The Englishness of English Punk: Sex

Pistols, Subcultures and Nostalgia

RUTH ADAMS

 
Dr Ruth Adams 
Lecturer in Cultural & Creative Industries 
Culture, Media and Creative Industries (CMCI) 
King's College, London 
Room 6C, Chesham Building 
Strand 
London 
WC2R 2LS 
 
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Please cite as

The Englishness of English Punk: Sex Pistols, Subcultures and

Nostalgia' in Popular Music and Society, Vol. 31, No. 4, October
2008, pp. 469-488

IMPORTANT: When referring to this paper, please check the page

numbers in the journal published version and cite these.

The Englishness of English Punk: Sex Pistols, Subcultures and Nostalgia' in Popular
Music and Society, Vol. 31, No. 4, October 2008, pp. 469-488 
The Englishness of English Punk: Sex Pistols, Subcultures and

Nostalgia

Abstract

This article considers the Englishness of English Punk, or,

more specifically, the Englishness of the Sex Pistols and the

cultural productions associated with them. It will consider

whether the challenge that they posed to conventional,

Establishment, consensus notions of Englishness has merely

been recuperated as an entertaining diversion within a broader

hegemonic nationalist history, or whether this challenge has

had a more fundamental impact. It will argue that the Pistols

facilitated a reframing and a re-imagining of English culture,

and left a legacy, which has been drawn upon by a number of

subsequent art and music subcultures.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dan Bernstein for his patient

proofreading and constructive critical challenges.

This article seeks to examine the Englishness of English Punk,

or, more specifically, the Englishness of the Sex Pistols and

the individuals and cultural productions associated with them.

It will consider whether the challenge that they posed to

conventional, Establishment, consensus notions of Englishness

has merely been recuperated as an entertaining diversion

within a broader hegemonic nationalist history, or whether

this challenge has had a more fundamental impact. It will

contemplate the possibility that the Pistols, to some extent,

facilitated a reframing and a re-imagining of English culture,

and further suggest that the current Grime musical culture is

evidence for punk‟s legacy and enduring influence.

What is without question is that the Sex Pistols, and the

cultural phenomena that they created, generated, and inspired,

were decidedly English. Although Johnny Rotten was of Irish

parentage, and Malcolm McLaren was half Jewish,i and despite

the fact that the Pistols called for Anarchy in the UK and

attacked the British monarchy, as a consequence no doubt of

the band being born and bred Londoners the culture which they

both drew on and reflected was English. They offered

relatively few representations of either the specific

nationalist cultures and issues of the other dominions of the

Union, or those of the regions beyond London.ii

Punk, as a number of theorists, most conspicuously Dick

Hebdige, have noted, was a subculture constructed through a

process of collage, of bricolage. Bits and pieces of both

officially sanctioned and popular English culture, of politics

and history were brought together in a chaotic, uneasy

admixture to form a new culture; a culture that arguably spot

lit the very institutions that it nominally sought to destroy.

Whatever the – still disputed – motivations, the Sex Pistols‟

output and career can only be fully understood within the

context of English history.

This is clearly demonstrated by two films - one contemporary,

one a historical account – which sought to offer a critical

commentary on, and context for punk.

Derek Jarman‟s Jubilee was made in 1977 which, if not the high

point of punk, arguably represented a peak in public awareness

of the movement. The film draws on the conventional

repertoire of English Heritage; it opens in the court of

Elizabeth I and it is significant that the name of the

messenger who guides the old Queen into the future world of

her namesake is Aerial, a Shakespearean reference. This

future – “the present” - is an apocalyptic wasteland, the

aftermath of a civil war. A wasteland in which punks and

police fight running battles in the streets of London, in

which although patriarchal society has apparently been

overthrown the real power lies with a monopolistic media baron

who lives in bucolic splendour on a Dorset country estate. In

this „contemporary‟ setting, the references to English

Heritage are no less apparent than in the opening sequences,

albeit distorted and detourned. Further Shakespearean

references abound, and punk celebrity Jordan adopts the guise

of a number of female English icons - Elizabeth II, Britannia

- which are twisted and wrested from their conventional

representations to lay bare the ruthless and oppressive

politics they occlude. That history is a fictional narrative

written by the victors is made plain, a conclusion that John

Lydon also drew from the various – and rarely accurate –

histories of himself.iii The social chaos portrayed in Jubilee

may have been somewhat exaggerated for dramatic effect, but

the settings are all too real. The film gives a stark account

of just how derelict and desolate large areas of London were

in the late 1970s; a grey world of bombsites, council blocks,

graffiti and grime.

Such a view is also not absent from Julien Temple‟s 1999

retrospective account of the Pistols‟ story, The Filth and the

Fury. News footage of blasted urban landscapes, race riots,

industrial unrest and piles of uncollected rubbish are

juxtaposed with apparently more innocuous aspects of English

culture, such as Michael Fish presenting the weather, Big Ben

and illuminated manuscripts. This film, even more so than

Jubilee, clearly locates punk within the context of English

cultural history. Explicitly illustrated are Lydon‟s use of

Shakespeare‟s (or, more specifically Olivier‟s) Richard III to

create his stage persona, and both his and McLaren‟s

employment of Dickensian imagery – Oliver Twist in particular

– in the construction of the band‟s image. McLaren describes

the Pistols as his “little Artful Dodgers,” thus casting

himself in the role of one of the two most notorious Jewish

entrepreneurs in English literature. The Pistols themselves

are presented less as menaces to society than the inheritors

of the English Music Hall tradition; the heirs to the crowns

of Arthur Askey and Max Wall, operating outside of the

“legitimate theatre” and characterised by clownish outfits,

silly walks, smutty jokes and cocking a snook at the

Establishment. The Pistols, it is stressed, were working in

the tradition of English, working class musical theatre, not

Rock and Roll, which was – like other undesirable rogue

elements such as heroin, Nancy Spungen and a uniform of black

leather jackets – an American import.iv

Malcolm McLaren makes this very explicit in a radio programme

in which he comments on Andy Warhol‟s multiple portrait of the

Queen from 1985. Of Warhol‟s painting he says:

You can‟t take it seriously; there is no depth of

character. It‟s flat; it‟s just an icon. It‟s vacuous,

it‟s empty, it‟s just like a Coca-Cola bottle. If that‟s

what we‟ve got to consider the Queen as, then in some

respects I‟d be happy to say that perhaps we won‟t have

any more queens as we tried to impose, with a thought

 about the Queen back in the days when I managed the Sex

Pistols. We took the Queen‟s portrait, by Cecil Beaton,

we printed it just like a silk screen image no different

from Andy Warhol here, we filled in some colors, but we

put a safety pin through her nose, and we wrote on the

side “God Save the Queen, she ain‟t no human being.” We

basically didn‟t molly-coddle her, we didn‟t put her up

on a pedestal, we were basically saying “this icon is a

joke.” Because right there in the „70s, we were already

demonstrating our resistance against this vacuous,

gilded, Hollywood, American way of dominating culture

with stories that were genuinely untrue. We were now

trying to authenticate our beliefs, move away from

American culture, resist and fight it and come up with a

culture of our own. That was punk rock, and we

wrote the song and equally painted a portrait, our

version of the Queen, and got it on the front page of the

Daily Mirror, on Queen‟s Silver Jubilee day! (McLaren

Portrait: Andy Warhol’s Queen Elizabeth II, broadcast on

BBC Radio4, 14 August 2006)

The Pistols, then, might be regarded as unlikely guardians of

English Heritage, albeit expressing a history which stressed

the popular cultural and the radical dissenting pamphleteering

elements of that heritage rather than the more conventional

(pro)monarchical and aristocratic aspects. In this, the

Pistols were absolutely of their time, given that the 1970s

marked the point in English history when (as a consequence of

furious lobbying and energetic marketingv) the “Heritage

Industry” – from visits to “Stately Homes” to the immense

popularity of Laura Ashley – became a firmly established

element of national life.

