No future

Saturday again, and 7 Ages of Rock again. This week the ‘Blank Generation’ looking at punk rock. Whilst I had a few albums under my belt by this time, the first live gigs I ever went to were punk: The Vibrators, The Jam, The Boomtown Rats, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Blondie, Buzzcocks, Ian Dury and the Blockheads, The Stranglers.

Whilst I can’t argue that New York was the seedbed of punk, it actually flowered in the UK. Argue all you like but you’ll never convince me that the Ramones were a bigger influence than the Sex Pistols or that Patti Smith was more interesting than the bard of Salford, John Cooper Clark.

Punk in the UK was born in the era of the three-day week, random power outages, mass unemployment, and the threat of petrol rationing. I was working in a newsagents at the time and remember hand-cranking the tills in the dark as we struggled to keep serving customers. NY never suffered like we did, theirs was never a true punk perspective.

John Lydon still comes across as the least pretentious and most honest punk survivor. Pete Shelley is still as effeminate as I remember from watching the Buzzcocks at Portsmouth guildhall on 3 October 1978. He tried to walk off stage because the crowd were spitting (unpleasant, but not unusual at punk gigs), the crowd threatened to pull the guildhall apart and the management pushed him back on and made him finish the gig. I don’t think he enjoyed himself on that occasion!

The week before I had seen Ian Dury, and the performance was interrupted by a small fire beneath the stage. The band stopped and Ian asked the audience to make way for the fire brigade. The crowd parted like the red sea, the brigade rushed in, unfurling a hose, and vanished through some small doors under the stage. Five minutes later they emerged, with sooty-faces, and left the building, rewinding their hose as they went, whilst the audience cheered and clapped their efforts. Then the band played on!

Finally, I’ll never forget 10 September 1978 when Debbie Harry wore a skin-tight suit covered in tiny mirrors and sang “Fade Away And Radiate” while lasers played over her body. Sorry, I have to go to the bathroom.