There’s an elephant in the room - and it’s got a dirty great safety pin through

its trunk. I’m talking about punk, of course - the music that I pretended to love

so that I could get a job at the New Musical Express at the age of 17.

Lying is considered naughty at any point, of course; in this age of ‘authenticity’

what I did must seem more of a crime than ever. But try to see it my way. I was

a working-class kid desperate to be a writer. Coming from the background I did,

my dad a factory hand and my mother a shop worker, I had very little chance

of achieving my desire - my destiny, as I melodramatically thought of it. For my

classmates and I, the visit of the Careers Officer was effectively the execution

day of any ambition - he might as well have worn a black cap. (It’s things like

this which the brilliant working-class academic Lisa Mckenzie pin-points as part

of what it means to be a true prole with her bone-chilling phrase ‘Growing up

with a thousand paper cuts every day’.) Even the slightest aspiration was well

and truly laughed out of court; when my bright, attractive cousin expressed a

desire to become an air hostess, she was told to come back to earth - and he

wasn’t joking - as though she had stated her intention to become an astronaut.

So when you’re nearly out of hope and you suddenly see the ladder come down

from the helicopter, you don’t tend to hang about - you scramble up it. Thus I

answered ‘Patti Smith’ (true - I fancied myself in love with her) and ‘The

Ramones’ (untrue - I’d never heard such a mindless, sexless racket in my life)

when the nice NME man asked me who my favourite ‘acts’ were. What would

have happened if I’d said ‘Disco Tex and the Sex-o-lettes’ instead of the latter,

which was the truth? What if I’d said ‘The Isley Brothers, the Supremes and

practically everything black except that ruddy awful reggae?’ I think I’d be in a

factory now; well, not actually now, as I’m an OAP, but I’m pretty sure that the

NME job would not have been mine and I’d have stayed in Bristol for the rest of
my life. It’s a beautiful city - but that life wouldn’t have suited me. I wanted

something wild.

Still, I reflected sourly a few months later, sipping snakebite as I listened in a

smelly basement to a ‘band’ playing a ‘song’ entitled ‘I’m Gonna Be Sick On

You’ ('I’m sick to death of everything you do/And if I'm gonna puke/You bet I'll

puke on you/Down your face and your dress/And your legs and your shoes/I’m

gonna be sick on you!’) what a ruddy price to pay. I gazed into the distance

and wondered what Oscar would have made of it all, or Dorothy and the

Algonquin crew. Surely this wasn’t how one became A Writer - listening to

fellow teenagers boast about vomiting, while drinking cider? I could have got

that at home!

In time, I met the luminaries of the scene; John Lydon, the Clash and a very

young Paul Weller and found them pleasant, interesting and even attractive.

But though I came to kind of like their work because I liked them, punk never

evoked that strange feeling that music at its best provokes; the feeling that

something world-shaking is about to happen, that a miracle could be just

around the corner. My compadre, Tony Parsons, who got his job at the same

time as me (there was only meant to be one ‘hip young gunslinger’ but they

hired us both as we were so adorable) took it all very seriously. He was 24 and

had travelled ‘extensively’ in Europe; I was 17 and had been to Butlin’s in

Bognor Regis several times. But he was terrifically naive and really appeared to

believe that punk would change the world - and even more strangely, that he

and I should get married. Once more, if I’d wanted to marry the first man I had

sex with, I could have stayed in Bristol.

I was a very ‘bad’ punk; not only did I come home from ‘gigs’ and not feel clean

until I’d danced around my grotty bedsit tearing off my stupid leather punk
clothing while playing Martha and the Vandellas but I ‘swerved’ that historic

day in the annals of punk history, the Sex Pistols Boat Trip of June the 7th,

1977, as I had a prior appointment to get thoroughly whipped by the friendly

neighbourhood sadist. I pretended I had ‘period pains’ and that was enough for

El Tone; off he went like a good little punk-rocker to whip himself into a

thorough froth over the fuzz breaking up the party as it sailed by the Houses of

Parliament. He wrote dolefully about it in the Sun in 2021: ‘Until that fateful

and legendary night on the Thames, it was possible for wild young things like

the Pistols and myself — a staff writer on the NME at the time — to believe that

our rebellion would change the world. The atmosphere was ugly, violent and

depressing. We came expecting Woodstock and we got Altamont. Right from

the start of punk rock, we goaded the grown-ups, the straight world, the

establishment. On that Sex Pistols boat trip, the empire struck back.’

Meanwhile, bound and gagged, I was having a lovely time! You wouldn’t get

this back in Bristol, I gloated mutely. Looking back, that was such a genuinely

‘punk’ way to behave; not to show up for the big conventional occasion - as

was expected of one - but instead to pursue one’s own shady and self-serving

interests, thus potentially outraging not just one cohort (Mum and Dad) but two

(fellow punks).

