Didn’t You Used To Be Tony D?

September went a bit mad for my old Ripped & Torn past, as two events dusted it down and included it in their various retrospectives of punk and DIY culture.

The events were the launch of a book called ‘Fanzines’, authored by Teal Triggs and an exhibition of punk memorabilia – Loud Flash: British Punk On Paper –  at a Mayfair art gallery curated by the fashion designer Toby Mott.

Press interest in the exhibition led to covers of Ripped & Torn being published in such mainstream papers as The Observer and Shortlist magazine (plus honourable mentions in many more). See these pages by clicking here or go to our photobucket gallery on your own steam and look in the ‘Nowadays’ album.

The book launch was held in the bowels of the London College of Communication at Elephant & Castle, and was well attended by a large crowd of mainly young and enthusiastic writers / designers / self-publishers.

 

I spoke with the author who told me that the art of fanzines is flourishing as new writers are reverting to the printed page more and more and she has never seen so much interest in the fanzine culture: both looking at the old and writing the new.

This KYPP site is mentioned in the book and Teal said, “the book shows how important your zine has been both in terms of content and also graphically. I certainly have enjoyed   keeping up with things from your website”.

This event is written about here by Jeremy Leslie at Magculture.com, he also took the picture of Teal and myself.

Three days later was the private view of Loud Flash: British Punk On Paper, and after the LCC I wasn’t prepared for how posh was the Haunch Of Venison art gallery where the exhibition was being held: or how many people would be attending this event.

It was heaving, and heaving with the most significant people. We formed a punk corner with people like Spizz Oil and other fanzine writers, venturing out into the mass only to run into Adam Ant!

There’s an enormous amount of stuff on display – interestingly there are walls of both National Front and Rock Against Racism stuff showing that young Toby Mott had a grasp of the bigger picture of punk – well worth a visit. It’s free and on till 30th October, address: 6 Burlington Gardens W1S 3ET.

I behaved myself well enough at the private view to be invited to join a roundtable discussion about punk to be held the next week.

The roundtable discussion held on Wednesday 29th September at the Haunch of Venison Gallery turned out to be very interesting for those of us on the panel but not so sure what the invited audience made of it.

Photo by Heather Blockley

The panel consisted of Toby Mott, Ray Gange (actor from the Clash film ‘Rude Boy’), Teal Triggs, myself and a literary hero, who turned out to be my nemesis on the night, Peter York.

Peter, who wrote about punk in 1977 for Harpers and Queen and some of these pieces are in his book Style Wars, gave a picture of punk as middle class kids posturing as a form of art. “It was never working class kids from tower blocks”, was his view, and he coloured this in with several stories and anecdotes. Even worse his version of punk was that the first wave was the only wave and that soon these kids found something else to do which allowed them to dress up and be pretty.

I gave the continuing story, that 1977 and the emergence of bands such as The Lurkers, 999 and The Ants was when punk really began to mean something; how 1978 was the year of the Ant and the beginning of mass punk squatting; then the galvanisation of Crass and the evolution of anarcho punk through the eighties.

If I hadn’t been there it would have been the Peter York vision that was propounded, as Toby and the Haunch of Venison MC – Mark ? – were from that side of society and comfortable with that revisionist history. Indeed, toward the end the three of them eagerly supported the proposition put to the panel that Thatcher was a punk rocker as she supported the entrepreneur and the ‘little guy’!

If this site / blog hadn’t existed I would have instigated it at that moment.

Made me realise why Puppy is more important than Ripped & Torn, because what we did at the time – and are doing now – is to show in a positive manner that punk didn’t neatly ‘die’ when New Romantics came along. And no matter how people like Toby Mott show the wider picture  – vis a vis the fascist / RAR stuff and materials up to and including Crass covers – punk is still too easily compartmentalized and stored away in Sex Pistol shaped boxes.

The discussion was filmed and it is hoped to have it available on either Youtube or Vimeo in the near future.

