There are few things more tedious than old punks banging on about being old punks.
In their minds, it’s still the summer of ’76. The Man doesn’t get it and they’re going to get The Man. Everybody and everything that came afterwards is somehow less important, less energised and a sell-out.
Experience and empirical evidence rarely dents this self-assurance. It leads to wrongheaded beliefs that original punk is still for outsiders.
The wealthy businessman Joseph Corré, son of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, threatened last week to burn £5m worth of punk memorabilia in protest at the establishment endorsement of a series of 40th anniversary punk events.
“Talk about alternative and punk culture being appropriated by the mainstream,” he fumed, making no mention of the KLF beating him to the situationist punch 20 years before.
Perhaps he was also furious when the great punk godhead John Lydon advertised butter on British TV. Lydon, from a working-class north London background, always saw through such bluster. He understood that a man must make a living. And he also understood that holding rigidly to those views was a nonsense.