50 years of punk: Why the DIY ethos still matters five decades on (and why the punk spirit is needed now more than ever)

Malcolm McLaren considers the question coolly. “Aren’t you just more interested in sewing chaos?” asks the presenter of the BBC’s Nationwide TV show in 1976.

“Well, that’s an accusation by people who don’t really understand what kids want,” he replies.

“They want excitement, they want to transform what’s basically a very boring life for them right now. And rock music is the one thing they thought that they controlled. But if you look at the charts they don’t really have anything to do with it. Bands like the Sex Pistols are making music from the streets, born out the frustration to get something across, that is their own.”

The presenter then challenges these bands’ “bizarre clothes”.

“They’re only bizarre to old people,” McLaren counters.

“What about the nasty word ‘punk’?” she asks.

In the background a pale and lean 20-year-old John Lydon, struggling to make eye contact, pipes up in that robotic tone: “No, the press gave us [that name]. It’s their problem not ours”.

What about the Rolling Stones and The Who? “Are you against those sounds?” the presenter asks.

“Of course,” says Lydon, “because they’re established. They just do not mean anything to anyone”.

It’s an encounter in ways far more revealing than the much more famous car crash of an interview on The Bill Grundy Show later that year when Grundy, said to be a few sheets to the wind, repeatedly goaded the band members to swear to his London audience live on TV. They kindly obliged.

Yes, The Grundy Incident brought punk to national attention — the newspapers reacted as though the entire country was up in arms, though in reality relatively few people would have seen the programme. But the reasons why punk, which marks its 50th anniversary this year, still leaves its impression on pop culture so many decades after its brief flowering are more complex than confected outrage.

"A sense of agency and the stimulus to do something"

As, indeed, are its uncertain, underground origins: whether in the US, with bands the likes of MC5, Television and The Stooges, or in the UK, with the likes of X-Ray Spexs, The Adverts, The Slits, Siouxsie and The Banshees - “and then a whole bunch of copycat wankers,” as Lydon would put it - or the consequence of a cultural exchange between the two, one in part presciently repackaged by impresarios the likes of McLaren. McLaren, recall, managed the New York Dolls before he discovered the Sex Pistols.

“Certainly the cultural impact punk had in the UK was extremely acute,” argues Matthew Worley, professor of modern history at the University of Reading, who teaches a course on the topic.

“Punk gave young people a sense of agency and the stimulus to do something. And it’s still a template of how to take what’s around you and do something with it. But it wasn’t just about the sound. Punk still resonates in part because it was so visually exciting. We’re so familiar with the tropes of punk now we forget how striking it was in the 1970s when everything was flared and beige, not colourful and tight”.

Many have certainly argued that punk was a counter to the British political climate of the time: runaway unemployment, racial tensions, a disaffected and divided government, an economy in desperate free-fall, the three-day week and the ‘Winter of Discontent’. Punk built on the shock sensibility of glam rock before it — in its way a more artsy, fantastical form of proto-punk — and, arguably, before that, on the paradigm shifts brought by artists from Little Richard to Jerry Lee Lewis at the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. But, given such national instability, as the next big youth culture punk was bound to break with pop’s more romantic inclinations in favour of being angry, nihilistic and disenchanted.

According to Stephen Palmer, author of The History of Punk: Punk & Pistolry , punk just happened to have its origins in music rather than street protest. “But what made it critically important was that it would become an English, working-class, council estate-led movement,” he argues.

“The punk ethos was ‘be yourself’, but its giving permission to express fury against privilege, deference and so on alone made it important. It expressed this chaotic anger that nobody in the middle-class knew was there and which came as a massive shock to many. Punk was a polemic, one that was highly influenced by US bands — the word ‘punk’ was popularised by American culture, after all — but which could only have happened as it did in England, where it exploded”.

"Every generation needs its own sound"

Yet "punk has to be understood in context - not just that it was a time of economic crisis but that popular music [on the radio and TV] seemed to be a million miles from what was going on at street level. And every generation needs its own sound,” adds Don Letts, the DJ, film-maker and co-founder of Big Audio Dynamite who, more by happenstance than intent, documented the punk years with his The Punk Rock Movie.

“That said, the first awareness of punk for me actually came visually — the people walking up and down the King’s Road near where I worked at the time. The first time I saw The Clash I couldn’t understand a word they were singing but the look and the energy and the attitude captivated me instantaneously.”

A dark, seditious, individualistic aesthetic of rips, fetishwear, provocative and contradictory political symbols, meets the cut-and-paste ransom note graphic style of Jamie Reid — all set, in time, to be co-opted by the corporate world, as Reid predicted it would be — well, it was, at the least, fresh and surprising. More deeply, it felt like punk was the bastard lovechild of the avant-garde, and channelled a new kind of otherness.

Worley, however, reckons that the idea of punk as inherently revolutionary has been overplayed in the writing of its history. He suggests that punk’s birth was less a critique of society — lyrically it was broadly anti-establishment, but far from directed towards the end goal of a better world; punk was as apathetic as it was urgent — so much as a critique of culture's failure to reflect the disaffection felt by every generation, sometimes inherently, sometimes with whatever circumstances it finds itself facing.

“Pop music, for example, just wasn’t the preserve of young people anymore," he says, and as McLaren stated.

“It wasn’t ‘relevant’, to use a favourite word of Lydon’s. It was more about light entertainment: more predictable, more tepid, with novelty songs and excessive AOR. It certainly wasn’t providing the larger soundtrack to young people’s lives. Punk injected the thrill again. Punk recaptured what rock ’n’ roll had in part been about at its inception: disruption."

