 Punk
In 1977, merely suggesting that the Queen was a moron (or a
potential H Bomb) would get you banned from the charts. These days
The Sex Pistols could duet with
Eminem, three strippers and a donkey, and roll Her Majesty around
Trafalgar Square in a barrel and nobody would give a damn. Times
have changed.
 Punk
took Great Britain (the entertainment industry and the general
public) completely by surprise. In the mid 1970s, the massive
tornado of the British Invasion
of the 60s was a fading memory whose survivors sat atop the charts
with pale echoes of their best work.
Disco and soft rock/pop were the trends
of the day (as they were also in the USA). Britain's economy was
flailing and more and more teenagers left school to go straight on
the dole with little hope of financial success or social
stimulation.
Malcolm McLaren, who ran a boutique in London that catered to
an ever-changing clientele seeking alternative fashion, was on the
look-out for a band of loutish adolescents to use as a platform
for his loosely held anarchist ideas. He harboured aspirations to
manage The New York Dolls, but when
that band disintegrated he looked to even scruffier, younger
musicians that frequented his store. In late 1975 The
Sex Pistols began to perform with McLaren as their manager and
mentor.
 Throughout
1976, The Sex Pistols built up a
fierce underground following with incendiary live shows which were
often violence-ridden chaotic affairs.
Late in 76, their debut single Anarchy in the UK
established punk's modus operandi - ear-splitting guitars,
hyperactive tempo and inflammatory and venomous lyrics . . . with
raw energy carrying the lot.
The group were goaded into swearing on national television and
Fleet Street descended on punk with horror headlines and outrage.
Other groups were already following the Pistols' blueprint and
quickly stepped into the breach. The most famous members of what
came to be called the 'Class of '77' were The
Damned, The Clash (who mixed punk and
politics), The Jam (Mods who modelled
themselves after the early Who) and The
Buzzcocks (whose punk sensibilities did not hide their keen
grasp of pop hooks).
These bands were just the tip of an explosion that saw many
minor but important groups adding their voices to the fray. Generation
X, The Adverts, The
Vibrators, The Saints (from
Australia), X-Ray Spex, Slaughter
& The Dogs and Chelsea are all
esteemed by collectors for the one or two memorable songs they had
in them.
 Overnight,
hordes of angry kids from huge, decaying council estates and
soulless high-rise blocks, who were able to relate to the punk
movement, chipped in to buy mini sound-systems and bashed away at
cheap guitars.
London venues such as the Vortex, Nashville Room, 100 Club, The
Roxy and The Marquee threw open their doors to thousands of
safety-pinned, cropped top, pogoing punks. At the same time, most
council-owned halls barred any form of punk performance.
Today, early British punk records still sound exciting. At the
time however, they were also the epitome of nihilistic shock. They
could not have caused more of a sensation. The tempo was FAST
(although hardcore eventually made it even faster!), the guitars
and vocals were LOUD and the lyrics addressed politics, sex,
depression and society with a frank realism that had rarely been
heard in popular music.
The performers were not seasoned virtuoso's and they valued
inspiration and attitude above professionalism. Some listeners
viewed the end-result as unbearably crude. Others welcomed them as
a necessary shot of air to blast rock & roll out of its
complacency.
Punk never really took hold in the USA as it did in Britain
(although those who were converted took up the music with a
passion that equalled their British counterparts). The
Sex Pistols found this out the hard way, with Johnny Rotten
leaving the group in 1978 after the last show of a brief but
legendarily chaotic American tour, where their album Never Mind
The Bollocks stopped just short of the Top 100.
Perhaps punk failed to take hold in the US because it was
diametrically opposed to the American Dream. US rock audiences
liked a working class hero - as long as he behaved like a star. So
in the US in the mid-Seventies there weren't many takers for the
notion of well brought-up, middle class kids ripping perfectly
good clothes and pretending to have been born in the gutter.
 Another
reason Punk never took off in America (aside from the fact that
the conventional music business chose to ignore it) was the sheer
size of the country. Unlike in Britain, independent record labels
could not reasonably expect to have anything more than a local
hit.
In the end, punk did not so much die out as mutate and
diversify. As liberating as the first wave of punk was, it was
impossible to perform an endless loop of hyper-fast, bile-filled
anthems, as the musician's ambitions broadened and their musical
skills improved.
The Jam remained huge stars in the UK
through the early 80s, like The Clash who
became stars in the USA at long last after 1979s London Calling
LP, they refined their sound and incorporated reggae, R&B,
soul and pop into their compositions without ever compromising
their integrity. Original British punksters like Generation
X and Sham 69 played themselves out
almost immediately and others went into arty minimalism (eg: Wire
and The Fall), psychedelia (The
Soft Boys), pop (The Undertones)
or New Wave (Siouxsie
& The Banshees).
By 1980, New Wave had become the new
label for a modified, tamed but no less innovative offspring of
the original punk explosion
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