{"id":838223,"date":"2026-03-20T10:49:15","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T10:49:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/838223\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T10:49:15","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T10:49:15","slug":"punk-gave-birth-to-maga-and-brexit-and-to-eco-warriors-and-antifa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/838223\/","title":{"rendered":"Punk gave birth to MAGA and Brexit and to eco-warriors and Antifa"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n OCTOBER 1976. The Sex Pistols arrive in Scotland for the first time. Not long after they take to the stage at Dundee<\/a>\u2019s College of Technology<\/a>, 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\u2019t finish their set.\n<\/p>\n

\n Glen Matlock, the original bassist before Sid Vicious, says: \u201cWell, you were bottling us\u201d. In response, the stragglers reply: \u201cWell, we read you liked that.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\n That anecdote neatly sums up just how badly punk has been misunderstood since it officially crash-landed to Earth 50 years ago. Punk isn\u2019t all gobbing, glue-sniffing and safety-pinned septums.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\n 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.\n<\/p>\n

\n 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.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\n Punk in Scotland<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\n Punk can be a \u2018smash-it-all-to-hell\u2019 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.\n<\/p>\n

\n What\u2019s 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?\n<\/p>\n

\n And what\u2019s 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.\n<\/p>\n

\n Indeed punk can be both left and right simultaneously. Consider Biafra singing \u2018Nazi Punks F**k Off\u2019 to a room full of, erm, Sieg Heiling Nazi punks.\n<\/p>\n

\n It\u2019s punk to hate. The word \u2018Destroy\u2019 is emblazoned on many old Vivienne Westwood designs; but it\u2019s also punk to love. In a world of cruelty, the ultimate act of rebellion is being kind.\n<\/p>\n

\n Punk shouldn\u2019t be thought of as a musical genre like rock and roll. It\u2019s a cultural movement, like surrealism (with which it bears much in common), that goes far beyond music\u2019s limits, affecting all forms of art and altering even technology.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\n The internet, arguably, is the quintessence of punk. It\u2019s 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.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\n That\u2019s not always pleasant – or even positive (see numerous revolutions as example) – but punk is often ugly, deliberately so. Punk is never a comfort-blanket.\n<\/p>\n

\n Artist Tracey Emin during a photocall with her piece ‘My Bed’ (Image: PA)\n<\/p>\n

\n The internet meme is like a 21st century equivalent of the \u2018three-chords-and-you\u2019re-a-band\u2019 notion within punk. Anyone can be an artist. That\u2019s what YouTube is about, right?\n<\/p>\n

\n Art<\/a> today is saturated in punk attitude. Tracey Emin\u2019s \u2018My Bed\u2019 is as punk as it gets; as idiosyncratic an act of self-expression as early punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue. The best art exhibition I\u2019ve ever been to was at Barcelona\u2019s Museum of Contemporary Art. It was called \u2018PUNK: It\u2019s Traces in Contemporary Art\u2019.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\n The photograph \u2018747′ 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\u2019s shocking – as all punk should be. It would cause outrage if released today.\n<\/p>\n

\n 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.\n<\/p>\n

\n Read more cultural commentary from Neil<\/strong>\n<\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s sake. Britpop – god help us – is Punk-indebted up to its eyeballs. Hello, Wonderwall. Much of this stuff is simply landfill and I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s good, but punk is in the marrow.\n<\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019t that great a step from The Specials and The Jam to the Pistols and The Buzzcocks.\n<\/p>\n

\n 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.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\n 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<\/a> and books. They were funny, and while they looked scary they all hated violence. None trusted authority. All wanted a different world. I\u2019d found my people.\n<\/p>\n

\n The Sex Pistols :Steve Jones, John Lydon, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook (Image: John Stillwell\/PA)\n<\/p>\n

\n But Punk didn\u2019t 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\u2019s 1963 Louie Louie. Fittingly, the FBI investigated the song for subversion, suspecting some hidden message in the distorted lyrics would corrupt America\u2019s youth.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\n You can even hear punk in The Andrews Sisters. Re-listen to The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy and tell me if these ladies weren\u2019t breaking every damn rule in the 1940s. Watch Josephine Baker dance in Paris during the 1920s and there\u2019s a woman more punk than punk ever dared.\n<\/p>\n

\n In literature the influences go far back. The delinquent French poets of the 1800s like Rimbaud and Verlaine? For sure. There\u2019s even an echo of Baudelaire\u2019s Les Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) in one of the Pistol\u2019s best lyrics:\n<\/p>\n

\n When there\u2019s no future, how can there be sin?\n<\/p>\n

\n We\u2019re the flowers in the dustbin,\n<\/p>\n

\n We\u2019re the poison in your human machine\n<\/p>\n

\n We\u2019re the future, your future.\n<\/p>\n

\n 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.\n<\/p>\n

\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 40-years-old but could have been written today.\n<\/p>\n

\n I gave up the punk look long ago. Sadly, you couldn\u2019t train as a journalist in 1991 dressed like an extra from Hellraiser, but I\u2019ve never given up the ethos. I still believe, as the Sex Pistols sang: \u201cDon\u2019t be told what you want to want\/and don\u2019t be told what you want to need.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\n Punk asks you to think for yourself. It reflects a spirit of wild freedom, by the people, for the people. It\u2019s democracy for dirtbags like me. We\u2019re all punks, if only we\u2019d just realise it.\n<\/p>\n

\n Neil Mackay is the Herald\u2019s Writer-at-Large. He\u2019s 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OCTOBER 1976. The Sex Pistols arrive in Scotland for the first time. Not long after they take to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":838224,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5226],"tags":[802,748,2000,299,5187,1699,4884,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-838223","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brexit","8":"tag-brexit","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-eu","11":"tag-europe","12":"tag-european","13":"tag-european-union","14":"tag-great-britain","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116261117275199259","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=838223"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/838223\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/838224"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=838223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=838223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=838223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}