Vicious, Rotten ‘Bollocks’: What Did Punk Ever Do to You?

An apex predator cornered on stage, Johnny Rotten’s eyes flit this way and that through the crowd with feverish malice. His frame is jerked around by forces surely external to his body, like a children’s toy with too much voltage applied to it. Beneath a shock of orange hair and a torn banana-yellow waistcoat, the Sex Pistols’ frontman could be screaming his shopping list: simply the way the singer sneers his words from a larynx rough as bitumen is enough to stoke the crowd to frenzy. This gig on 2 June 1976 at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall will go down as one of the most important concerts of all time. Shortly afterwards, inspired attendees Morrissey and Peter Hook would go on to found the Smiths and Joy Division, respectively.

Fast forward fifty years, and punk is an afterthought. Sure, you might blast ‘Town Called Malice’ on a nice day or whack on ‘London Calling’ as you lower yourself beneath a barbell, but cratediggers of our generation everywhere seem to jump from early seventies glam to eighties post-punk and new wave when it comes to British music. Why is that?

Besides the music, punk was in no small part an aesthetic, a vice. As much of the buzz came from hearing Ramones’ ‘Beat on the Brat’ as it did from reading stories in the NME or Spin of the Sex Pistols’ day out on the Thames: the band chartered a barge and played songs like ‘Anarchy In The UK’ from the river outside the Houses of Parliament before police intervened. Such antics caused the furore in 1970s Britain that helped propel punk to the mainstream, but given our liberalising and the passing of time, all this hoo-ha — like punk itself — feels like a relic. But then again, was a big part of the success of bands like Oasis not the tabloid-friendly hijinx of the Gallaghers and their chart battles with Blur? Who cares about any of that now? Quite a few people, it seems, after last summer’s Ticketmaster debacle.

When it comes to the music itself, it’s true that the really rare cuts of punk taste a bit like marmite. The title of Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols is a handy warning sticker; its lyrics land somewhere between edgy and objectionable depending on the listener. But this is the very flintiest of the genre’s offerings — the further you go past 1976, the more recognisable (and perhaps palatable) punk becomes as the scope of the genre widens. For that reason, the Clash’s double LP London Calling — its fingers firmly in reggae and ska-shaped pies — might look like more solid ground on which to build your foundation. Or there’s the Jam (God forbid anyone young listen to the Jam!), whose ‘Setting Sons’ blends a call to arms in ‘The Eton Rifles’ with soft vagaries like a mournful recorder in ‘Wasteland’.

That doesn’t mean to say you should sidestep the stripped-back early stuff though. Part of the puzzle when it comes to punk’s (lack of) popularity is the fairly straight line you can draw from the revving riffs of this period to the garage rock boom of the noughties. Peel away Joe Strummer’s glottal vocals on one end and Alex Turner’s lyrical lacework at the other, and there isn’t so much of a difference between the Clash and Arctic Monkeys’ first albums, respectively. Or listen to the Damned’s ‘Life Goes On’ and tell me you can’t hear tones of Nirvana. Punk’s no alien.

The American side of the movement meanwhile was kickstarted by Ramones’ eponymous debut. Despite the album being labelled as proof that contemporary rockstars were merely “playing two or three chords in a repetitive downward motion for a long time”, it somehow makes for the most earwormy, compulsive listening I’ve heard in a while. Its fourteen songs condense the genre’s uncompromisingly brash bounce into a bite-sized vinyl — one of many that should have us rethinking our lukewarm reception towards punk.

Illustration by Amelia Freeden