OCTOBER 1976. The Sex Pistols arrive in Scotland for the first time. Not long after they take to the stage at Dundee’s College of Technology, the band flee to their dressing room as the crowd pelts them with pint pots. Later, the venue empties and, calm restored, the Pistols re-emerge. A few remaining stragglers ask the band why they didn’t finish their set.
Glen Matlock, the original bassist before Sid Vicious, says: “Well, you were bottling us”. In response, the stragglers reply: “Well, we read you liked that.”
That anecdote neatly sums up just how badly punk has been misunderstood since it officially crash-landed to Earth 50 years ago. Punk isn’t all gobbing, glue-sniffing and safety-pinned septums.
Sure, you can do that, and many punks down the decades certainly have, but Punk – with a capital P – is about an attitude to life which reshaped the modern world and remains the strongest current in modern culture to this day.
Neither MAGA or Antifa, Brexiteer or Eco-Warrior, for example, would admit it, but all share a distinctly punk approach to the world, though they draw on very different strands of its ethos. All are anti-establishment for a start.
Punk in Scotland
Punk can be a ‘smash-it-all-to-hell’ wanton destructive force, or a two-fingered rebel yell at authority by those trying to build a different and – in their view, at least – better world.
What’s more punk, for instance, than an internet troll? Think of Sid Vicious wearing a swastika arm-band over his white tux. Was he a Nazi or an art provocateur?
And what’s more punk than kids arrested for protesting climate change or war? Think of Jello Biafra, lead singer of the Dead Kennedys and the snarling, dazzling poet of left-wing counter culture.
Indeed punk can be both left and right simultaneously. Consider Biafra singing ‘Nazi Punks F**k Off’ to a room full of, erm, Sieg Heiling Nazi punks.
It’s punk to hate. The word ‘Destroy’ is emblazoned on many old Vivienne Westwood designs; but it’s also punk to love. In a world of cruelty, the ultimate act of rebellion is being kind.
Punk shouldn’t be thought of as a musical genre like rock and roll. It’s a cultural movement, like surrealism (with which it bears much in common), that goes far beyond music’s limits, affecting all forms of art and altering even technology.
The internet, arguably, is the quintessence of punk. It’s literally a Do-It-Yourself approach towards the entire world. Social media – at least at the outset – was about ordinary people taking power into their own hands.
That’s not always pleasant – or even positive (see numerous revolutions as example) – but punk is often ugly, deliberately so. Punk is never a comfort-blanket.
Artist Tracey Emin during a photocall with her piece ‘My Bed’ (Image: PA)
The internet meme is like a 21st century equivalent of the ‘three-chords-and-you’re-a-band’ notion within punk. Anyone can be an artist. That’s what YouTube is about, right?
Art today is saturated in punk attitude. Tracey Emin’s ‘My Bed’ is as punk as it gets; as idiosyncratic an act of self-expression as early punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue. The best art exhibition I’ve ever been to was at Barcelona’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It was called ‘PUNK: It’s Traces in Contemporary Art’.
The photograph ‘747′ summed the exhibition up: a simple black-and-white of the artist Chris Burden shooting at a jumbo jet with a handgun as it flies overhead. It’s shocking – as all punk should be. It would cause outrage if released today.
Then there was the installation by Christoph Draeger entitled Black September. Its source material was the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. It featured a life-sized hotel room which you could walk through, reconstructing the aftermath of mass murder: blood splattered on the walls, sheets, and floor. This was punk as an empathy machine.
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Clearly punk thrives in the DNA of modern music. Every single New Wave, Pop-Punk, Post-Punk, and Grunge band – as well as most straight-up-and-down rock bands – are heavily under the influence: Nirvana, the Pixies, Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, Blink-182, the Artic Monkeys, My Chemical Romance – even Busted and McFly, for pity’s sake. Britpop – god help us – is Punk-indebted up to its eyeballs. Hello, Wonderwall. Much of this stuff is simply landfill and I’m not saying it’s good, but punk is in the marrow.
I got hooked on punk at 13. It was 1983. I was into Ska and the Mod revival, and venturing to my first under-age discos at the local youth club. Musically, it wasn’t that great a step from The Specials and The Jam to the Pistols and The Buzzcocks.
The punk aesthetic initially frightened me, but then so did the crazy geometric haircuts of skin-girls, and they turned out to be just fine.
Soon, though, I discovered that most of these kids – all a little older than me – were pretty cool, not pretty vacant. They talked about politics and books. They were funny, and while they looked scary they all hated violence. None trusted authority. All wanted a different world. I’d found my people.
The Sex Pistols :Steve Jones, John Lydon, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook (Image: John Stillwell/PA)
But Punk didn’t spring from nowhere. The artistic ground had been watered by many over many years. Musically, bands like the New York Dolls are often cited as inspiration. But you can hear punk in jazz, or The Kingsmen’s 1963 Louie Louie. Fittingly, the FBI investigated the song for subversion, suspecting some hidden message in the distorted lyrics would corrupt America’s youth.
You can even hear punk in The Andrews Sisters. Re-listen to The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy and tell me if these ladies weren’t breaking every damn rule in the 1940s. Watch Josephine Baker dance in Paris during the 1920s and there’s a woman more punk than punk ever dared.
In literature the influences go far back. The delinquent French poets of the 1800s like Rimbaud and Verlaine? For sure. There’s even an echo of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) in one of the Pistol’s best lyrics:
When there’s no future, how can there be sin?
We’re the flowers in the dustbin,
We’re the poison in your human machine
We’re the future, your future.
Tick forward in time and some of the greatest writers of the 20th century were punk long before 1976 arrived: Charles Bukowski, Hubert Selby Jr, Kurt Vonnegut. Anthony Burgess prefigured punk nihilism and aesthetics in A Clockwork Orange.
After those underage youth club discos, I never left punk and it never left me. Every punk has a band they love. For me, it’s the Dead Kennedys – all jangling surf guitars, spider riffs and a blast of anti-establishment rage that would skin you alive, wrapped up in biting satire. Listen to Stars and Stripes of Corruption. It’s 40-years-old but could have been written today.
I gave up the punk look long ago. Sadly, you couldn’t train as a journalist in 1991 dressed like an extra from Hellraiser, but I’ve never given up the ethos. I still believe, as the Sex Pistols sang: “Don’t be told what you want to want/and don’t be told what you want to need.”
Punk asks you to think for yourself. It reflects a spirit of wild freedom, by the people, for the people. It’s democracy for dirtbags like me. We’re all punks, if only we’d just realise it.
Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, extremism, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics