James Walton

Did everyone in punk sell out?

Plus: Deadwater Fell resembles Broadchurch, but luckily the first series rather than the second

For many people of a certain age (full disclosure: mine), punk has been a weirdly persistent presence. These days, we may not often be tempted to sit down with a glass of wine and an album by the Cortinas, Chelsea or Eater. We may even have belatedly realised that the most revolutionary record of 1977 — the year punk officially conquered Britain (and, incidentally, the country’s five bestselling singles were by Wings, David Soul, Julie Covington, Leo Sayer and David Soul again) — was Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. Nonetheless, the sight of Joe Strummer barking out a load of heartfelt if incomprehensible lyrics while the Clash thrash away in the foreground still somehow feels like a thrilling homecoming.

But what to make of the whole business 42 years on? After all, punk was famously for ‘the kids’. There are also few sights more melancholy than a bloke in his late fifties trying to tease out one last mohican from his reluctant locks. And anyway, can we legitimately feel nostalgia for a movement that so explicitly rejected nostalgia?

These were the questions tackled — or sometimes sidestepped — in BBC Four’s Chris Packham: Forever Punk (Friday). Even by male-fiftysomething standards, Packham’s claims for the importance of the movement to his youthful self tended to the extravagant. ‘I can’t say my life was saved by punk rock,’ he told us in an uncharacteristic moment of nuance, ‘but there’s a good chance that that was the case.’ As a more than usually angst-ridden teenager, he found in its music and fashion just the right blend of anger and friendliness, isolation and belonging. Approaching 60, he still has a large collection of the clothes with which he sought to outrage his hometown of Southampton — including, in a possible slight undermining of his rebel stance, a special punk jumper knitted for him by his mum.

Naturally, at the time, he was sure that such anti-establishment attitudes were with him for life.

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