Back in the early 1980s there were plenty of blokes wandering around with bedraggled Mohican haircuts and leather jackets that proclaimed “Punk’s Not Dead”. Generally, they were viewed as dinosaurs, left behind by a music scene that had long embraced electronic sounds and somewhat sharper threads. Nevertheless, as author Jon Savage points out, punk has indeed left an indelible stamp on music, art, clothes, literature and style that is still clearly visible.
Mark Sloper’s documentary, 50 Years of Punk goes back to the mid-1970s to explore the birth of that scene up until the point where pearl-clutching tabloid newspapers drove it out of the underground with tales of the supposed collapse of Western Civilisation – and ushered in multitudes of “Weekend Punks” who destroyed any individuality and instead imposed rigid rules of dress, behaviour and musical style. In this, he does a fine job of pulling in a vast array of talking heads and film of the time, setting out an accurate timeline of events. However, casual viewers are likely to be misled into thinking that it was a movement that was solely ushered into being from a shop on Chelsea’s Kings Road called SEX under the guidance of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. This is a view that has been challenged by many over the years, not least by former Sex Pistols’ frontman John Lydon, and it is one that studiously ignores the influence of the New York CGBG’s scene – that was already up and running well before the Sex Pistols’ debut performance – and also other places in the UK, like Manchester, who may have been slow to start but soon picked up the batten and ran with it.
Sloper’s tale starts with the disillusion, strikes, poverty and lack of hope that was endemic in the mid-1970s UK. As Damned drummer Rat Scabies (pictured above) succinctly puts it, “We had fuck all” with writer Caroline Coon adding “The hippy generation had failed”. However, there were pointers to a new world provided by the likes of Lou Reed, David Bowie and especially Iggy Pop (and later the New York Dolls and the Ramones), which were crucial to what subsequently came about. There is no doubt though that McLaren and Westwood’s clothing emporium was also of great significance, not least as a hang-out and HQ for the young punks (who may not have been able to afford the clothes on sale but frequently stole ideas from Westwood’s designs and created their own) and even as a source of employment for the likes of Glen Matlock, who would become bassist and a songwriter for the Sex Pistols. Those that were actually there, such as another former shop assistant Alan Jones, are also able to add plenty of colour with tales of how SEX marketed the scene with images of swastikas, Karl Marx, gay cowboys and the Cambridge Rapist to stir things up and upset people but pulled in a range of strange characters. As Matlock wryly puts it, “It was my exit from the straight world”.
From small origins, great things soon started happening and a plethora of talking heads (although perhaps not the most obvious people), such as Clash drummer Terry Chimes, Gaye Advert, Marco Perroni of Adam and the Ants, the Skids’ Richard Jobson and ex-Banshee Steve Severin revel in tales of nights out at the Roxy, the Vortex and the 100 Club, where the sweat poured down the walls of these small clubs and the music got faster and was accompanied by a certain attitude, world view and plenty of energy. As Gaye Advert puts it, there weren’t many records available and live music was the only place that people could sample these new sounds – which were far from the uniform vision that later ran rampant.
Initially, this was largely ignored by the music press, with the NME and Melody Maker mostly holding their noses until finally bringing in the like of Tony Parsons, Julie Birchill and Caroline Coon (pictured below) to write about it. However, the tabloids got involved much earlier, rubbing their hands together with glee and goading on a horrified British public, until an infamous appearance by the Sex Pistols on Bill Grundy’s early evening ITV talk show blew things up totally.
Sloper makes it clear how things went rapidly downhill from this point and the scene changed from being an intimate group of recognisable faces to a mass movement. The “Weekend Punks” soon turned up in their masses acting like complete herberts, thinking that violence and spitting were essential parts of their identity, and many of the original characters soon either decided to cash in or moved on to other things – which is where this tale ends.
As a primer for those who believe that punk started and ended with the likes of Green Day, 50 Years of Punk will be an eyeopener and is a succinct record of one element of the development of this musical genre. It is just one element though, which isn’t entirely clear from its narrative. However, it would have been interesting if there had been more of the big beasts from the scene interviewed. But with the likes of McLaren, Westwood, Joe Strummer and obviously Sid Vicious long dead and John Lydon having long taken up the role of professional contrarian, this would have been somewhat difficult to arrange. Nevertheless, 50 Years of Punk certainly adds plenty to the canon of fine documentaries of the original UK punk scene and fits easily next to the likes of Don Letts’ Punk Rock Movie, Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury and The Future is Unwritten: Joe Strummer, as well as The Damned: Don’t You Wish That We Were Dead.