Christopher Booker has claimed that “Never before in history

had there been an age so distrustful of the present, so

fearful of the future, so enamoured of the past. Therein lay

the significance of the Seventies.” (Weight 544)

Representatively, Roy Strong reflected in 1978 that:

It is in times of danger, either from without or from

within, that we become deeply conscious of our heritage

... within this word there mingle varied and passionate

streams of ancient pride and patriotism, of a heroism in

times past, of a nostalgia too for what we think of as a

happier world which we have lost. […] Our […] heritage is

therefore a deeply stabilising and unifying element within

our society. (Weight 544)

While the Pistols clearly had no intention of being either a

stabilising or a unifying element within society - quite the

opposite in fact - the notion that there might be “No Future”

was in fact an extremely widespread fear. If there is nothing

to look forward to then the only option is to

look backwards. If there can be no future then we are all, as

a nation, obliged to live in the past. As Savage suggests, in

the early „70s:

The country carried all the psychic baggage of a Pyrrhic

victory. Despite the post-war burst of Socialism, the

war had seemed to vindicate the status quo. The

incidence of films celebrating England‟s endurance and

victory was in a direct ratio to the refusal of its

people to see the need for change. England was smug and

static, full of imperial pretensions... (Savage,

England‟s 108)

Nevertheless, given punk‟s active construction of new social

and aesthetic modes of being, it paradoxically suggested that

there perhaps could and would be an (alternative) future, a

utopian vision that did not depend entirely on wallowing in

nostalgia.

It is perhaps useful at this juncture to introduce the

distinction, articulated by Laurence Lerner, between “Eden”

and “Utopia”; two myths that arose and endure within human

cultures to explain and compensate for the shortcomings of

life lived in the present. Although the two concepts are

neither necessarily antithetical nor incompatible (indeed,

they bookend a linear human history in both Marxist and

Christian accounts) they tend, argues Lerner, to give rise to

differing conceptions of the trajectory of history and to

different sensibilities. “The one sees it as going upward,

the other downward, to or from the paradise that transcends

history.” (Lerner 76) “The one structures our experience with

sadness, the other with fierce hope. One speaks an elegy, the

other a call to action.” (Lerner 65) The narrative of Eden

relates a fall from grace, whilst that of Utopia posits the

possibility of a bright future; the former tends to lead to

resignation, nostalgia and quietism, whilst the latter calls

for zeal and can be translated into an active political

programme. If we transpose this model onto English society in

the 1970s, we can argue that the Edenic position reflects that

of the Establishment and its adherents (i.e. “straight” or

“mainstream” society) whereas the Utopian position relates

closely to that of punk. Such a claim is given credence by

Lerner‟s assertion that

When such zeal fails, we see that it has to, and we

regard it with fear and pride. We see that it was

exhilarating and dangerous, like a hero so obsessed that

he cannot compromise or accept the limitations of mere

living. It is out of such passions that tragedy is made.

(79)

This narrative has clear parallels with punk‟s short,

explosive, yet ultimately doomed existence.vi

Patrick Wright argues that:

 National Heritage involves the extraction of history – of

the idea of historical significance and potential – from

a denigrated everyday life and its restaging or display

in certain sanctioned sites, events, images, and

conceptions. In this process history is redefined as the

historical, and it becomes the object of a similarly

transformed and generalised public attention. (69)

This might be said to offer a fairly accurate account of the

Pistols‟ career, but what happens when they – unavoidably –

became the object of a “generalised public attention,” a part

of history? Must they suffer the fate of oppositional places

and ideas described by Jane Jacobs, becoming “sanitised and

depoliticised in their transit into officially sanctioned

heritage.”? (23)

Certainly, if we consider a publication such as Satellite Sex

Pistols, it appears to be symptomatic of the theorists‟ worst

nightmares of the recuperation of all dissent within the

dominant hegemony. The book, while a useful visual resource,

reduces the Pistols‟ legacy to a collectors‟ guide of punk

memorabilia and provides a “tourists‟ guide” to the streets of

London. This begins: “You are about to go back in time and

revisit key locations in the Sex Pistols story. So grab your

A to Z, switch on your Walkman and let‟s go…” (Burgess 8) In

this publication there is a distinct lack of the awkward,

critical questioning, the self-reflexive interrogation that

was a key characteristic of punk; no question of whether being

either a tourist or an “anorak” might be antithetical to the

project‟s intentions. As much is, however, acknowledged by

the former editor of The Filth and The Fury fanzine; while he

admits that he is as guilty as the next fan, he fears for the

obsessives who “spend huge amounts of their time and money on

them, they‟re not interested in any other bands, or any other

kind of music, they‟re stuck in a rut… Exactly the opposite

of what the Pistols were supposed to be about.” (Murphy 25)

This could be seen as the apotheosis of a reactionary project

which has reduced the threat of punk through the processes of

mass commercialisation, diffusion and domestication – through,

for example, numerous tabloid exposés and magazine articles

featuring “Punks and their Mothers”, punk babies and punk

weddings. Such articles, as Hebdige suggests, “served to

minimise the Otherness so stridently proclaimed in punk style,

and defined the subculture in precisely those terms which it

sought most vehemently to resist and deny.” (98)

Arguably the band themselves have been complicit in the

“Pistols Heritage Industry”, staging their own “Silver

Jubilee” celebrations in the form of a(nother) reunion concert

in 2002 and licensing numerous souvenir commodities from

pencil cases to fridge magnets; and this all before Lydon

accepted a place within mainstream celebrity culture and

ventured into the “jungle.”vii For many of those with a

vested interest in the movement, punk was already “history” by

1979. The approach taken by Fred and Judy Vermorel and Julie

Burchill and Tony Parsons in their books Sex Pistols: The

Inside Story and The Boy Looked At Johnny, dating from ‟77 and

‟78 respectively, and McLaren‟s 1979 film The Great

Rock’n’Roll Swindle is testament to this. Dick Hebdige‟s

seminal work Subculture: The Meaning of Style, first published

in 1979, also refers to punk only in the past tense. Punk was

history, finished; the full story could now be told.

