I can’t remember the precise moment in time when I became a punk, but I can tell you that it changed my life forever. I may not wear the Destroy T-shirt or sport the bondage pants anymore, but I am still a punk and will be forever. You see, most people failed to realise that Punk wasn’t just a fashion or a trend, but a mentality, a way of life. People debate about which era was best to be brought up in, with probably the ‘60s being the most popularly stated. Quite frankly, I don’t want to get into that argument. I don’t care about any other generation or any other music. There are two events which I recall from my memory as a twelve-year-old in 1977 which may have been the beginning for me. The first was as I was walking down my auntie’s garden path with my cousin and my younger brother. I saw two punks walking down the street towards us. They were passing a bus stop and I can remember the faces on the people as they looked at them in bewilderment. My image is as if everything was frozen except for the punks and me. They were walking towards me in slow motion. I can’t remember what they looked like exactly, but it was on the lines of spiked, dyed hair, ripped T-shirts, skin-tight half-mast trousers and Dr. Martin boots. You have to remember, back in those days this was very radical. Motorists almost crashed cars, women gathered their children to safety and the general public looked in disgust at such people. They were depicted as the Anti-Christ. We, as twelve-year-old kids, bored and with nothing to do thought exactly the opposite. Punks were intriguing, interesting. Why did they dress like that? Why did they sneer at passers by? Why did they not conform to society? After I had given them what must have been the same stare and look as the people at the bus stop, we hurriedly opened the front door and got into the house. My auntie’s house had a large front window with a thick net curtain, which was ideal for us to view the punks passing, but without them being able to see us. All three of us stood at that window and looked. I can’t speak for the other two but I can say for myself that I took in every last detail of what they were wearing, how they stood, how they spoke and acted, as I had already decided that I wanted to be like that. The second event is when my cousin, brother and I went record shopping. As usual we were bored and decided to go to South Shields for something to do. We ended up in a record shop at the bottom of Fowler Street. As we were sifting through the vinyl we came across a new release and couldn’t believe our eyes. Some band had the bare-faced cheek to call their album Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols. We thought it was hilarious and bought it immediately. Although we didn’t know it at the time, The Sun had tried to whip up a four-letter storm in a teacup on the day of the album’s release, focusing on the ‘filthy’ ‘Bodies’ and garnering a couple of bite-sized quotes from the Tory shadow education minister Norman St. John Stevas. ‘Bodies’ was apparently, ‘the kind of music that is a symptom of the way society is declining. It could have a shocking effect on young people,’ while the album containing the song had clearly, ‘been produced deliberately to offend.’ Trying to silence the Pistols had become the primary preoccupation of the nation’s society for small minds. The forces of darkness seemed to be massing. At the end of October, Capital Radio banned Holidays In The Sun though only after it had entered the Capital charts. Someone, somewhere up there, had listened to the record and decided that in singing the line, ‘I don’t wanna go to the new Belsen,’ Rotten was likening Belsen to a holiday camp (eh?!) We dropped the idea of doing anything else that day in South Shields and instantly headed for the bus home. Once in my cousin’s bedroom we shut the door so that his mother couldn’t hear, just in case there was any swearing on the record. We sat poised waiting for it to start. We sat intently and listened to the opening track, Holidays In the Sun – great! Very angry, loud thrashing guitars and all that but not too sweary. Never mind, we still had the rest of the album to go. Next track, ‘Bodies.’ Say no more. We sat there mouths agape as we heard Rotten scream, ‘Fuck this and fuck that fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat.’ This was it. This was what we’d been waiting for! We needed something to channel our energies into and this was it. We listened to the album over and over again, picking up more of the lyrics each time. Now that we had our first taste of Punk we wanted more. We craved knowledge. Where did punks hang out? Were there any other Punk bands out there? What should we dress like? Of course we were naive. We didn’t know that the Punk explosion had landed well before we had heard of it. Bands were now being signed up by the dozen and the record companies were spitting out whatever a band could produce. This inevitably resulted in some absolute crap being released but I bought it all anyway. The music scene had been stifled for a long time in any case, with dire similar-sounding Disco songs being released in quick succession. It was almost as though the music industry was saying to the public, ‘Look, we know it’s another shite record that you’ve already heard in one form or another but we can’t think of anything better to give you.’ We started to open our eyes to what was going on in the Punk world. There was never a shortage of media coverage, perhaps exemplified by the extensive and extensively negative mass-media coverage centred on the Sex Pistols after the now infamous Bill Grundy television interview with them on the Today programme at the end of 1976. The show was only broadcast in London so we didn’t get to see it, but we certainly read of the aftermath. The press were never short of a story and this was particularly true with the more common newspapers such as The Sun and the News Of The World. All of the coverage was bad. It fuelled an already bad reputation and the punks loved it. The more they could shock society the better. I liked the fact that Punk tackled the taboo subjects of sex, racism and violence, to name a few. I also liked the fact that bands were going it alone, without the backing of major record labels. I then read an article in one of the music papers which reviewed the Punk Festival at the 100 Club in London and learned that the Pistols were supported by a band called The