In recent decades, John Lydon - the absolute spirit, soul and sex appeal of punk

- has outraged the punk herd, both veterans and new recruits, by making no

secret of his feelings towards both Brexit (‘The working class have spoke and

I'm one of them and I'm with them’) and Donald Trump (‘Trump is the Sex

Pistols of politics’) and saying 'I never thought I'd live to see the day when the

Right wing would become the cool ones giving the middle finger to the

establishment and the Left wing becoming the snivelling self-righteous twats
going around shaming everyone.’ I don’t think I’ve ever heard the Culture Wars

so sharply and succinctly summed up, except perhaps by moi on a very good

day.

Lydon’s open-mindedness and willingness to change his views when reality

changes (as opposed to clinging to the past and employing Magical Thinking to

make one’s Luxury Beliefs seem swallow-able) was bound to make him Public

Enemy Number One all over again, this time to the new Establishment which

had displaced the old one outraged by him when he was young. This led to the

highly enjoyable spectacle of expensively-educated wet-wipes in their twenties

insisting on X that JOHN LYDON IS NOT PUNK, an accusation also oft levelled at

we proud TERFS - as though it could ever be ‘punk’ to suck up to transvestites

whose one desire is to perve over women in public toilets. The ghastly Lambrini

Girls are the mouthiest representatives of the take-the-knee-and-suck-the-

ladydick view-point (‘Riot Grrrl can be very TERFy. If you look at 30 years ago,

they were putting on festivals where you had to be an assigned female at birth

person to go to them’) while the excellent working-class artist Birdy Rose

created her gorgeous TERF IS THE NEW PUNK T-shirt (bearing the face of

Emmeline Pankhurst) in response to such appropriation of punk by the posh. If

the Lambrini Girls are in any doubt that they are certainly not keepingthe

wayward flame of ‘punk’ alive, I’ll tell them how they’ll know; no ‘punk’ band

would ever accept money from a Government grant, as these State-sponsored

Toytown-rebels have from the Music Export Growth Scheme, despite saying

they were “embarrassed” to be English. Imagine the Sex Pistols being given a

government grant - talk about castrated at birth.

Punk has been irretrievably colonised by the bourgeoise; it was bad enough

when it was the plummy Jon ‘Savage’ (real name Sage, though equally
inappropriate) writing books like 1991’s England’s Dreaming. Pleasingly, the

London Review Of Books Jenny Turner opined that ‘The book is surprisingly

badly written, full of ill thought-out and tiresome Horrible England, Rotten

England, Pusillanimous England, Fuck England bits.’ It gives one a cosy feeling

to remember that the author’s parents and grandmother get thanked for ‘living

through this with me’ (bless - but not very *punk*).

Savage’s speciality was wheeling out the corpse of youth culture and rouging

its nipples one more time in an attempt to eke out his speciality sausage until

his pension came through. But this year, even Savage was outdone in his prissy

re-rendering of punk. One could read in Private Eye:

‘PUNK: The Last Word is a powerful reimagining of punk - not just as a sound or

style, but as a radical, DIY philosophy rooted in defiance, truth and

individuality," declares Omnibus Press's blurb for Chris Sullivan and Stephen

Colegrave's presumptuously titled history, which will be published next month.

And that spirit of defiance and individuality is still alive and spitting. The

Spectator requested that a copy of the book be dispatched for review to Julie

Burchill, who famously chronicled the gory days of punk as one of the "hip

young gunslingers" on the NME in the late 70s. They were informed that the

authors and publisher were "not comfortable" with the idea of Burchill

reviewing their tome, and refused to send it. How very punk!’

That’ll be another thing that isn’t ‘punk’ - charging thirty quid for a coffee table

book about the 50th anniversary of punk. By the time I got to the bit where the

struggling author attempts to sum up the punk ethic as ‘If you want to be a

doctor, lawyer or architect, just work hard, study, do all you can to attend

university and become one’ I did wonder briefly whether it was an elaborate

joke - or just the unwitting public demonstration of profound stupidity. I could

reviewing it, as I would have performed an extremely ‘punk’ demolition of the

whole sad shambles.

So we definitely know what punk isn’t - but what was it? Like all pop uprising, a

combination of anger and ambition. It’s notable that even the angriest yowler,

once he’s made his packet, wants above all a lovely big house in the country -

seen most flagrantly Billy Bragg, who fancied himself a one-man-band version

of punk, and after tormenting us for more years than I care to remember with

the worst singing voice in the world, retired to a huge country pile in one of the

whitest counties in the country. Which seems a strange - hypocritical, even -

choice for someone forever yapping on about the benefits of ‘diversity’; still, if

one can bring oneself to believe that penises can be female, one can probably

believe that Dorset is a vibrant multi-ethnic community.

Summing up, I can see that I haven’t mentioned the actual music - but that

was never the point. Overall, I remember punk fondly, for making a raucous old

racket which though I wouldn’t actually choose to sit down and listen to it

made a change from the AOR which was triumphant at the time (which I would

definitely sit down and listen to, perversely), for propelling the ceaselessly

fascinating John Lydon into the public eye and for launching me on the lovely

work-life I’ve had - and indeed, fifty years later am still having. ‘Career

Opportunities’, indeed!