However, in the mid 1970s, although it was always considered

probable that punk would have a short (if intense) lifespan,

with a “moral panic” in full swing the normalising, let alone

memorialising, of this most oppositional of subcultures did

not appear to be a likely fate.viii Not least because, unlike

the mainstream Heritage Industry, Punk was trafficking in

history, not merely wallowing in nostalgia; it was

highlighting what Wright has described as “the cheap little

ruse in which history subsequently turned „our‟ short-lived

victory [in the War] into long-term defeat.” (25)

Nostalgia and history explosively met head on during the

Queen‟s Silver Jubilee in 1977. The official Jubilee

celebrations met with unexpected success, with some 90% of the

population giving themselves over to what Tom Nairn called

“the Glamour of Backwardness.” (Savage, England‟s 352) This

was perhaps unsurprising given the media saturation, the

promise of additional holidays and something to look forward

to and celebrate in circumstances that offered few

opportunities for either. Beyond the formal celebrations,

consisting of a service at St Paul‟s Cathedral and a royal

walkabout, approximately 6,000 street parties were held in

London alone. Reports of the celebrations throughout the

Union stressed the breaching of class, racial and sectarian

barriers, and there was much talk of the rekindling of

“community spirit” reminiscent of the discourse of the Second

World War. However, as Richard Weight suggests: “The emphasis

on reconciliation […] was an explicit acknowledgement that

national unity had broken down.” (546) This was a fact

acknowledged even more explicitly by the 10% (of whom the

Pistols were the most notorious and visible members,) for whom

the Jubilee, as Savage suggests,

seemed an elaborate covering of the social cracks – with

fading Coronation wallpaper. […] „God Save the Queen‟

was the only serious anti-Jubilee protest, the only

rallying call for those who didn‟t agree with the Jubilee

because […] they resented being steamrollered by such

sickening hype, by a view of England which had not the

remotest bearing on their everyday experience. (Savage,

England‟s 352-353)
Yet for all its offensive republicanism and the sacrilegious

treatment of national icons in Jamie Reid‟s accompanying

artwork, “God Save the Queen” was not, I would argue, per se,

anti-nationalist, or anti-patriotic. Rather, it was an attack

on a particular version of English nationalism, the

monarchical, jingoistic, xenophobic sense of superiority,

which – despite periods of nominally

Socialist government – had been an important aspect of the

post-war consensus. In doing so, the Pistols were arguably

working in another “tradition” of dissenting, yet

quintessentially English culture, this time from earlier in

the twentieth century. Both the “Angry Young Men” of the

1950s and the “satire boom” of the 1960s set out to attack the

“complacency” of consensus Britain and “„the unthinking

attitudes of respect‟ which still predominated” (Carpenter

119).ix

“God Save the Queen” likewise, for all of its apparent

negativity, pointed a way towards a new, more positive,

reframing of Englishness. An England, perhaps, of citizens

rather than subjects. As Lydon protested in The Filth and the

Fury: “You don‟t write “God Save the Queen” because you hate

the English race, you write a song like that because you love

them and you‟re fed up with them being mistreated.” And, “We

declared war on England without meaning to.”

The metaphor of war was an apt one because, as Mark Sinker

argues:

„No Future‟ was never a threat; it was a promise. It was

– it is – a moral fact, a fundamental conundrum: how to

behave in the last days, when authority is ended. Life

during wartime; how to live happily and decently when

this is as good as things may ever get (133).

It was also apt because the Second World War loomed extremely

large in nominally post-war British society. As Billy Bragg

has noted: “The mythology of 1940, fed by heroic war films and

the soft stereotypes of ‘Allo, ‘Allo and Dad’s Army, is rooted

deeply within our national consciousness.” (Savage, England‟s

x) This dominance of history (and a historical victory) was,

for many punks, a problem, not least because it was used as a

stick with which to beat the younger generations. Hence the

deployment of the swastika as the ultimate offensive symbolic

weapon;x however, as Patrick Wright suggests:

Abject and manipulative as it undoubtedly is, the public

glorification of war can express the real counterpoint

which the experience of war has provided to the

routinised, constrained and empty experience of much

modern everyday life. In war – and surely not just for

men – personal actions can count in a different way,

routine can have a greater sense of meaning and

 necessity, and there can be some experience not just of

extremity (avant-garde pleasure), but also of purpose.

In this undoubtedly limited respect war can indeed be

recollected as both more meaningful than normal everyday

life and also as a purification (23).

Given that a major complaint of the punk generation was a

persistent boredom, was it possible that they were, to some

extent, “envious” of the extreme experiences of the older

generations, experiences that they both flaunted and seemed

intent on withholding from the young? Was punk, perhaps, a

form of symbolic war, to facilitate avant-garde pleasures and

a sense of purpose? Joe Queenan suggests that such an idea is

embodied by The Clash song “London Calling”.

By commandeering the legendary phrase “London Calling,”

previously used as a verbal beacon of hope by the BBC

World Service during the dark days of World War II, the

song expresses the punks‟ contempt for the generation who

defeated the Nazis, and then spent the rest of their

lives reminiscing about it. With its apocalyptic lyrics:

“London calling to the faraway towns, now that war is

declared – and battle come down,” it captures the punks‟

desperate, somewhat theatrical yearning to fight the kind

of pitched battle their parents had fought 30 years

earlier. That is, to participate in a battle that might

 lead to something more lethal than a head butt.

(Queenan)xi

In wartime also, there are fewer difficulties regarding

identity formation, you know clearly which side you are on.

For post-war generations, the defining of “us and them” had to

be constructed from within. Perhaps also for this reason there

was an almost covetous attitude toward the clear identities

and militant attitudes of some black communities in Britain.xii

Denied a war of their own, punks might still aspire to, in the

words of The Clash, “a riot of their own.”

Punk also took on a broader significance and purpose through

its association (which reached its peak during the Jubilee)

with the nation as a whole. As Wright argues:

where so much contemporary experience in this period of

economic and imperial „decline‟ can only disappoint or

frustrate, the symbolism of the nation can still provide

meaning. In this respect the nation works to re-enchant

a disenchanted everyday life (24).

While the “blank generation” was visibly disenchanted by the

model of nationhood offered by the Establishment, punk

provided a quasi-nation, a sense of identity and belonging.

Thus, rather than bemoan the apparent facility with which punk

was absorbed into the nationalistic hegemony, perhaps we

should consider its long-term effects on the English national

identity – and particularly for post-war generations. Punk

offers reasons to be proud of being English that do not rely

on the subjugation of other races or nations, nor of the lower

social classes. Punk could be argued to be a reframing of

national identity in the image of (certain elements of) the

working classes, rather than that of the ruling classes, of

the (post) industrial city rather than the pastoral fantasy of

the countryside. In this, punk is again perhaps indicative of

broader trends within national heritage, which

has been expanded in fairly recent years so that it now

includes the local scene alongside the capital city, the

old factory alongside the municipal art gallery, the

urban tenement or terrace alongside the country house,

the vernacular alongside the stately and the academically

sanctioned (Wright 25).

