John Robb’s life was changed by punk. He’s written a book about it
by: John Robb
14 Mar 2026
John Robb. Image: Stephen Sweet / Shutterstock
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It was in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where Reg, the leader of the People’s Front of Judea, played by John Cleese, asks his followers “What have the Romans ever done for us?” Amusingly his disciples start a list of things that were much improved by the invaders. Here we ask the same of punk rock.
Was it all shouting, swearing and spitting? Of course not… there was some negative stuff as well as a lot of other things. Punk was not just about the inner circle in London, it was lost souls like myself in towns like Blackpool where I grew up, naively embracing the sound and vision and having our lives changed, those outsider rebels very much with a cause
In typical punk fashion my upcoming memoirs are sneeringly called Punk Rock Ruined My Life. Like many of my fellow outlaws I could have had a respectable well-paid life but chose noise and confusion instead. I could have been a contender or an astronaut, an archaeologist, an archivist or even got a proper sensible job, but pop culture engulfed me. Punk rock changed our trousers and our world and it was also a rush of seven-inch singles, fanzines, ideas and DIY culture that empowered and thrilled part of a generation of outsiders growing up in outsider towns. The noise and confusion inspired them to create in a rush of action, time, vision that went beyond the music and into the culture, clothes and then on to living beyond political, sartorial and musical conventions.
2. Punk rock changed my world
Or at least my small corner of it. Punk’s shock appeal was not just the music but using yourself as a blank canvas and sculpting a many-faceted creature who dared to become an author, musician, journalist, TV presenter, music website boss, book publisher, festival boss, eco champion, vegan behemoth and punk-rock warlord.
Robb (far right) in the late Seventies
3. Punk rock saved the Seventies from themselves
The Seventies was the decade of excess. Just before punk, the Seventies had hit peak style excess and overgrown sartorial foliage with insane huge flares, big collars and even shoes that were so large and wide they seemed flared. 1975 was peak over the top and the school playground was full of flip-flap-flapping flared keks, big-knot ties and neatly combed bouffant hair like high-rise Bee Gees while upper lips were adorned with bumfluff moustaches and bumfluff opinions.
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This inner core of ‘cool’ kids played rugby with a misshapen ball on Wednesdays and rugby with the first years for the rest of the week in their encouraged bullying. Like the tail end of the dinosaur era, these arrogant rugby lad dinosaurs strutted along the school corridors of power surrounded by the lingering scent of burnt school dinners and their bullying was endorsed by their prefect status as the pushed the awkward punchbag kids around. These wretches’ lowly mammal status was soon to be revoked when the punk rock meteorite hit the Earth and the Flaredkekosaurus dinosaurs were wiped out.
4. Punk rock was the much-needed cull of blue denim style and blue denim music
After the glorious sci-fi excess of glam rock there was a curious lull where all music looked and sounded like blue denim. It was all beards and stonewashed authenticity with that earnestness that comes with the ubiquitous material. After the glam riot with its attendant wild wardrobe you were yearning for some freak attire but one that you could obtain – glam, like London, felt like it was in outer space and it was punk rock that brought the freak catwalk to the outer reaches of forgotten UK towns.
Born in 1961, my adventures in pop culture were as part of the Tupperware generation – too young for the swinging Sixties but just in time for the polypropylene single-use plastic Seventies. I was a man-made synthetic kid with a father who worked in plastics. At first I had the punk records and then I formed a band without ever playing a musical instrument. Our first gig as The Membranes was an out-of-tune mess because we thought tuning up was putting the machine heads in a row. We didn’t stop though and despite having no musical talent but a head full of ideas, and inspired by the 45rpm revolution of Buzzcocks debut Spiral Scratch EP, we made a record and then carried on for decades.
6. Cut-and-paste culture
The best punk rock was homemade. We believed that anyone could do it, not realising that the original punk bands were talented and had big-money showbiz machines behind them. Out in the wilds you could barely even get the records – let alone the clothes – and punk rock was a cut-and-paste bricolage of second-hand clothes stitched badly and home-made ear piercings done with a cork and a compass. Our music was DIY and so was our homemade fanzine, The Rox, where we worked out how to dare to make our own art noise and write in our own machine-gun prose.
7. Pop got naughty again
The worst offence of any pop culture is to be boring, and punk was anything but boring. All the best music pisses off your parents. To this day music still does this and even some old punks moan about “music nowadays…it’s all just shouting!” The generation gap in culture is always there, but was maybe never so pronounced and self-conscious as in the punk wars when the Sex Pistols created pop’s first generation gap. In that revolution of the everyday you had to choose sides. Punk was not those “the nice, clean Rolling Stones” as the hapless Bill Grundy mentioned on the infamous Pistols 1976 TV appearance just before their swearing changed the world. Punk’s sex, style and subversion was not a cult underground that existed beyond the horizon, but was on the front pages having a riot of its own and changed the world.
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John Robb of The Membranes performing at the 2016 Green Man festival. Image: Richard Gray / Alamy
8. Rip it up and start again: Year zero
Sometimes in pop culture you have to rip it up and start again and wipe the slate clean and destroy the past to fast-forward to the future. For a brief few months The Beatles and The Stones felt like they were from the Victorian times and glam rock looked and sounded really dated. Punk was all-consuming until it too was trapped by its own ideas.
9. Punk empowered the outsiders
Of course the modern perception of punk is a bunch of wild extrovert cool kids but the reality, as ever, was quite different. It was often a bunch of hopeless misfits uncomfortable in their own skin huddled together living like the lyrics of the great Adverts song Safety in Numbers. This scruffy clutch of silent dissenters were uncomfortable with the world. Stuff didn’t feel right and now there was a soundtrack that matched that confusion. We were already there ready and primed for the punk wars, and just waiting for the soundtrack.
10. What did the punk rockers do for us?
Punk may not have invented sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, freshwater systems and public health like the Romans may have done, but it made music feel urgent and cool again and opened the door to a generation of creative wild cards to take the stage until the Goths came and sacked Rome in 410 – but that’s another story…
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