At the end a smartly dressed lady came over and introduced herself. It turned out she’d been to gigs at St John’s Church on Pentonville Road at the beginnings of anarcho. Which just goes to show something, she was of the Mayfair set and pally with the Tobys and the Peters yet she knew exactly where I was coming from and congratulated me on saying what I did. She too felt that this part of punk history was unfairly swept under the carpet. Goes to show something, but what I still can’t express.

The story continues. Housman’s bookshop have been given an evening at the ICA on October 21st and have asked me to do a bit of a talk there about punk and all that. Penguin should be there too. The acclaimed writer Stewart Home will also be on the stage, whether at the same time it’s hard to say. But it should be good.

Tony posing with R&T cover at Fanzines book launch
46 comments
  1. AL Puppy
    AL Puppy
    October 3, 2010 at 8:50 am

    Trying to think of something more analytical than “Great Stuff”, “Well done”, or “Excellent” … in particular the bit about challenging the Peter York interpretation of punk… might have been a bit more interesting if Jon Savage could have been on the panel. ‘England’s Dreaming’ says a wee bit more about punk than ‘Style Wars’…

  2. Sam
    Sam
    October 3, 2010 at 3:22 pm

    Well I feel a bit silly saying this now but….great stuff Tony. One of my memories of you was sitting in the kitchen at Westbere road and watching you eat a big plate of baked potatoes, cheese and beans. I was that jealous. I spent much of this period starving. Me and Leigh went on a 5 day expedition to Holland on my dole cheque. We hitchhiked along windswept, frozen motorways, bunked the train to Ostend, bunked the train from Dover and finally arrived back penniless and starving to Lymington Rd. The returning heroes were met at the door by Robbo in his Y Fronts who asked “have you got any food?” and returned to bed. Why I’m relating this now I don’t know.

    Don’t let the style historians grind you down!

  3. Lou
    Lou
    October 3, 2010 at 7:23 pm

    Was great to see you and Val after all these years….kill your pet puppy was my crib….xxx

  4. baronvonzubb
    baronvonzubb
    October 3, 2010 at 9:53 pm

    off topic but…
    i can corroborate how much lack of food was a theme at lymington rd. i left there early, went off to anarchist it about with anarchists, who strangely enough werent very. anyway. went to lymington one day and persuded them lot to come begging.
    and my memory was that for some unknown to me reason they were that hungry that they hadn’t got round to the idea of going poncing for food. we went poncing, i was the most lucky as i had the energy and we all came back and ate.
    a strange memory sam. even mr energy mad robbo himself thanked me for getting you all out of the house and onto the finchley rd, grafting. v odd. and i also remember how i often noticed that puppy mansions had bags of cookables visable. we never had that. any food was instantly quoffed. i guess as a group of of people we were just one level more out of it. back on topic, great that kypp is out there. and not surprised that all except tony have a completely distorted view on how it was.
    good on yer mate. history is written by those who write it rather than those who participated. thats why fanzines were and are so important.
    🙂

  5. Sam
    Sam
    October 4, 2010 at 4:57 am

    I don’t know Jake. We did some ‘hard graft’ poncing every day as I remember it. It all went on drugs though that was the problem. And still is as I’ve just found out a mysterious eye problem I’ve had since 1981 is called ‘HPPD’. I’m off to see a specialist in Boston next week. Anyone else with this bastard of a condition please contact me and I’ll tell you all I know about it.

  6. Steph Hag
    Steph Hag
    October 4, 2010 at 2:03 pm

    What can I add except to say brilliant article Tony. Love the photos too and can’t wait to see the video!

  7. Carl
    Carl
    October 4, 2010 at 2:19 pm

    I shall be fairly naff and simply say “Well done Tony “. I must confess to never having much time for Peter York, I always kind of stuck him on the shelf in the same bracket as Robert Elms and the like..

    Not sure if that was right or not ????

