If you were born after 1970 and don’t remember punk, you’ve almost certainly been misled by people who do. You’ve probably been told – through countless paean-to-punk retrospectives, documentaries and newspaper culture pages – that it was a glorious, anarchic revolution that swept all before it. I can tell you first-hand that it wasn’t.
Punk was as middle-class as a Labrador in a Volvo. It was invariably the posher kids who abandoned Pink Floyd, Genesis and Yes
Far from being hugely influential, punk was a passing fad that made little impression on the charts and left the lasting legacy of a spent firework. Only one punk single could be described as a big hit: The Sex Pistols’s fabulously obnoxious ‘God Save the Queen’ which shot to number two on the week of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.
However, the Pistols didn’t share that top ten with any other spiky-haired renegades. Instead they vied for sales with Kenny Rogers, Barbra Streisand and The Muppets – any of whom can still make them look musically and culturally trivial. So why are punk’s false glories still mythologised into falsity? How has it remained in the cultural colander when far more popular genres have drained away?
Quite simple: punk was as middle-class as a Labrador in a Volvo. It was invariably the posher kids who abandoned Pink Floyd, Genesis and Yes for The Sex Pistols and The Clash. After university, many ex-punks went on to become writers, documentary makers or cultural commentators, re-writing history to fit their own narratives.
History, as we all know, is written by the victors and this little clerisy – educated and borderline bougie – was always going to be the victors. A typical example would be a provincial dweeb from a comfortable background who was a shy and misunderstood loner until punk supplied his salvation. Suddenly liberated by a sense of rebellion and a few safety pins, he pledged his undying allegiance to The Damned.
Unfortunately, ‘undying’ has proved to be the operative word because – brace yourselves – it won’t be long before there’s another BBC commemoration of the fabled punk explosion. It’ll no doubt feature the assertion that around 1977, popular music was practically dead until punk jolted it to back to life with its three-chord simplicity and electrifying brilliance.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The singles charts at the time were a cornucopia of fantastic 45s like David Bowie’s Sound and Vision, Don’t Leave Me This Way by Harold Melvin & The Bluenotes and Exodus by Bob Marley. Though the biggest hit in the summer of 1977, laughably labelled ‘The Summer of Punk’, was Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. Phenomenally influential, I Feel Love topped the charts for five weeks and shaped the sound of dance music for the next 40 years.
Julie Burchill succinctly described punk as the most ‘white, male and asexual’ genre of music ever made. So Donna Summer – black, female and sexy – was of little interest to the punkily inclined. They were fooled and besotted by The Clash, a band formed by a public schoolboy called John Mellor who’d seen what the Sex Pistols were doing and decided to Xerox that for his own band.
Taking his cue from ‘Gary Glitter’ and ‘Alvin Stardust’, John gave himself the equally silly name of ‘Joe Strummer’ and that wasn’t the only cue he took. The cover of The Clash’s third album, London Calling, is identical to the cover of Elvis Presley’s first one. But it was when they turned their attention to reggae that The Clash became truly embarrassing. If you’re offended by cultural appropriation, don’t listen to their execrable version of Police & Thieves. It’s on a par with The Black and White Minstrels singing Ol’ Man River but mercifully, not too many people would have heard it. Most were too busy listening to Hotel California, Saturday Night Fever and Songs in the Key of Life, all infinitely more popular than punk in 1977.
The reality of the 1970s bears little resemblance to the way it’s now portrayed. Two years after the Bay City Rollers, The Sex Pistols were another manufactured boy band, shrewdly groomed by a ruthless manager – the Bay City Rollers with attitude. Don’t get me wrong, I liked that attitude. There was an authenticity to their phlegm-flecked malevolence which meant they attracted frenzied media attention. And it’s the intensity of that attention which forms the basis of those countless misleading punk retrospectives.
Those who make them are now probably too young to remember punk and base their opinions on previous documentaries, so the insufferable punk bandwagon rolls on. We’ll have to endure more falsehoods about its popularity and lasting influence when neither claim holds up. Compared with the joyous attractions of disco, funk and reggae, punk was often joyless, elitist and too often about moralising rather than music. Ideal for the middle classes from where most moralising comes.
Punk flashed for a brief period – and it was pretty vibrant. Though if you’re looking for musical and cultural significance, trust me, it was also pretty vacant.
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