Why it's Time for a New Punk Era
Why it's Time for a New Punk Era
Punk veteran Stephen Colegrave argues that the time is ripe for young people to hit out against a system opposed to their interests
People ask me why punk hasn’t been reinvented by a new generation. Are today’s youth just not angry enough?
Their outlook is just as bleak as ours was. As much as our parents didn’t understand us, they didn’t do such a good job of destroying the planet as parents today. While we had to endure a three-day week and some pretty poor governments, today’s younger generations have grown up through 13 years of austerity, Covid, politicians who blatantly lie and condone corruption, and an even more rabidly right-wing tabloid press. So, why the apparent complacency?
Research by Zoopla shows that rents are 51% higher than the five-year average. This is country-wide but in London – where street fashion, music and rebellious ideas tend to coalesce – rents are now astronomic, with rooms in shared houses under £1,000 rarer than a real punk on the King’s Road.
I had a very different experience, renting a bedsit in Pimlico in 1976 for £7 a week (and sub-letting my floor to a friend for a fiver a week). You could get up to a lot of anarchy in a week just living on £2.
There’s a close correlation between the birth of punk and cheap accommodation. Believe me, this isn’t just a Marxist interpretation of the history of punk. A quick dive into its origins in Downtown New York in the early 70s, takes you to a world of a bankrupt city and an ‘off-grid’ community that had grown up dodging the Vietnam War and was centred around Andy Warhol’s Factory and CBGB. However much this world has been glamourised, most of the people we now associate with New York punk could only afford to be musicians because they squatted in abandoned buildings.
My friend Smutty Smith, from Levi and The Rockets, inherited the Blondie Loft, where Debbie Harry used to sleep on a mattress on the floor surrounded by a ring of boric acid to keep away the cockroaches. According to Leee Black Childers, each morning when they woke up, she and Chris Stein had to sweep up and dispose of thousands of dead roaches that had tried to get them in the night. Hardly the carefully honed sultry image of Blondie adored by millions a few years later.
Debbie’s rise from waitress in the backroom of Max’s Kansas City, with its crazy mix of rock stars, junkies and punks, to international stardom with Blondie wouldn’t have happened without the ability to squat nearby.
Money just wasn’t important in Downtown New York, as personified by Richard Hell of bands Television and The Heartbreakers, who reputedly invented the safety pin as a fashion accessory because his clothes were literally falling apart, meaning he had to use big safety pins to hold them together, which people started copying as a style statement.
Established rock stars like Mick Jagger and David Bowie rubbed shoulders with chancers and aspiring artists in a wonderful mix where you were measured by your style, attitude, and raw talent.
Back in London, Malcolm McLaren knew the importance of giving his new band the Sex Pistols somewhere free to live and put them up at a dive in Denmark Street of guitar shop fame. It was such a dump that, when Steve Jones and Paul Cooke turned it over to Bananarama, they reputedly persuaded the council to declare it unfit for habitation and were rehoused.
I’m amazed there are so few squats today compared to the 1960s and 70s. There were over 34,327 vacant houses in London alone according to Government figures on 31 March 2022. In fact, if you add in second homes and holiday lets, there are a million homes in Britain without residents.
Of course, in the 70s, it was less difficult to squat as there were fewer security firms.
In the meantime, young people in London especially are becoming rent slaves. My daughter went to an open house to rent a room and was amazed when they conducted an auction for the person who offered the highest rent.
Reading about and watching the recent Conservative Party Conference, I was struck by the fertile environment for a new punk-type rebellion – watching successive cabinet ministers, and especially the Prime Minister himself, fighting unreal threats and demonising asylum seekers. Although there was a right wing element to some later punk bands, the wider punk movement spawned both the Two-Tone record label and the Rock Against Racism campaign.
Two-Tone grew out of Coventry, which had been devastated by bombing in the Second World War. Racism was fuelled by the National Front but punk came to the rescue as it evolved into a ska-based rhythm. Founded by Jerry Dammers with the Specials, it moulded punk and reggae into a new form. They didn’t just preach a multi-racial community, they lived it and weren’t afraid to express what it was like to be unemployed and forgotten by the Government and Establishment. The Specials in “Ghost Town” probably express this better than any other band.
As the photographer Dennis Morris said in PUNK A Life Apart:
“It was lucky that Two-Tone happened because music has always been the saviour of a divided society, and with Two-Tone it didn’t matter if you were black or white”
Surely with a Government that is trying to divide society, and ignore the climate crisis so blatantly, there needs to be a powerful youth movement that combines music, politics and rebellion. It’s time for a movement that shocks parents, teachers, and Government as much as punk did, that shreds the culture wars and shows them up for the cynical politics that they are.
Society needs a regular injection of youthful rebellion and idealism otherwise it stagnates, whether it is punk, Hip Hop or any other movement. The problem is that if young people are forced to conform just to afford somewhere to live, it is all too easy for an older generation to ignore them and the future world they are going to inherit.
Punk still casts a shadow, but it’s time for a new generation to rage against society and the political desert. As writer and actor Paul Durden told Chris Sullivan and me when we wrote our book on punk:
“I think punk made people more politically aware. It criticised people and made them aware of what the real world was like. It marked a decline in the power of the monarch and the Government. We don’t look at the Royal Family and politicians in the same way. We are no longer deferential.”
So my mantra to anyone under 25 is – forget your student debt, don’t go to the same gigs as your parents, create your own music, fashion, and politics, after all you have more tools and technology to shake the older generation out of its complacency than any other young generation in history.
When I am truly shocked by it and feel uncomfortable, I will know that it is finally happening…but please don’t take too long
Stephen Colegrave is the co-author of PUNK. A Life Apart.