  8. Mike
    Mike
    October 4, 2010 at 5:25 pm

    Tony, that Loud Flash viewing was certainly rammed (free beer?). I met that Toby guy the week before to sell him some old ’77 zines I had spares of, and pointed out some newer mags I’d been sent, mainly by young punks in the US and all very much in the old spirit (without being derivative as they’ve never seen R&T or SG). The Peter York view of ‘Punk ended the day I lost interest in it’ is prevalent, but it was doubtless better off when he and his ilk “moved on”. Strange to see the Mayfair set contemplating old Crass/Vortex flyers tho’…incidentally, I’ve helped a few friends with a fanzine that will have a piece on Ripped & Torn (just when you thought you’d had enough of it!) and I’d like to send it to you to corroborate a few details. It’s an oldschool cut’n’paste mag. Penguin has my email address…

  9. jock
    jock
    October 5, 2010 at 9:23 am

    i dont ‘hate’ many folk but that ‘i know everything about punk spokesman’ peter fecking york has desrved a good clip round the smug mush for a long time,
    btw this post is a great article to read.
    keep it going pups.

  10. baronvonzubb
    baronvonzubb
    October 5, 2010 at 10:33 am

    sam yeah i know you did graftin every day. it was a strange event. maybe i just there before the shift began. 🙂
    cant believe you spend your food money on drugs. terrible
    sorry to hear about your eye boss.

  11. Sam
    Sam
    October 5, 2010 at 3:58 pm

    Who knows which paticular tipple did it. I suspect LSD in Amsterdam. The price we pay for misdirected youth. It always amazed me that we were earning probably twice the minimal wage per hour at the time for looking wasted and hungry. BAD KARMA MAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN…

  12. Sam
    Sam
    October 5, 2010 at 7:36 pm

    “If I hadn’t been there it would have been the Peter York vision that was propounded, as Toby and the Haunch of Venison MC – Mark ? – were from that side of society and comfortable with that revisionist history. Indeed, toward the end the three of them eagerly supported the proposition put to the panel that Thatcher was a punk rocker as she supported the entrepreneur and the ‘little guy’!”

    I agree with some of that though. I’ve reached the age whereby I repeat myself endlessly so apologies but…there’s a big difference sometimes between how we see our ideals and their effect on the world. I don’t think punk was ever exclusively middle or working class. It was one of the great things about it and generally nobody cared as long as you were real. There was an ex-public school boy who used to hang out down Portobello who had ‘All coppers are bastards’ written in Latin on the back of his jacket. Good bloke. However, the ideal was to be working class, preferably from an estate or tower block and everybody who was middle class (myself included I might add) played down their roots. Which in the end was uncomfortable. Looking back on it, the Steptoe and Son image of being working class was retarded. Funny how fake and/or posh a lot of the major players sounded in retrospect.
    I do think that punk had much to do with Thatcherist ideas of the individual, even if the slogans and visual rhetoric were otherwise. I think squatting defused areas of London, making it safe for wine bars and lefty bookshops. Nobody was scared of punk rockers after a while. We’re all part of a bigger machine that we’ll never fully understand. I think punk still has bite though as, 34 years on it’s still being fought over. Long may it continue. I’m glad your voice is being heard Tony D.

  13. Carl
    Carl
    October 6, 2010 at 9:36 am

    It would be good to see a “proper” book written on the subject to follow on from Jon Savage’s Englands Dreaming…taking in the years 1979 to 1984, and try and pull together the various punk strands that were happening at the time, in a sensible and well thought manner.

    I would guess that Tony would be as good a person to write it, but probably too busy !!!

  14. Tony Puppy
    Tony Puppy • Post Author •
    October 6, 2010 at 7:37 pm

    KYPP at the ICA on 21st October as mentioned in the piece above:

    Now advertised by the ICA:

    http://www.ica.org.uk/26490/Talks/Were-Looking-for-People-Who-Like-to-Draw-Fanzines-art-and-politics-from-Punk-to-present-day.html

    The gist is:

    21 October 2010
    Free, booking required.

    Writer Stewart Home will be in discussion with Tony D publisher of Kill Your Pet Puppy and zine maker Laura Oldfield Ford about the anarchist history and DIY culture of zines. Chaired by Malcolm Hopkins from Housmans Bookshop

    Thursday 21/10/2010 7:00 pm Fox Reading Room Free

  15. Lion
    Lion
    October 8, 2010 at 12:05 pm

    Tony, no disrespect to you, because you are surely by far the most sincere of all the panelists you mention — but it shows how ‘unpunk’ these absurd people are. Why should anyone take Peter York seriously. He’s an upper middle class socialite who wrote one article on punk — for Harpers and Queens fer feck sake.

