Over to you 2002/2003 Close View 2 – Special Report Programnr: 02060/ra2 CLOSE VIEW 2 – Punk Rock 25 Years Old Manuscript: Keith Foster Producer: Keith Foster Broadcasting date: 9/10, 2002 Length: 15’ Music: Sex Pistols ”God Save the Queen” Keith Foster: Welcome to Close View! I’m Keith Foster. Ex-punk. This year in England the Queen has celebrated her golden jubilee – that’s fifty years on the throne… 25 years ago, in 1977, it was her Silver Jubilee, and people then had parties in the streets to celebrate. Then along came this band, the Sex Pistols, and spoilt the party. The song called the Queen a moron, and it made the Sex Pistols the most hated band in Britain - ever. Newspapers called for them to be put in prison, and in the end their record company sacked them. Twice. Suddenly, punk rock had made its mark. If you liked punk you liked loud music, an dance called the pogo, which meant just jumping up and down really, often on the person in front of you, and you put safety pins through your clothes, your ears, your nose, your cheeks, your…...well, anywhere. And you were angry. Very angry. Music mix: “Stranglehold” by UK Subs Oh Bondage Up Yours” by X-ray Spex “Anarchy in the UK” by Sex Pistols “Too drunk to fuck” by Dead Kennedys KF: You didn’t have to be very musical… Punk rock exploded in Britain in 1977. If you were a teenager almost everyone you knew picked up a guitar or a drum set and started to make a lot of noise. At last, record companies began to understand that there was money in all this, and lots of young bands were picked for stardom. Mine wasn’t… Anyway, we believed we were on the road to revolution. And even if we weren’t, we were going to have a bloody good time. Over to you 2002/2003 Close View 2 – Special Report Programnr: 02060/ra2 British author Steven Colegrave was another guy involved in the punk scene, playing in bands, going to all the London gigs. He recently wrote a book called, simply, PUNK. He can remember what it was like back then, too. Steven Colegrave:At that time we had probably suffered the most dire music ever. You forget what it was actually like to actually be brought up on David Cassidy. Music: David Cassidy “Puppy Song” SC: It was pretty awful. British parents were very uptight. They were, you know, suit-wearing, bound by all sorts of convention, and they just really didn’t understand kids. And it was great, because we could shock them in a way that they just didn’t understand. 25 years later it’s very very different. Now, now I’m a parent. I’m probably more musically aware than my kids, and I annoy them because I can sing along to their tapes more quickly than they can. KF: Maybe things have changed. But where did punk really come from? Well, the word “punk” actually came from New York. The man who co-invented the name was John Holmström – yes, his ancestors were Swedes – who together with journalist Legs McNeill started PUNK MAGAZINE. John Holmstrom: Let’s see, punk came out of my fascination, my insane compulsion for punk rock. I’d seen Alice Cooper in 1972 and I picked up Cream Magazine and I found there was this whole wave of music called punk rock. I started picking up on the New York Dolls and all the ‘Glam rock” bands that were still around in 1973 and 74. But by 1975 that scene was over with, and this new scene called punk, featuring the Ramones who were dressed in leather jackets and blue jeans and sneakers – which is what I was wearing – they were representative of the new sound. That was so exciting. KF: Punk magazine spread the word from New York, where one of the most colourful figures was Wayne County, who combined wild punk rock music with simulating sex on stage, pretending to empty a toilet on the audience and generally shocking everyone. Music: Jayne County “Fuck me or fuck off” KF: Wayne changed sex and became Jayne County, performing in the States and Britain. She says not everyone was too happy with the word punk. Over to you 2002/2003 Close View 2 – Special Report Programnr: 02060/ra2 Jayne County: ...and the Ramones and me and everyone were going around and, like, going.. ‘Punks? We’re not punks, we’re rock’n’roll! We’re supposed to be punks? Punks? What, are they crazy?’ But it stuck. And of course the British welcomed the word. Yes! We’re punk! They welcomed the word, they latched onto it, because Malcolm accepted that that was going to be the word for this, so.. It was better to describe the early bands because they were really raw. And then later the bands smoothed out and became new wave bands. Ha ha. KF: Yes, the British were happy to be called punks. The “Malcolm” Jayne mentioned was Malcolm McClaren, the manager of the Sex Pistols. He was a genius at creating publicity for his band and the whole British punk scene and he became a media guru. Thanks to him punks started wearing chains, torn T-shirts and those safety pins – something that changed the world of fashion. Now you could destroy your clothes and look cool. Rich kids paid huge amounts for T-shirts someone else had torn up. Madness or what? These days Japanese tourists stand at Piccadilly Circus in London and have their photographs taken with so-called punks with multicoloured spikes of hair sticking 20 centimetres out of their heads. But that’s something no true punk wore – try dancing in a sweaty club with that on your head – it either melts all over you or you poke somebody’s eye out. Although it was the British punk scene that hit the newspaper headlines, punk was still strong in America. But there were some big differences. British punk bands attacked the Queen, the conservative government and the high unemployment among young people in their country. The Americans punks couldn’t understand all this anger. JH: I think the New York bands were more patterned after a Bohemian, Beatnik kind of approach to the sixties. They were re-inventing garage rock. Whereas when you got to London, you got to pretty much a sameness of sound. They all sounded like the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. There was all that loud, aggressive, shock rock. KF: You talked about aggressiveness there. The Brits were maybe angrier than the Americans. For the Americans it was more a music scene, for the Brits it was also a political scene. Over to you 2002/2003 Close View 2 – Special Report Programnr: 02060/ra2 JH: It was difficult to be political about anything in the States. Because you’d just seen the government topple. Nixon had just been forced out of office. And so there wasn’t really anything to rebel against. We’d just pulled out of Vietnam, there was no war to protest. And it looked kind of corny. We were anti-politics at that point.” KF: In Britain the punk wave had caused shock and outrage when bands swore on family television shows, spat, broke hotel rooms, and insulted anybody and everybody. But John Holmstrom says the British punks had problems getting the same effect in the States. JH: Well I think the advantage that the English punk scene had was that they had a status quo that was shocked by their antics. I think this proved to be a problem for a lot of them when they tried to come over here. One of the reasons why punk never happened here in the 1970’s, was that people had seen everything in the sixties and they weren’t shocked by anything in the seventies over here. My favourite English punk band, still to this day, is The Damned. They didn’t depend on that stuff, they were really more like an American punk band. They were more about having fun, being loud, being aggressive, but not necessarily trying to piss off their parents. Music: The Damned “New Rose” KF: So while the Brits shouted and swore and shocked, the American punk rockers wore leather jackets and didn’t quite take things so seriously. The Ramones were the classic American punk band. They played basic rock and roll, and fast. In fact, the story goes that at the beginning of one early tour they played for 35 minutes. By the end of the tour they were playing the exact same set of songs in just 22 minutes. Music: Ramones “Sheena is a punk rocker”. KF: There was also a more intellectual side to American punk rock. Patti Smith and Television were punk artists who appeared in the pages of heavy cultural magazines as often as the music fanzines. The punk explosion made it much easier to start a band, to make a record and get people to listen to it. That also meant a load of rubbish was released, by bands with more and more stupid names, like Peter and the Test Tube Babies, the Anti-Nowhere League and Attilla the Stockbroker with songs like “City Baby Attacked by Rats”. Over to you 2002/2003 Close View 2 – Special Report Programnr: 02060/ra2 A band from Manchester, England - The Buzzcocks - said it all: punk was millions of angry, fed-up and BORED teenagers.