The break from, and the interventions in the dominant models

of nationhood that punk achieved can be illuminated by the

distinction that Wright (drawing on Agnes Heller) makes

between history (that which is formally sanctioned) and

historicity. Alain Touraine‟s definition of historicity is a

society‟s capacity to act on itself and determine the order of

its representations. “Historicity” is thus a “symbolic

capacity” which enables a society to “construct a system of

knowledge together with technical tools which it can use to

intervene in its own functioning.” (Wright 14) In Heller‟s

conception “historicity” also relates to questions such as

“where have we come from, what are we, where are we going”‟

These questions are answered by the stories that we tell

ourselves and others about our place in society, and may be in

contrast to or conflict with both dominant narratives and the

“truth.” This facilitates then, what Heller calls a sense of

“everyday historical consciousness” which includes “a sense of

historical development or change as it impinges on everyday

life: a „sense of historical existence‟.” (Wright 16)

Historicity then, can offer both an individual sense of

history and a way of framing that within the broader

historical process, and by extension, a way of reframing

history to take account of individual, personal history and

resist, if necessary, dominant narratives. The Pistols could

not have failed, to borrow a phrase, to have felt “the hand of

history upon them,” but also enjoyed an awareness that they

were playing an active role in the formation of history, that

their historicity was shaping history. It is an interesting,

albeit unanswerable question whether punk would have had quite

such a profound effect on the nation as a whole had it not

been blessed with the opportunity to hitch its star to the

wagon of the Jubilee. But perhaps more importantly, the Sex

Pistols allowed their fans to also feel as if they were part

of history; Andy Medhurst recounts that he “drew sustenance

and prestige from being in tune with the prevailing cultural

aesthetic” (228) and there was no doubt a thrill in being part

of a movement which was front-page news, however

geographically or socially remote individuals may have been

from the events making the headlines.

Wright argues that this everyday sense of historical existence

not only testifies to radical needs which can be met neither

in present everyday life nor “in the complacent grandeur of

official symbolism” but also holds out a utopian hope “that

everyday historical consciousness might be detached from its

present articulating in the dominant symbolism of the nation

and drawn into different expressions of cultural and

historical identity.” (26) Given the Pistols‟ reliance on such

symbolism, it is perhaps questionable to what extent they

managed to achieve this. As Hebdige observes:

The various stylistic ensembles adopted by the punks were

undoubtedly expressive of genuine aggression, frustration

and anxiety. But these statements, no matter how

strangely constructed, were cast in a language which was

generally available – a language which was current (87).

To some extent this was born of necessity, as punks had no

other language available to them, but even if they had been

able to express themselves with more individual and arcane

symbolism, and not within the common language, their reach and

influence would undoubtedly have been much less widespread and

significant. To be effective, punk had to demonstrate, whilst

maintaining the critical distance of the outsider, that it was

part of the society it attacked. Hebdige again:

the punks were not only directly responding to increasing

joblessness, changing moral standards, the rediscovery of

poverty, the Depression, etc., they were dramatizing what

had come to be called „Britain‟s decline‟ by constructing

a language which was, in contrast to the prevailing

rhetoric of the Rock Establishment, unmistakeably

relevant and down to earth (hence the swearing, the

references to „fat hippies‟, the rags, the lumpen poses).

The punks appropriated the rhetoric of crisis which had

filled the airwaves and the editorials throughout the

period and translated it into tangible (and visible)

terms (87).

Despite punk‟s modernist certainties, the new England which it

(at least in its early years) imagined into being was arguably

a post-modernist utopia, in which difference is celebrated

(often for its own sake.) Punk very often ignored and

transgressed the gender, sexual, class, racial and aesthetic

norms of mainstream society; it created a safe space in which

individual expression and diversity could be given free reign.

Notwithstanding the mistaken accusations of fascism that arose

from the intemperate use of the swastika, punk‟s relationship

with reggae music and West Indian culture more generally was

arguably an early exercise in multiculturalism. The appeal of

reggae for punks was largely, if paradoxically, as Hebdige

suggests, “in the exclusiveness of Black West Indian style, in

the virtual impossibility of authentic white identification”

(64). Reggae and Rastas proffered less an aspirational

identity than a parallel, analogous identity. “It was an

alien essence, a foreign body which implicitly threatened

mainstream British culture from within and as such it

resonated with punk‟s adopted values – „anarchy‟, „surrender‟

and „decline‟.” (Hebdige 64) And, as detailed above, the

themes of a state of “emergency” and “war.”

Punk‟s advocacy of reggae and Rastafarianism represented a

further rejection of Establishment notions of Englishness:

This response embodies a Refusal: it begins with a

movement away from the consensus (and in Western

democracies, the consensus is sacred). It is the

unwelcome revelation of difference which draws down upon

the members of a subculture hostility, derision, „white

and dumb rages‟ (Hebdige 132).

More positively, punk‟s acceptance of reggae as a different -

but equal - cultural form might be said to represent a shift

from a colonial to a post-colonial orientation. As Hebdige

observes:

At one level, the punks openly acknowledged the

significance of contact and exchange, and on occasion

even elevated the cultural connection into a political

commitment. Punk groups for instance, figured

prominently in the Rock against Racism campaign set up to

combat the growing influence of the National Front in

working-class areas. But at another, deeper level, the

association seems to have been repressed, displaced on

the part of the punks into the construction of a music

which was emphatically white and even more emphatically

British (68).

There is then, perhaps, something in Roger Sabin‟s argument

that “what punk didn‟t say about (anti-) racism was often more

important than what it did. Specifically, punk‟s biggest

failure in the political sphere was its almost total neglect

of the plight of Britain‟s Asians.” (Sabin, I Won‟t 203) In

the late 1970s the focus of both far right activity and more

casual racism tended to be Asians rather than Afro-Caribbeans,

particularly following the arrival in Britain of many Asian

refugees expelled from Uganda, Kenya and Malawi; but this fact

was largely ignored by punk. Sabin suggests that punk‟s

failure to respond to this situation was perhaps due less to

an active hostility to Asian immigrants than to the fact that

 the issue wasn‟t a „hip‟ one. Asians simply didn‟t have

the same romance as Afro-Caribbean youth –

especially in terms of the latter‟s reputation for being

confrontational with the policexiii – and what was equally

problematic, they had no music comparable to reggae with

which punks could identify. As fellow „rebel rockers‟

they were a dead loss (Sabin, I Won‟t 203-204).xiv

Sabin further contends that the influence of reggae and

openness to other cultural forms more generally has been

exaggerated for positive effect in histories of punk. This

may be, in itself, evidence of the metropolitan London-centric

nature of many such histories, given that West Indian culture

was more widespread and visible (and thus, perhaps, more

accessible and accepted) in the capital. When reggae acts

supported punk groups outside of London and other large

conurbations they often found themselves playing to

indifferent or even hostile audiences.xv Sabin argues that

“The publicity given to Rasta DJ, Don Letts, of Roxy club

fame, has certainly skewed the picture,” (Sabin, I Won‟t 216)

that “the fact that punk had a blind spot for anti-Asian

prejudice meant that this was an area that was left open for

exploitation” (Sabin, I Won‟t 213) and this facilitated “an

alternative, right-wing, lineage – one that continues to be

menacingly significant, not just in music but in wider

political life.” (Sabin, I Won‟t 213) Nevertheless,

exaggeration notwithstanding, it is certainly true that punk

opened the eyes and sympathies of many young people to musical

and ethnic cultures which they may have otherwise remained

unaware of, or even hostile towards. The “Two-Tone” movement

that emerged in punk‟s wake in the late „70s and early „80s

might be said to represent a more thoroughgoing synthesis of

black and white cultures (and personnel.)