No barriers to entry

Punk was, as Jack Miller, punk historian and guitarist with Diesel Boy, has it, a kind of “lost youth music, of a different flavour but akin to heavy metal - unusual sounding, shamelessly and unapologetically itself, but also very much the basis of a community of the like-minded”, with a cultural impact, he laughs, in proportion to its loudness.

Critical to its disruptiveness was not just the volume but that the music was welcomed in spite of its performers’ ability to use the available tools of disruption, those guitars and drum sets. Its restless, sometimes abrasive, three chord style was for many, if certainly not all, punk bands, a product of rudimentary playing skills, ones that would routinely get them booed off stage, while violent antics on stage and in the audience would see them banned from venues, or from the radio or repeatedly dropped by successive record labels. Still, all the negative publicity from throwing beer glasses only helped punk grow.

That punk had such low barriers to entry — unlike the professionalism and production values espoused by the era’s prog rock, for example — made it that much more immediately accessible, argues Miller. Small wonder that punk would likewise drive an alternative media of independent record labels and lo-fi fanzines the likes of the UK’s Sniffin’ Glue. As the caption of a cartoon in one such fanzine, Sideburns, put it: “This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band”.

That’s why “punk is a genre in which the efforts of underground and garage bands that never made an album or onto Top of the Pops are just as important to its story as these that did,” reckons Ian Glasper, bassist with hardcore punk band Stampin’ Ground and author of Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984.

“It’s also why I tend not to think too hard about whether or not ‘the first punk band’ was The Ramones or The Damned, because what matters was that there was this energy developing around the world,” he adds.

“But it was The Damned…”

DIY attitude and "a cultural ladder"

Indeed, rather than being about the music, arguably punk’s most important legacy is the oft-cited DIY, have-a-go mentality — through the music — and the idea that creative self-expression didn’t require anyone’s permission. This was, as Letts calls it, “punk’s greatest gift”. Seeing his mates pick up guitars with no idea how to play them — “and with the stage filling up pretty quickly” — he picked up a film camera with the same mix of ignorance, curiosity and sense of potential.

“One reason we’re still talking about this four letter word so many years later is the sheer number of people who left punk gigs inspired to do something themselves,” says Letts.

“It wasn’t just a soundtrack, or just a style or just an attitude. It was all of that. In fact, I don’t think anything has been that complete since. Of course, nobody at the time was predicting it would have its cultural impact. At the time we were just doing our things, man.

“And in a way punk painted itself into a corner. But the point is that some took that attitude and ran with it,” Letts adds.

“Punk provided a cultural ladder. Some people stayed stuck on the first rung. Others started climbing. It became bigger than a moment. It became a living thing. Like the force in Star Wars, you just had to have a feel for it”.

“As with any explosion it didn’t last long, but in a way by then punk just wasn’t needed anymore anyway,” adds Palmer. “It had already provided the touchpaper for this vast ecology of creative forms. Punk had done its work”.

For all that punk was in one sense starting to fizzle out just three or four years after it started — the Sex Pistols disbanded early in 1978, while other bands went on to be denounced as sell-outs, or to just grow up — that artistically enterprising spirit had fractured and diffused throughout the culture. Punk would prove formative to the likes of New Romanticism, Two Tone and Oi!, to cite just three wildly different youth culture movements that followed it, and not just to music but to art, fashion, film-making.

“Goth, polymorphous sexuality, a kind of laddishness, EMO - these are all lines that stretched out of punk,” Worley suggests. Meanwhile, punk itself mutated into various multiple waves of musical sub-genres throughout the 1980s and beyond, all proudly retaining the ‘punk’ heritage label: ska-punk, afro-punk, skate-punk, the more serious anarcho-punk — bolshily against anything ‘the system’ proposed — as well as many other punkish experiments. Punk could be by turns a product of music business hype, excess exuberance and deeply-felt radicalism.

Punk politicians, punk teachers, punk everyone

But then perhaps core to punk’s strange longevity has been its very nebulousness, its chameleon quality.

“The thing is that punk means something different to almost everyone touched by it,” says Glasper.

“Some see it as deadly serious, a means to convey an anti-authority message. But to others it’s always just been about jumping up and down and having fun." Protest for some was just laughs for many others. It was the Pistols’ Sid Vicious who was said to have invented pogo dancing.

Yet that very nebulousness, he adds, is also important for allowing the essential psyche of punk — rather than some nostalgic revisiting of the 1970s — to be embraced by every generation.

“I grew up in the 1980s, in a boring town, in the shadow of nuclear armageddon, and punk was for me a way of venting my frustrations then too,” says Palmer. “If we all lived idyllic lives there wouldn’t be the need for punk. But unfortunately there’s always something to be angry about."

Is there the same determination to do something about it though, even if that’s just to sneer into the wind? Maybe punk’s dark secret is out: that its hardcore acts of uncomformity didn’t really change much. Don Letts worries that the punk spirit is, if not lost, then at best hibernating and proving hard to wake.

“The problem for me is the aspirations of people creating now,” he says.

“We got into punk to be anti-establishment. Now it’s to be part of the establishment, to be on red carpets and MTV. I know it’s hard to take a chance when you have rent to pay. It’s hard to be a rebel if you’re 30 and still living with your mum. And obviously London isn’t built for people without money anymore is it?

"But we really need the punk spirit now. We need punk politicians, punk teachers, punk expressed though all aspects of life”.

• 50 years of punk: A Shortlist celebration

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