Punk Life
London's enduring love affair with the influential subculture.
Tim Chester
LONDON -- Punk may have been brewing on both sides of the Atlantic for some time by 1976, but it was that year, and particularly in London, that it really came off the leash and snarled its way into the public consciousness forever.A bunch of bands, labels and icons, from The Sex Pistols to The Clash, The Damned, Stiff Records, Siouxsie Sioux, Vivienne Westwood and Malcom McLaren, came together to define an era and trample an indelible mark on popular culture.Beyond the calling cards that have long since been reduced into cliché – the safety pin, the three chords, the vomit green mohawks – the punk spirit lives on loudly to this day. Its DIY and non-conformist mentality, its focus on empowerment and individuality, are as prevalent now as they were when Johnny Rotten spat his way across the country four decades ago.2016 has been hailed a year of punk to mark 40 years since the scene exploded in 1976. Here’s how its influence still resonates loudly today.
Contemporary music has been infected with the spirit of punk again and again, from post-punk’s experimental expansion at the end of the 70s, via hardcore, grunge and riot grrrl right up to the stripped down rock of the Sleaford Mods and Slaves of the current day.It’s away from the world of guitars that punk’s made itself known in the post-millennial music landscape, however. The capital’s grime scene is the genre’s obvious successor, a DIY-driven British success story spawned on the streets of east London and propagated via pirate radio and warehouse raves. While the likes of Dizzee Rascal quickly jumped into the mainstream, others like JME and Skepta have largely kept it punk.It's punk's "malleable" qualities that allow any individual to apply it to their art, says Jane Beese, Head of Music for The Roundhouse, the iconic north London venue that hosted The Ramones and Patti Smith in 1976. She points to Peaches and Savages as just two acts who have the spirit of punk in them. "You won’t find many artists performing at the Roundhouse today that haven’t been influenced by punk," she told Mashable.
2016's most punk British musician? Perhaps FKA Twigs, who's blazed an uncompromisingly unique trail over the last four years."Me and my mates, we do whatever we wanna do," she said in an interview last year. "And actually, I think there’s something quite punk about that. Not screaming into a mic or wearing leather straps every day, but doing whatever the fuck I wanna do. So to me, that's punk. That’s not a wet blanket."
Vivienne Westwood's name is always invoked when fashion and punk collide and indeed her London show last autumn, a placard-filled riot at Alien Sex Club, was suitably raucous.
However, the spirit of punk lives on across the industry, from Alexander McQueen to Katie Eary and is "as influential as a cultural movement today as it was 40 years ago," according to Dylan Jones, editor of British GQ.
The genre's enduring appeal in fashion is set to be marked twice this year: at a series of shows during London Fashion Week in February and at an exhibition of contemporary punk at June's London Collections: Men."Punk is anti-establishment," designer Claire Barrow told Mashable. "It's not a fashion trend, it's saying f* off to authority and using your resources in the best way you can whether you are poor or rich."
[img src="http://1.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/AP_557055799561-1.jpg " caption="Bob and Roberta Smith with his slogan-covered campaigning van in London." credit="REX FEATURES VIA AP IMAGES/ASSOCIATED PRESS " alt=""]
The worlds of punk and art have been intwined since The Sex Pistols played their first gig at Saint Martin's College of Art in London at the tail end of 1975.Bob and Roberta Smith (Patrick Brill) is one modern day artist upholding the genre's activist ethos admirably, his slogans and signs reminiscent of an earlier era. For a long time the punk fan has combined art and politics, becoming a thorn in Conservative MP and Justice Secretary Michael Gove's side and even running as a candidate for his own Art Party in the former Education Secretary's constituency.
"Punk will come back in new forms always because the attitude is so very, very good. It's to do with people doing things for themselves, controlling their own methods and their own culture." - Malcom McLaren, 1982
Punk design permeates modern culture, meanwhile, and we're not talking about those Never Mind The Bollocks credit cards.The cut and paste aesthetic, pioneered famously by artist and anarchist Jamie Reid on the Sex Pistols' album covers, borne out of a disdain for conventional formats and perfect for DIY designers without typesetting facilities, has resurfaced again and again. The Libertines' logo, for example, sees their colours pinned to the mast at every gig.
Punk lives on in celluloid. Scorsese and Jagger's upcoming HBO series Vinyl centres on the mid-seventies scene in NYC while Julien Temple has been keeping punk documentary alive since his early Sex Pistols films. His 2006 film on Glastonbury brought Britain's mud-splattered weekender into sharp focus in living rooms across the country.Don Letts, whose 2000 documentary The Clash: Westway to the World won a Grammy, is curating a season of films at BFI Southbank in August. It will highlight the diversity of the punk movement though documentary and archive footage, also focussing on the crossover between the Jamaican music scene and punk.
Stuart Brown, Head of Programme and Acquisitions for BFI, says that the punk tradition has been kept alive for decades."As the movement splintered into sub genres we do see the punk aesthetic and ethic manifest in underground film making," he says. In the UK, figures like Derek Jarman led the post punk avant-garde scene with others like John Maybury, Grayson Perry, Tina Keane, Christine Binnie, Isaac Julien, Jill Westwood, Cerith Wyn Evans and Sophie Muller, Brown says. While in the U.S. the No Wave scene took cues from the movement, "stimulating a new wave of independent film making in New York."Brown cites Harmony Korine (Kids, Spring Breakers) as a punk film maker "in the way that he has challenged convention so consistently.""A lot of punk’s DIY ethos and 'fuck you' attitude is to be found in the underground horror scene," he says.
Punk's tattooed tentacles stretch even further, influencing everything from club culture to photography and politics. Fanzines, blogs, online petitions, Occupy, Wikileaks, Anonymous, Pussy Riot -- all exist in a punk-influenced world.Across literature, it plays a part in shelves full of books, from Jeff Noon’s sci-fi series via cyberpunk to the writing of Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill, ex-Buzzcocks manager and north London librarian Richard Boon told Mashable."Punk lives," Boon adds. "It always will.""Its spirit is centuries old. It's not just about music, but attitude -- challenging orthodoxy of any kind; questioning received wisdom; opening doors to information; breaking barriers between people and empowering them to build community, to make things happen."
[img src="http://1.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Three-punks-with-mohicans-Chelsea-Kings-Rd-London-1970s.-�Ted-Polhemus_PYMCA-1.jpg " caption="Three punks with mohicans, Chelsea, Kings Road, London, UK 1970s " credit="TED POLHEMUS / PYMCA " alt=""]
A number of London cultural institutions have joined forces for a year-long celebration of the city’s punk roots in 2016.The Roundhouse is throwing a punk weekender, the British Library is digging out an archive of punk fanzines, Don Letts has a film season based on the genre and Rough Trade are running a series of gigs. The whole thing closes with a party at the Design Museum.
40 years on, and punk isn't loosening its grip any time soon.