Friday essay: punk's legacy, 40 years on
- Written by David Nichols, Lecturer - Urban Planning, University of Melbourne
Like many youngsters of the late 70s, my first exposure to punk rock was memorable and social – perhaps, even, societal. It was some time in 1977, I was having dinner with my parents and siblings at my grandparents’ place, and the Sex Pistols were a featured story on Weekend Magazine, the ABC’s Sunday evening infotainment program.
In my dim recall, the band were simulating a live performance against a black background (it was probably the clip to Anarchy in the UK - of course, entirely new to me then, very familiar now) with sound grabs from members and some footage of everyday punks on busy thoroughfares evincing menacing idleness. This was very starkly and clearly not Supertramp, 10CC, or Fleetwood Mac with their fey, wry, decadent meanderings.
Whereas the late David McComb – soon after, the central songwriter and singer in the Triffids and eventually a late 20th century Australian musical legend – told me had the rest of his life shaped by what he saw that night, I have to say that I don’t recall anyone at our dinner at Mavis and Norm’s semi-detached bungalow expressing disgust, despair, angst, delight or exhibiting any other response to the clip. It was grist to our mill, so worldly were we in suburban Caulfield in the late ‘70s.
Punk is now, apparently, 40 (which must make me 51). Double J is running what it calls “a month long celebration of the seminal artists, albums and moments that make up four decades of disruption”. As a musical form – and even though it was regarded, when it first emerged, as a retro throwback eschewing a decade of progress in pop music – it was obviously the most exciting thing going in western music when it sparked. It spoke about ideas, the having of them and the diffusion of them, and about the fate, role and obligation(s) of the individual in society.
It was cool, but it was also extraordinarily difficult to access: public radio was not only just coming into being, it was obscure and, well, elitist; the records themselves were hard to find and, when found, expensive. But it was at least as much about attitude as it was about sound or style: I, like others interested in counterculture and “scenes”, put reading about it (which I did, avidly) above finding ways to hear it.
The weekly New Musical Express, easily the best music paper of the late ‘70s and still a British institution today (sadly, in very reduced form), was a world in itself. I still probably wouldn’t recognize more than a couple of songs by The Damned, but I read every word about their trials and tribulations in 1977-8. Funny, that.
Early Australian innovators
Since then, I have come to realise that Australia had its own very valid and important punk scene, too, and I feel those early innovators must be acknowledged partly for their contribution but also as a phenomenon. I was semi-aware of greats like The Saints, already gone, but it was hard to find their music anywhere.
There were brilliant magazines like Adelaide’s Roadrunner that covered the right stuff, but popular music, while it obsessed me, was vast and varied and, as I mentioned, expensive for a teenager.
There are Australian stories of legendary acts with a Stooges-brand punk attitude. In 1973, Perth had a band called Pus; Sydney had The Rats; Melbourne had Judas Iscariot and the Traitors. Brisbane had the aforementioned Saints, a band with a unique musical vision rooted, like the others’, in the unpretentious and bratty 1960s. None of these bands knew about each other but they, or various key players, had enough gumption and critical mass to form a “scene” by 1976 or thereabouts.
As was typical of Australians then, when the international equivalent sprang up, the locals (and their “street” fellow travellers – think The Sports or even Paul Kelly) were classed as imitators. In this case, most of the artists were sufficiently self-assured to not give the proverbial toss, but the damage was done to their reputation as originals. The difficulty of fitting these stories into a recognisable narrative, however, means that in the main they are forgotten or unknown: not influential, just undeniable.
By the beginning of the 1980s, I was fully immersed in punk’s less strident and more arty sibling, new wave – even faking being adult to see bands, on occasion, starting with the Serious Young Insects, International Exiles and Kids in the Kitchen supporting Snakefinger.
Soon, out of school and on the dole, still living at home undertaking what would later come to be known as a “gap year” (the gap actually extended about five years) there were many options to help the local musical arts economy, for instance with regular visits to Melbourne’s great record shops of the era: Exposure, Missing Link, Greville, Gaslight.
I recall two elderly ladies walking past Missing Link and observing a display advertising the Birthday Party’s album Prayers on Fire. “Punk rock”, said one.
The other made a noise to convey the concept of, “I just threw up in my mouth”.
Gruelling Thatcherism
Andrew Winning/ReutersIn 1986, I was able to avoid my grandparents’ Sunday dinners for an extended period of time, swapping them for six months of gruelling Thatcherism within earshot of the tyrant’s heartbeat – London.
Of course, punk was a postcard caricature by then and its memory only discernible to the knowledgeable in new wave, postpunk (both of those terms were, by the way, beneath contempt in the mid-80s), new romantic, and whatever else had come along since.
But what Michelle – my girlfriend at that time – and I did do one Saturday afternoon (the 19th July, I now discover: there’s a Wikipedia page!) was hop on a train to Manchester to be a part of a celebration of punk’s tenth anniversary.
Her diary – which she dusted off when I asked her about the event – reveals a lot of detail I’d forgotten; that we were “shocked and distressed” on arriving at the venue to find it cost £14 to get in (I think that was a week’s dole).
Michelle, apparently, was able to sneak down the front for The Smiths’ set and was “scared to death in a crush to the front”. Other acts that day were The Fall, New Order, Orchestral Manouevres in the Dark, A Certain Ratio and Cabaret Voltaire (I have absolutely no recollection of seeing these last two, though I was and remain a fan of both).
It’s weird now to look back on this event and appreciate that what might now be seen as bands who in many instances typified slick English New Wave – albeit with a very Manchester flavour – were seen as appropriate to celebrate a decade since “punk”.
A very drunk Bill Grundy – the TV presenter still to this day primarily famous for his ad hoc “filth and the fury” Sex Pistols interview – berated the audience. But Grundy’s presence notwithstanding, the festival might seem to show very conclusively how much “punk” – the spirit, the attitude, the values, and even to some extent the sound – was being co-opted into not only popular music, but also popular attitudes.
This was only going to accelerate: no-one could possibly have conceived of the Sex Pistols being so much a part of “history” to have been commmemorated at the London Olympics - but that’s what the establishment does, it keeps its enemies closest of all.
As mentioned, I’m 51, and I deal with enough young people to know it’s foolish to try and typify what “they” think. There is some truth, it would appear, to the often evoked (by my generation) notion that young people have so much access to music past and present that, in many instances when they really engage with the popular music of former generations they have trouble stringing the beads of influence into the necklace of historical chronology.
That said, if we are going to celebrate the impact of punk as a form and a style, we need to make some points about its lasting value. I think there are quite a few – and I offer them as one who firmly believes that their impact is hard now to fully appreciate: as if we were living in a crater so large we don’t notice the meteorite that made it.
A voice for women
Authors: David Nichols, Lecturer - Urban Planning, University of Melbourne
Read more http://theconversation.com/friday-essay-punks-legacy-40-years-on-60633