Given that the post-war consensus has now been replaced with a

different – and arguably equally oppressive – consensus, given

that (despite many gains in race relations) the concept of

multiculturalism in Britain is now widely regarded as under

threat, given the poor state of British Rock music which seems

unable to imagine itself other than as endless rehashings of

the progressive, punk and New Wave forms, given that punk

itself degenerated into little more than a uniform style and

stance, how legitimate is it to make radical claims about its

effects on the national culture and psyche? Perhaps its

significance lies, as Neil Spencer argues, in part, in the

fact that many cultural phenomena once regarded as beyond the

pale are now commonplace. He writes:

As the most public face of the punk insurrection of 1976,

Lydon‟s place in cultural history remains secure. From

today‟s perspective, the spasms of outrage and delight

instigated by the Pistols are hard to understand. Noisy

bands, weird clothes and swear words on prime-time TV

don‟t amount to much in the Eminem age, yet the surge of

 creative energy punk released, and its defiance of the

stifling conformism of the times, changed Britain for

good, and for the better. If the 1977 Jubilee means

anything now, it‟s the Pistols‟ God Save the Queen. No

xvi
knighthoods here, then (27).

An argument can legitimately be made that the Sex Pistols

pushed the pop envelope so far that they effectively denied

following generations the opportunity to shock in any really

society-rocking fashion. The Pistols killed the pop avant-

garde stone dead. Robert Garnett concurs with this view,

arguing that

The moment of punk passed not simply because it was

recuperated, reified or processed by the culture

industry, it passed because the space within which it

operated was closed down. If punk was simply recuperated

it would not still affect people in the way it does.

After the space within which it existed was closed down,

things like „Anarchy‟ simply couldn‟t be made anymore,

and nothing like it, nothing with the same gravity,

nothing so abject has been made since (17-18).xvii

This “space” was “a zone that was neither high nor low; it was

a space between art and pop. It was probably closer to pop

than it was to anything else, but it was at the same time

something unprecedented.” (Garnett 17) Although this lacuna –

“the only „pop detournement‟ worthy of this epithet”(Garnett

21) was short lived, it has been, as Garnett implies, lasting

in its effects. One such effect, he suggests, was the “young

British art” scene that reached its peak in the 1990s.

For this generation of artists punk exists as an

inescapable cultural fact, part of what defines the

parameters of cultural practice; it is as important as

any recent movement in art. Again like punk, much of the

work is deliberately low-tech, or is as suspicious of the

grandiose claims made for the art of the 80s as punk was

contemptuous of the 70s‟ reverential attitude towards

music. But, like the best of punk, this aspect of the

new British art amounts to a meta-trash aesthetic, one

that is self-consciously about the low, the base and the

profane. More than anything else, it is in the way in

which new British art has opened up a space between

academic high art and the realm of popular culture that

it can be said to form part of the legacy of punk. And,

as is the case with punk, its singularity can only be

appreciated if it is discussed alongside the categories

of high and low (18-19).

Despite the fact that there have been no moral panics quite

comparable with that generated by punk and the Pistols in the

late 1970s, punk has, nonetheless, spawned numerous musical

offspring. These are generally considered to be the direct

offshoots of punk such as Oi!, anarcho-punk, the feminist Riot

Grrrl and, in America, Hardcore and Grunge. Sabin proffers

these as evidence that “there is a part of the tradition that

was never fully co-opted, which did develop an agenda, and

which is still thriving today.” (Sabin, Intro 4)

However, it is not difficult to argue that such movements are

merely so much old wine in new bottles, and I would suggest

that the true legacy of punk is to be found in other, more

hybrid, musical and cultural forms, which combine punk‟s

neophilia with an attempt to create a culture and lifestyle

outside of and perhaps at odds with the mainstream, and

dramatise the experiences of often marginalised and excluded

youth.

The ecstasy-fuelled Acid House/Rave culture, which took off in

Britain in the late 1980s and 1990s, is one such. As Bill

Brewster and Frank Broughton suggest, ecstasy – like

subcultures – “has a powerful ability to make an individual

feel connected to the wider group. […] But as well as these

powerful communal feelings, there was still room for

individual interpretation.” (396) Many of the social changes

attributed to ecstasy and Acid House culture reflect those of

the early days of punk.

It made people more tolerant of others, and as young men

dropped their defences and hit the dancefloor, and as

girls and boys learned to appreciate each other as

 friends and not just alien opposites, it did much to

erode the famously repressed British character. […]

Black danced with white danced with gay danced with

straight. And because it encouraged self-belief and

seemed to unlock possibilities, it launched a great many

people into creative careers (Brewster 396).

It also attracted a good deal of fairly hysterical press

attention, and when Acid House moved beyond the confines of

clubs and into the English countryside, collecting along the

way a motley crew of anti-establishment groups such as “new

age” travellers, squatters and eco-warriors (many of whom had

been or still considered themselves punks,) the negative

coverage intensified. Attention from the authorities was

likewise stepped up, with the moral panic reaching its peak in

1992 when 25,000 ravers converged on Castlemorton Common in

Worcestershire for a four-day party reminiscent of earlier

hippie festivals, but with considerably louder music.xviii In

response, John Major‟s Conservative government passed the

Criminal Justice Bill, “a wide-sweeping set of laws which,

amongst other things, overturned the centuries-old right to

free assembly and greatly increased the powers of the police.”

(Brewster 402) As Brewster and Broughton suggest:

The CJB was unique in that it was the first time the pop

music of a youth culture had been specifically

prohibited. Its famous legal definition of house and

 techno as „sounds wholly or predominantly characterized

by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats‟

showed just how seriously government saw the threat of

dance culture, with its combination of music, drugs and

hordes of lusty young people (402).xix

Like punk, the era of “true” rave culture was fairly short-

lived, due not just to legislation but to other social and

cultural shifts, but its influence and effects – again like

punk – have been much longer lasting and widespread.

Festivals, dance music and club culture continue to thrive and

proliferate.

One notable and more contemporary example of such

proliferation is Grime. Grime is a predominantly black

musical form and culture, though it is also very explicitly

British, as the lyrics “Round here we say birds not bitches”

from The Streets makes clear. As the prominence of The

Streets‟ alter ego, Mike Skinner, also suggests it

does not preclude an “authentic” white – or other ethnicxx –

identification, and draws on a wide range of influences

including Hip Hop,xxi Dancehall Reggae, Jungle and Drum and

Bass (the latter two both products of the 1980s‟ rave

revolution.) It is largely performed and distributed via an

underground network of raves, pirate radio stations and

homemade “mixtapes.” Grime shares with punk a birthplace “on

the estates of London”, an emphasis on the “authenticity” of

voice and subject matter, few obvious concessions to

mainstream pop sensibilities, and a usage of whatever material

and media are cheaply available and to hand. As Chantelle

Fiddy suggests:

Having adopted a DIY ethos, grime slowly but surely

continues to develop its own infrastructure and industry.

