Whatever happened to punk?

Growing up in Dublin in the mid-1980s, my encounters with punk were limited to fleeting glimpses of mohawks and pierced ears congregated in St Stephen’s Green on Saturday afternoons. My sister and I would be shepherded past on our way to the playground, my mum hissing, “For god’s sake don’t look at them!” as if we might be corrupted by proximity. I had no idea what punk meant, but those early stolen glances sparked a lifetime of fascination. 

DJ, writer and cultural instigator Chris Sullivan writes in Punk: The Last Word that “punk stands for rebellion, individuality, self-determination, the rejection of nonsensical authority and doing whatever ‘it’ may be for you, without trying to impress or kowtow”. Although he is generally more affiliated with the New Romantic era, Sullivan helped to shape London’s nightlife from the late 1970s onwards, founding the Wag Club, playing records for Bowie and Madonna, and documenting subcultures as they unfolded. 

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“I was there and in it so I didn’t have to stand on the edges,” he tells me. “Many stories are contradictory as many who claim to have been around were not and the truth is they were messy, while any romanticism regarding the whole shebang has been conjured up by those not in the know.” His co-author Stephen Colegrave, co-founder of Byline Times, approaches the subject of punk from a complementary angle, having spent years chronicling the political and cultural collisions that shape social movements. Together they have created a wide-ranging tome; a record of the punk sensibility, where it existed before the Sex Pistols gave it a voice and how it shows up now, beyond the co-opted aesthetic and mythologised roots. 

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The story begins with the early adopters – a nod to Socrates, Arthur Rimbaud and Lee Miller among others – before stomping through the familiar territory of the Beats, Warhol’s Factory, King’s Road, Siouxsie Sioux and the early days of hip-hop, following a restless lineage of people who carved out their own spaces when none were offered. The book is built from a chorus of these voices, gathered over 25 years of interviews.

Sullivan and Colegrave are present, but so are the people most often deferred to as vanguards of the era. Iggy Pop, Vivienne Westwood the Sex Pistols, Warhol’s circle, drag queens, designers, promoters and provocateurs, the words of people who were too busy making something to think about how it might look 50 years later all contribute to this vivid picture. The late Leee Black Childers is also there in his own words and through his brilliant photographs, which give the book a rough-edged precision. 

“The attitude wasn’t about conforming – it was about people doing it for themselves, whether collectively or individually. It wasn’t about doing what you read in the paper,” says Clash bassist Paul Simonon. Musician Jayne County describes the movement with typical bluntness: “I was more or less taking the piss, using sex to upset people, and I found that hilarious. I’ll go out of my way to shock people, and got into really bad trouble a lot of the time.”

Others saw it less as chaos than liberation. “The Velvet Underground were possibly the biggest inspiration for a lot of those early punk bands,” says Marco Pirroni, guitarist in Siouxsie and the Banshees and Adam and the Ants. “They weren’t like fucking Yes in flares and capes. They looked great, and they made sense.” As Vivienne Westwood put it, “The only reason I am in fashion is to destroy the word ‘conformity’. Nothing is interesting to me unless it’s got that element.”

Westwood looms large, as does Malcolm McLaren, whose instinct for opportunism made him an accidental architect of the entire scene. The Pistols’ famous foul-mouthed TV interview with Bill Grundy, engineered by McLaren, lands like a small bomb. It’s 50 years since the band played their first gig, but that’s not the only thing that makes the timing of this book feel significant. It also arrives at a moment when the subcultures punk helped to ignite have been picked clean. I ask Sullivan how he sees the philosophy of the movement showing up today. 

“Be yourself,” he says. “Do not feel you have to conform, be brave, use what you have at your disposal to create something you want to create. Be egalitarian, empathetic open to new people, cultures, ideas and people. Punk, above all, was a melange of foreign stimuli.” As Childers puts it towards the end: “You didn’t have to look a certain way or sound a certain way. You just had to show up and mean it.”

Punk: The Last Word by Chris Sullivan and Stephen Colegrave is out now (Omnibus, £30). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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