'....The Queen giving 2016, the year of punk, her official blessing is the most frightening thing I've ever heard. Talk about alternative and punk culture being appropriated by the mainstream.  Rather than a movement for change, punk has become like a fucking museum piece or a tribute act...'

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It's sad really - I didn't want to feel this way - but my fonder memories are being tainted with all this rehashing of the whole punk thing and its absorption into the mainstream which is undoubtedly peaking right now.  Especially when I see things like this:

Punk Rock 2016