It‟s also why grime is often better described as a

cultural movement embracing anyone and anything true to

the homegrown cause. (Roll Deep)

Grime has also generated a few minor moral panics, mostly

relating to the perceived association of gun and gang crime

with the culture. This perhaps suggests that it has not

escaped from the more negative stereotypes of black, urban

culture more generally, but it is nonetheless making its own

positive contributions to multicultural, fusion culture. Many

grime artists publicly support Rock Against Racism‟s

successor, Love Music, Hate Racism, and it has spawned a sub-

genre known as “Grindie”, characterised by collaborations

between indie rock acts such as Pete Doherty and The Rakes and

grime producers and vocalists such as Statik and Lethal

Bizzle.

In an article on grime‟s first superstar, the Mercury Music

Prize-winning Dizzee Rascal, Lloyd Bradley makes explicit

comparisons between grime and punk. He suggests that “It‟s

called “grime” for the same reason punk was dubbed “punk”:

in order to draw attention to its scuzzy street origins.” (56)

Grime is “punk for a multi-culti Sony Playstation generation,

but that would be punk as it started, when it still had a

sense of outrage, not punk as it soon became.” (54) He

describes the music as sounding like

the noise pollution of its inner city environment.

Ringtones, video game bleeps and traffic noise replace

conventional musical sources […] with oral acrobatics

that defy the mundanity of the favoured subject matter:

life as it is lived on some of London‟s bleakest council

estates (54).

However, Bradley also argues that grime‟s strong and authentic

roots in black culture differentiate it from punk and make it

less likely to be recuperated by the mainstream.

But comparisons with punk begin and end with the shared

DIY ethic because, whatever the cut of its trousers, punk

was white men with guitars, looking to distribute their

music widely and make money by touring. It made sense to

the mainstream music business and was quickly

assimilated. By contrast, grime‟s new underground

remains more self-contained than punk ever allowed itself

to be. Pirate radio stations are central to this genuine

independence. In essence, the scene is a 21st century

 version of the sound system, the music medium that came

to Britain on the Empire Windrush (56).

Indeed, for grime artists to maintain credibility with their

grass-roots audience, it is crucial that they are not

perceived to sell out to the mainstream. Such a perception

may, in part, explain the scene‟s current hostile attitude to

Lady Sovereign. She is a white, female rapper from North

London, whose underground popularity in the UK has declined

sharply since she was signed by Jay-Z to America‟s pre-eminent

hip hop record label, Def Jam. This being as it may, „the

Sov‟ has done her bit to raise the profile of the young,

white, working classes in England. Refusing to regard

accusations that she is a “chav” and the living embodiment of

the “Vicky Pollard” character from the comedy series Little

Britain as insults, she instead wears them as badges of honour

on her Adidas hoody. She has even made some forays into

political life; objecting to the demonisation and

criminalisation of her favourite item of clothing, she has

even petitioned Downing Street with her “Save the Hoody”

campaign. She has also acknowledged the influence of punk on

her attitude and output, and makes this very explicit by

covering the Pistols‟ song “Pretty Vacant” on her new album.

Likewise, rapper Akala features samples from Siouxsie and the

Banshees and The Cure on his recent album, whilst Lethal

Bizzle mines those elements of punk most evidently influenced

by black music, performing versions of songs by The Ruts with

hardcore band The Gallows and sampling The Clash‟s cover of

Eddy Grant‟s “Police On My Back”.

Punk laid the groundwork for the development of later

subcultures in a number of ways. As Andy Medhurst argues, “it

was a deliberate slap in the face for established pop

aesthetics, declaring generational independence through a

carnivalesque inversion of musical value” (225). Whilst punk,

dance and urban music have been positively rapacious in their

ransacking of the archives, elements of past cultures are not

treated with the reverence afforded to

archaeological treasures but “sampled” and put to work in new

and surprising contexts. Medhurst further suggests that punk

established that the medium was secondary to the message,

that popular culture could and indeed should be a vehicle

for social and cultural intervention. Music, in other

words, was political – no, more than that, it was a form

of politics itself, a politics that concretely engaged

with contemporary issues (226).

Dying one‟s hair pink, dancing all night in a field or wearing

a hooded sweatshirt “with attitude” may appear fairly

insignificant political gestures, but they have often been

symptomatic and symbolic of more deep-rooted and wider social

discontent, and the attempts by the authorities to clamp down

on them through moral and legal frameworks suggests that they

are regarded as a significant threat by those in power.xxii As

societies change, so must

their subcultures in order to be vital and relevant, a message

that punk made explicit throughout its short life.

Yet (former) members of subcultures are also curiously

nostalgic for their “heydays”, even if “back in the day” was

only five years ago. As Andy Medhurst acknowledges, there is

a particular irony in nostalgia for

a discourse as rabidly unsentimental as punk. A central

thread in punk‟s semiotic and ideological repertoires was

its scorched-earth, year-zero attitude to tradition and

the past […] whereas nostalgia often springs from an

attempt to seek consolation and security in times gone by

(224).

Nostalgia is, as many commentators have observed, a consistent

presence in British culture, but is perhaps not to be

condemned out of hand. As David Lowenthal observes, “The view

of nostalgia as a self-serving, chauvinist, right-wing version

of the past foisted by the privileged and propertied […]

neglects half the facts;” (27) and not simply the fact that

the Left is equally prone to promoting romantic versions of

the past. Nostalgia can be a critical and positive engagement

with the past and does not necessarily imply a “despairing

rejection of the present.” (28) Rather, as Roger Rosenblatt

suggests, nostalgists “desire to get out of modernity without

leaving it altogether; we want to relive those thrilling days

of yesteryear, but only because we are absolutely assured that

those days are out of reach.” (Lowenthal 28) In this vein,

Jon Savage reflected in 1981 that

I still buy records, but it‟s like it used to be: they

fill in various gaps, rather than occupy the centre of my

life – these days, I find sex, video and history much

more interesting. As for punk rock, I don‟t regret it at

all, although I do wonder occasionally.

I wouldn‟t do it again.

If at all, it‟s remembered as a blurred, frantic,

exciting period, which for all its paraded nihilism,

negativity and stupidity actually held out hope as some

reaffirmation of the human spirit in this collapsing

society (Savage, Time 131).

Medhurst recalls his punk days as

a time of strongly drawn boundaries, a time when people

took sides […] Punk happened to me at the same time as a

number of major changes in my life […], indeed it has

become intimately bound up with them through the

processes of memory, to the extent where the opening bars

of a record can plunge me back directly into those

feelings of thrilling transition. (228)

As Lowenthal suggests, nostalgia

mainly envisage[s]a time when folk did not feel

fragmented, when doubt was either absent or patent, when

thought fused with action, when aspiration achieved

consummation, when life was wholehearted; in short, a

past that was unified and comprehensible, unlike the

incoherent, divided present. Significantly, one thing

absent from this imagined past is nostalgia – no one then

looked back in yearning or for succour (29).

Nostalgia for subcultural activity, then, might be interpreted

as nostalgia for a lack of nostalgia; a nostalgia for

youthfulness.

Thus, even attempts to recapture and recreate the glories of

subcultures past (such as performances by reformed punk bands

and “Old Skool” raves) may be considered as not entirely

conservative and reactionary cultural events, but attempts to

recapture a little “magic” in otherwise mundane (adult) lives.