Clash. I decided to visit the local record shop and see what releases The Clash had available. At the time they only had one single on release, White Riot, and later released their first, self-titled, album. The Clash whetted my appetite still further. Around this time I started listening to the John Peel show on Radio 1 as he was the only DJ I knew of who was playing decent stuff. I had been brought up as part of a model working/middle class family. My Father was the financial Director of a Newcastle-based company and my Mother held a good supervisory position within the local authority. We all went to church on Sunday. My brother David and I attended Sunday School until I was about eleven years old, when our parents decided we were old enough to make our own mind up whether we wanted to go to Church or not. This in mind, can you imagine my parent’s displeasure when I became a Punk. It was against everything my family ever stood for and everything I was ever taught. They were fed up with me. Their son was turning into a monster and the more they tried to talk me out of it, the more I rebelled. Newcastle venues frequently hosted well-known bands, the biggest names playing the City Hall, providing a visual dress guide emanating from outside the city. Less obviously commodified and more insular, places such as Bollingbroke Hall in South Shields played host mainly to local bands such as the Angelic Upstarts. Trawling Newcastle for Punk records took you right across the city, from raking around the bargain bins of department stores such as Callers on Northumberland Street (which was really a furniture store with a record department upstairs and which also happens to be the same store in which I was arrested for stealing the Clash’s first album) to queuing outside HMV to meet The Dickies. Incidentally, it was whilst waiting in this queue that my Dad passed with some work colleagues and chose to disown me. This didn’t make any odds to me but when my Dad told my Mother of his embarrassment at seeing me dressed with all the other punks they decided to confront me. I was asked to ‘tone myself down’ and start acting a bit more responsibly. I asked them for some money so I could buy some clothes and get my hair cut. After Dad shelled out I promptly went to the local barbershop in Jarrow and asked for a ‘No.1’. Sporting my skinhead, I then headed for Newcastle and bought a pair of bondage pants and a ‘Who Killed Liddle?’ T-shirt (referring to the Angelic Upstarts song about Liddle Towers, who died whilst in Police custody.) I was rebelling against my parents as every teenager since the dawn of time has done, but I regret to this day what I did after seeing the disappointment on my parent’s face. It was as if they had thrown the towel in and I had finally won the battle. This, in hindsight, was probably a master stroke on their behalf and the next few weeks saw me kissing ass by doing household chores and the likes to get back in their good books. I started to experiment with my own designs and mutilated anything I could get my hands on. Fortunately, I was quite good at art and became the envy of many of my friends with some of my products. I ended up being persuaded to make gear for some of my mates but I knocked this on the head as quickly as possible as I couldn’t be arsed to produce for other people. I did relish in painting haversacks though, where I reproduced some good album covers. I landed in hot water on the parent front once again though when I painted the cover of Penetration’s Moving Targets LP on a friend’s haversack, which was a microscopic picture of sperm. They confronted me about the suitability of ‘that sort of material’ for a haversack but I just played like I didn’t understand what they meant. Even the school uniform wasn’t safe. The specification may have been black trousers but they didn’t say that they weren’t allowed to be so tight that it took you a good few minutes of wriggling around the bed to get your feet over the ends. Nor did they specify that you weren’t allowed to rip the school badge on your blazer so that in hung down below the breast pocket and they didn’t even specify that you couldn’t tie your tie so tight that the knot was almost invisible, Jam-style. Another source of clothing was Tell It T-Shirts (a.k.a. TITS) on Westgate Road in Newcastle and the ad’s which appeared in the back of Sounds and NME offering motorbike jackets, bondage trousers, Punk badges and an array of fake Westwood and McLaren Seditionaries merchandise. Through these outlets Punk fashion grew and mutated, sited within, and inextricably linked to, a much broader culture.

So is Punk dead or not? It’s an argument that has raged for years and after great deliberation I have concluded that the answer is no and no! By my first no, I mean that on the surface Joe Public will tell you that Punk died a long time ago. If you scratch that surface, you will find a music scene very much alive and kicking. And what’s more, not a lot has changed. Punks move in small circles and most of the gigs I go to are attended by the same crowd. It’s funny, but if you stand back and look you can see new faces are recognized and watched closely. Once they have been accepted they become part of a close-knit family. In the North East, we have some brilliant regular Punk music venues. My second no is because if you ask any Punk fan if their music is alive and well, the answer you’ll receive will vary drastically according to one major factor - the age of the respondent. The over 40s will possibly say, ‘No chance - it died in 1981,’ whilst the 30 somethings might find it fits into the aforementioned category, but your standard ample trousered, spiky-haired 18-year-old skate urchin will probably reply enthusiastically in the affirmative. This is because there’s a whole new Punk scene straddling the music world, spearheaded by bands like Green Day, Rancid and Blink 182. So perhaps Punk’s not dead after all, maybe there’ll always be room for rebellion in music. The answer probably depends, once more, on the age and overall temperament of the person you’re asking. Your aforementioned skate-brat loves it and doesn’t want his music examined too thoroughly, while the more laid-back fan in his 30s doesn’t really mind one way or another. Approach your 50 odd-year-old who was there in ‘76, however, and the answer will be the same - Punk died three decades ago, mate.’ RS


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