Tales From The Punkside - An Anthology

 TALES FROM THE PUNKSIDE - AN ANTHOLOGY

There was a time when the story of punk and its whole narrative was structured and presented within extremely strict parameters, starting with the Sex Pistols and more often than not ending with their demise in Texas and the words 'Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?' Back then there was always an almost holy trinity composed of just three groups: the Pistols, The Damned, and The Clash, acting as an axis around which all other bands orbited. 

Since from around the mid-1990s, however, with the growth of access to the Internet the narrative has shifted so that rather than a top-down perspective as narrated by a very limited number of talking heads, the net has been cast wide and far so as to nowadays include practically anyone who has ever been touched by punk who might now care to comment. The history of punk and its rich tapestry can now be told from the bottom-up. Rather than a bird's-eye view going from A to B we now have a worm's-eye view going from A to Z and back again - and that's no bad thing.

Tales From The Punkside is a collection of anecdotes, academic articles and personal recollections by those who were a million light years away from the original punk inner-circle but who were actually the very lifeblood of it all. At the time, punk was meant to have been the last hurrah, the full stop at the end of awopbopaloomopalopbamboom! As Johnny Rotten once posited in one of his earliest interviews "We've got to destroy the entire superstar band system." The idea being that anyone can be a Sex Pistol, summed up neatly by the slogan 'No more heroes anymore'.

The truth of the matter, however, was that there was always two versions of punk sitting alongside each other and very comfortably it should be added. One version was the lived reality. The shared, everyday experience of the euphoria elicited from the punk rock rush accompanied by the danger and the potential for violence from simply wearing your heart on your sleeve. The other version was a media construct, placing all attention upon bands, individuals and records in a hierarchical system where everything and everyone was product to be bought and consumed. Bought up, beat up and souped-up, just another cheap product for the consumer's head.

The difference between punk and any other so-called 'youth movement' was that by the mid to late 1970s there was an accumulated cultural history behind it, acting not so much as baggage to be jettisoned ala the Year Zero idea but as a propellent. Punk came loaded not only with a musical heritage stretching back to Elvis but also with the societal and political fallout from the impact of past generations and their wrestling with the world they'd found themselves in.

Punk had been born in the aftermath of the hippy dream or rather to put it more bluntly, the hippy dream-induced hangover of the late 1960s with its attendant nightmare of a headache. It's for this reason that the events of something like May '68 in Paris and the impact of Situationism upon that period is significant as evidenced by a lot of the early punk slogans. Moreover, the significance of those early slogans and the subliminal messages garnered from them are the stuff of punk dreams that took on a life of their own and which could not be accommodated, recuperated or co-opted by the profit motive via the music business - though the music business certainly tried.

The messages, hints, signals, slogans, suggestions and ideas being emitted by punk were myriad and their meanings manifold but the beauty of punk was in how it was all open to interpretation. In this light for example, Johnny Rotten's simple use of the word 'destroy' at the end of Anarchy In The UK could either be interpreted as a byword to Sid Vicious-style self-destruction or as Bakunin's idea of the urge to destroy being a creative urge. The 'Anarchy for the UK coming some time' line from the same song could be taken as a promise or a threat. 'Got no time to mess around, got a brand new rose in town' as sung by The Damned could be interpreted as meaning either a new girl or as the arrival in London of punk rock itself. The Ramones singing about how they wanna sniff some glue and Mark Perry naming his fanzine after the habit could easily be interpreted as mere comic book provocation but at the same time also be interpreted as endorsement, leading to glue being viewed almost as a 'punk drug'. And so on and so forth.

In Steve Jones' memoir Lonely Boy, the ex-Pistol at one point wonders how and when punk became associated with squatting, and it's an interesting question. It wasn't until the early 1980s that songs about squatting began to be written as in Dirty Squatters by Zounds and Psycho Squat by Rudimentary Peni, so if it wasn't originally from lyrics that squatting became linked with punk, then where was it? From Joe Strummer, possibly, and his early days with the 101ers and their squat in Maida Vale? The answer is academic, of course, as is also the question of whether the association has been a good or a bad thing? According to writers Justine Butler and Rebecca Binns in Tales From The Punkside it's a mixture of both, though the subject certainly makes for two of the best chapters in the book.

Other chapters that stand out are those written by Francis Stewart about punk in Northern Ireland during the time of The Troubles, Lucy Robinson and her casting of a beady eye over punk and its relationship to academic studies, Ted Curtis and his rummaging through his memory box of his time as an anarcho punk in Bath, and Alistair Livingstone whose voice in the book is probably the most clearest and brightest.

Alistair draws together a number of strands from the punk tapestry and weaves them into a flurry of material endeavours to fulfill a vision of a better world, that world being one in opposition to the machinations of the music business and even to capitalism generally. A world, as Alistair puts it, where everyone is an anarchist. Alistair gives mention to Crass, the Kill Your Pet Puppy fanzine collective, the Autonomy Centre in Wapping, and the Stop The City protests of the early 80s; all essential and important off-shoots and extensions of the original punk idea.

Alistair Livingstone passed away in 2018 and his inclusion in Tales From The Punkside is a nod to his legacy as a pioneer in working out what all this punk stuff meant. The same can also be said of Tales From The Punkside as a whole in that if not quite blazing a trail, shines a light upon punk, opens the door on it that little bit wider, and discusses its meaning and its place in the world so that others might follow and discuss, examine and perhaps take it further? And in the same vein as the Crass Records releases of old, all for just 'Pay no more than 5 pounds'.

John Serpico