As Patrick Wright suggests:

At the vernacular level, the „unique‟ gains in importance

and meaning with the rationalisation and

disenchantment of everyday life; and despite the many

problems implicit in the institutional restaging of

history there is at least the possibility that real

 cultural creation – albeit of a kind connected to

mourning – can occur in the public appropriation of

historical remains (80).

Although opportunities for genuinely radical activity are

perhaps precluded in such circumstances, punk (and past

subcultures more generally) can remain an active,

inspirational part of England‟s cultural heritage, and not

merely a folly in the garden of a stately pile.

Works Cited

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2004: 54-58

Brewster, Bill, & Frank Broughton. Last Night A DJ Saved My

Life: The history of the disc jockey. London: Headline, 1999.

Burgess, Paul, & Alan Parker. Satellite Sex Pistols: A book of

memorabilia, locations, photography and fashion. London:

Abstract Sounds Publishing, 1999.

Carpenter, Humphrey. That Was Satire That Was: The Satire Boom

of the 1960s. London: Phoenix, 2000.

Colegrave, Stephen, & Chris Sullivan. Punk: A Life Apart.

London: Cassell & Co., 2001.

Garnett, Robert. “To low to be low: Art pop and the Sex

Pistols.” Punk Rock: So What? Ed. Roger Sabin. London:

Routledge, 1999. 17-30

Hebdige, Dick, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. London:

Routledge, 1991.

Jacobs, Jane M. Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the city.

London: Routledge, 1996.

Lerner, Laurence. The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral

Poetry. London: Chatto & Windus, 1972.

Lowenthal, David. “Nostalgia tells it like it wasn‟t.” The

imagined Past: history and nostalgia, Eds. Christopher Shaw &

Malcolm Chase. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989.

18-32

Lydon, John, with Keith & Kent Zimmerman. Rotten: No Irish, No

Blacks, No Dogs: The Authorized Autobiography Johnny Rotten of

the Sex Pistols. London: Plexus Publishing, 2003.

McKay, George. “‟I‟m so bored with the USA‟: The punk in

cyberpunk.” Punk Rock: So What? Ed. Roger Sabin. London:

Routledge, 1999. 49-67

McLaren, Malcolm. “Afterword.” Great Interviews of the 20th

Century: Sex Pistols: Bill Grundy 1976. London: Guardian News

& Media, 2007. 13-15

McNeil, Legs & Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored

History of Punk. London: Abacus, London, 2002.

Medhurst, Andy. “What did I get?: Punk, memory and

autobiography.” Punk Rock: So What? Ed. Roger Sabin. London:

Routledge, 1999. 219-231

Murphy, Scott. “Collector or Sad Bastard.” Pistols at the

Palace Official Souvenir Magazine. 2002. 25

Queenan, Joe. “Meltdown Expected.” The Guardian 9 August

2007.

Roll Deep presents Grimey: Vol. 1 CD Compilation, London: DMC

Publising Ltd., 2006.

Sabin, Roger. “Introduction.” Punk Rock: So What? Ed. Roger

Sabin. London: Routledge, 1999. 1-13

Sabin, Roger. “‟I won‟t let that dago by‟”: Rethinking punk

and racism.” Punk Rock: So What? Ed. Roger Sabin. London:

Routledge, 1999. 199-218

Savage, Jon, England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock,

London:Faber & Faber, 2001.

Savage, Jon, Time Travel: From the Sex Pistols to Nirvana:

Pop, Media and Sexuality, 1977-96. London: Vintage, 1997.

Sinker, Mark. “Concrete, so as to self-destruct: The etiquette

of punk, in habits, rules, values and dilemmas.”

Punk Rock: So What? Ed. Roger Sabin. London: Routledge, 1999.

120-139

Spencer, Neil. “Johnny, be good.” The Observer 1 February

2004: 27

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2000. London: Pan Macmillan, 2003.

Wright, Patrick. On Living in an Old Country: The National

Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso, 1985.

i
Nevertheless, these alternative national/ethnic identities

were clearly of considerable personal importance to Lydon and

McLaren, and may have both aggravated a sense of the

oppressiveness of the English Establishment and facilitated

the critical perspective of the „outsider‟. McLaren recalled

that:

My grandmother had impressed on me at an early age that

the English were a nation of liars and the royal family

its symbol. England was a country whose survival, she

thought, depended on how well they practised the culture

of deception. […] I opened my first store, Let It Rock,

with the sole purpose of smashing the English culture of

deception. […] I gathered my art school friends to help

me plot the downfall of this tired and fake culture. All

I needed now was a record company. EMI became my label

of choice. It was English through and through. (McLaren

13-14)
ii
That England is taken to be a synecdoche for Britain as a

whole, and indeed London for England is, perhaps ironically, a

familiar criticism of Establishment portrayals of the nation.

Indeed, this essay could, arguably, be titled the „London-ness

of English Punk‟. While I accept that this might reflect also

my own regionalist prejudices, and in no way seek to deny the

significance of the contributions of the Buzzcocks et al, it

is also true that punk and London have become closely

associated in the public imagination. The myths of the King‟s

Road and the 100 Club are testament to this, as is the

souvenir industry that, for a couple of decades at least,

produced London postcards adorned with photographs of colorful

punks, and punk dollies which were “part of a series that also

included Tower of London Beefeaters and „British Bobbies‟.”

(Medhurst 229)

iii
Lydon writes:

I loved history [at school] because I don‟t believe any

of it. I have a good memory for it, but since I‟ve seen

my own musical history buggered up so professionally, I

really can‟t believe anything about anyone else. In

twelve years the media changed me into God knows what for

their own benefit. So what on earth have they done with

Napoleon and the rest? Any kind of history you read is

basically the winning side telling you the others were

bad. (Lydon 16)

iv
It was for this reason, among others, that many British

punks deemed it “significant that Presley died in their year,

1977.” (McKay 57)

It might be reasonably objected at this point that the

Pistols, much as they might wish to deny it, clearly were

influenced by the antecedent American punk scene. McLaren and

the band admitted the influence of the New York Dolls and Iggy

and the Stooges particularly, but this influence was

translated into something else altogether that was appropriate

to, and shaped by the English context. This adaptation of

their musical subculture was greeted by American punks with,

by turns, resentment, horror, delight and resignation. Legs

McNeil grumbled, apropos of the Pistols‟ US tour and the

accompanying media hysteria:

“So it was like, “Hey, if you want to start your own

youth movement, fine, but this one‟s already taken.”

But the answer that came back was, “Oh, you wouldn‟t

understand. Punk started in England. You know, everyone

is on the dole there, they really have something to

complain about. Punk is really about class warfare and

economic blah, blah, blah.” (McNeil 407)

A variety of accounts, from both sides of the Atlantic, stress

that what distinguished English from US punk was the

„sociological‟ emphasis of the former. Whilst the latter was

largely content to remain an underground artistic movement, in

the UK punk was regarded as an opportunity to express

political, and not merely aesthetic dissent. Mary Harron

recalled that:

You could really feel the world moving and shaking that

autumn of 1976 in London. I felt that what we had done

as a joke in New York had been taken for real in England

by a younger and more violent audience. And that

somehow, in the translation, it had changed, it had

sparked something different. (McNeil 303)

v
See Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home 1997

for a full account and critical analysis of this history

vi
If we consider the two films about punk discussed here

within this schemata, it could be argued that Jarman offers a

Utopian vision of punk whilst Temple‟s is Edenic. This might

at first appear to be a counterintuitive classification as

Jubilee presents the Tudor past as tranquil and idyllic, and

“the present” as violent and chaotic. However, Jarman was

filming at a time when punk could still be conceived of as an

active movement alive with possibilities, whereas Temple

presents it rather as an historical “golden age”; the “fall

from grace” emphasised by the film‟s concentration on the

various tragedies that ultimately beset the band.

vii
In early 2004 Lydon was a contestant on the ITV “reality”

television show, I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, in which

personalities face a number of (usually unpleasant) challenges

whilst “living rough” in the Australian rain forest for a

number of weeks.
viii
As Hebdige observes:

Official reactions to the punk subculture betrayed all

the classic symptoms of a moral panic. Concerts were

cancelled; clergymen, politicians and pundits unanimously

denounced the degeneracy of youth. Among the choicer

reactions, Marcus Lipton, the late M.P. for Lambeth

North, declared: „If pop music is going to be used to

 destroy our established institutions, then it ought to be

destroyed first.‟ Bernard Brook-Partridge, M.P. for

Havering-Romford, stormed, „I think the Sex Pistols are

absolutely bloody revolting. I think their whole

attitude is calculated to incite people to misbehaviour….

It is a deliberate incitement to anti-social behaviour

and conduct‟ (quoted in New Musical Express, 15 July

1977). (158)
ix
As with punk, much of protagonist Jimmy Porter‟s fury in

John Osborne‟s Look Back in Anger is directed not just at his

“elders and betters” but also “at his own disillusionment and

that of his generation: „Nobody thinks, nobody cares. No

beliefs, no convictions and no enthusiasm.‟” (Carpenter 10)

John Lydon‟s nihilistic persona finds echoes also in Arthur

Seaton, the hero of Alan Sillitoe‟s Saturday Night and Sunday

Morning (1958). Seaton “declares himself beyond morality:

„That‟s what all those looney laws are for, yer know: to be

broken by blokes like me.‟” (Carpenter 11)

x
Likewise, one element of Beyond the Fringe, that appeared to

genuinely outrage audiences was a sketch titled “The Aftermyth

of War.” “This mocked such 1950s Second World War films such

as The Dambusters and Reach for the Sky (the film biography of

Douglas Bader) and, in doing so, laughed at all the clichés

about the war itself.” (Carpenter 113) As with punk, the

targets of such attacks were not war veterans themselves, but

the myths spun around them and deployed to ultimately

reactionary and repressive (if comforting) ends. As with punk

also, those who were offended by or criticised these attempts

to puncture complacent fantasies seemed unable or unwilling to

appreciate this subtle but crucial difference.

xi
Despite the fact that the song appears to be a fairly

explicit attack on a Britain gripped by an unhealthy

nostalgia, given that it was released in 1979 “after Margaret

Thatcher had taken office, after Sid and Nancy were dead,

after punk was dead” (Queenan) it might also be interpreted as

a work of nostalgia for the early, vital years of punk.

xii
It is significant that the metaphor of war was also

deployed in a number of popular reggae songs of the time; for

example, “War Ina Babylon” by Max Romeo, “Two Sevens Clash” by

Culture (reputedly the inspiration for The Clash‟s name,) and

“Under Heavy Manners” by Prince Far I, a critique of Jamaican

Premier Michael Manley‟s draconian law enforcement strategies.

The Clash stencilled the phrase on to their stage outfits,

both to suggest solidarity with the Rastafarians and that they

too were the victims of an oppressive state apparatus.

xiii
This is made very explicit by the lyrics to The Clash song

“White Riot”: “Black man gotta lot a problems, But they don‟t

mind throwing a brick. White people go to school, Where they

teach you to be thick.”

xiv
Sabin notes that bhangra, the closest Asian equivalent to

reggae, was largely ignored by both punk and Rock Against

Racism in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and argues that

Asian music did not make an impression on the UK music scene

until the appearance of a number of “indie” bands with Asian

members – most notably Cornershop and Echobelly in the 1990s.

Although Asian music is still poorly represented in the charts

and mainstream music broadcasting relative to record sales

(due, to some extent, to the majority of Asian music being

sold outside of the mainstream “chart return” retail sector)

and live audiences, arguably both the dance and UK Underground

urban music scenes have embraced Asian music to a much greater

extent than rock circles in recent decades. The popularity of

DJs such as Bobby Friction and Nihal (who have their own show

on BBC Radio 1) and bands and producers such as Asian Dub

Foundation and Rishi Rich have facilitated a much wider

appreciation of “desi beats” and the production of some

genuinely “fusion” musical projects. Such shifts have –

significantly – coincided with a radicalisation of identity

and politics amongst second and third generation British

Asians. Given this, we might accuse Sabin of both expecting

too much of punk and a degree of ahistoricism, given that

Asian culture was, in the 1970s, both lacking a political

dimension and largely hidden from, and thus unavailable to

white communities.
xv
For example, reggae band Exodus were violently heckled when

they played at the Wigan Casino.

xvi
Weight concurs, arguing that the Jubilee had little lasting

effect on Britishness because “Unlike the coronation of 1953

[or punk], the Jubilee offered no coherent vision of who the

British were or what direction they should take.” (551)

xvii
I would myself go so far as to argue that the Sex Pistols

represented the last gasp of the Modernist avant-garde.

xviii
Rave culture shares with reggae an emphasis on the “sound

system” as a key part of a mobile and D-I-Y approach to

staging music events. Such systems – and in particular the

enormous “bass bin” speakers - also boast the additional

subversive advantage of facilitating the creation of

oppositional – aural – places within any given space and

consequently attracting the disapproval of “straights” and the

authorities.
xix
The alarmist reaction to Castlemorton and rave culture more

generally resemble the similarly horrified responses to

“incursions” of “the mob” (i.e. the urban proletariat – in the

guise of ramblers, hikers and day-trippers) into the English

countryside earlier in the twentieth century. See both Wright

and Raymond Williams‟ The Country and the City 1975 for fuller

accounts of these phenomena.

xx
The English-Chinese artist Wong is symptomatic of such

diversity. The lyrics of and video for his song “Who‟s That
Boy” flag up his ethnicity whilst having fun with stereotypes

of Chinese culture (Kung Fu movies) and of first-generation

Chinese immigrants (selling counterfeit DVDs on street

corners) but is still firmly rooted in the context of London

(both its housing estates and its musical cultures.)

xxi
In this context, DJ and film-maker Don Letts‟ claim that

“Hip-hop is black punk rock” is not insignificant (Colegrave

364)
xxii
The “hoodie” has arguably replaced the safety pin as the

definitive symbol of delinquent youth and, as such, has found

itself the recipient of negative attention and sometimes

attempts at legislation from media, politicians and local

authorities. The term “hoodie” has now become a synecdoche

for the juvenile delinquent.