    And who the feck is Toby Mott? And Ray Gange?

    Punk surely was little more than a post Glam fashion hype — it’s really pointless to romanticise the Pistols et al, expecially after reading about York etc. What a joke.

    Again Tony, no slander of you is meant here — your site is loved by many of us and your views trump the rest of them. You obviously had your heart in it.

    Stewart Home is a good critic — He would have brought York et al down a peg or two. ‘Cranked up Really High’ is a definitive book on punk imho.

    Oh, and on the point of the Pistols, Lydon is an absolute idiot — when I hear him speak now, as a middle aged man, with his very simple world view, I can hardly believe he influenced so many people — people are easily fooled, as he himself surely knew in 1977, and surely knows now…or….maybe he just believes his own ‘knees up muvva Brahhhn’ /’voice of the ordinary man’ hype and likes all the adulation he gets…He’s very ‘music hall’ : It’s nothing more than comical that Lydon seems to think governments would be afraid of him. I recently watched some absolutely ghastly you tube interviews with John Lydon — what an ignorant person he is these days, and still living off a ‘cabaret steptoe and son punk’ image at his age. Very sad.

    http://www.pilofficial.com/info.html

    And, here’s a reality check for Rotten — here’s an article on the Israeli soldiers that Lydon defends — it seems that hamming it up as neo Nazis and gestapo hoodlums is a hip Israeli thing to do these days —

    http://www.haaretz.com/weekend/magazine/the-mengele-squad-1.316622

  16. Lion
    Lion
    October 8, 2010 at 12:14 pm

    I previously mocked Mclaren’s insistence that he ‘created Rotten’ — we all know by now, Mclaren’s line that Rotten was ( in Mclaren’s view) just a sneering, sullen, moody , sulky North London lad with incidental charisma and a good image, and Mclaren ‘moulded’ him, tutored him in rhetoric, stance and attitude etc.

    I laughed at what I saw as Mclaren’s absurd claim for years, and lionised Rotten’s uniqueness and intuition. But — after listening to Rotten’s interviews post PIL — it really is apparent that Mclaren was right. Rotten is a shell of a man, trying to live out his previous role, but not quite able to make any of the revolutionary originality sound at all his own anymore. He believed his own hype, and mouths platitudes and homilies he thinks live up to his role. Watch those Israeli interviews I posted earlier — indeed, watch any post Pistols interviews of the last 30 years. It’s all embarrassing bullshit.

    It’s nothing less than absurd that Lydon thinks he should be able to define and claim as his own, what was, and what wasn’t ‘real punk rock.’

  17. Sam
    Sam
    October 8, 2010 at 1:49 pm

    I don’t think anyone would disagree with you Lion about Mr Lydon today. But you seem to post obsessively about him all over this site which means he must have some provocative power left. If myself, you or I suspect any of us had been filmed at 19 we’d all think ‘what a sell out’ if we were seen in the media today. My 19 year old self would be disgusted at my life now.
    Your revisionist take on early punk is bollocks. I remember Mitch coming over to my parents with that Seditionaries T Shirt on of the seven dwarves fucking Snow White, sitting in the kitchen and chatting to my mum. A very strange situation. More than fashion if you ask me.

  18. Lion
    Lion
    October 8, 2010 at 1:55 pm

    Sam, I think I am more disgusted at Rotten’s ignorant right wing stance on Israel — imagine if a ‘spokesman’ for millions expressed the same views about black people during the apartheid era. I am not in the slightest interested in Rotten as a ‘punk’ or as a ‘cultural’ figure : but yes I’ll grant you, I am angered by his views on the millions of dispossessed Palestinians. That fuels my anger.

    You don’t seem to know that the people Lydon played to last month in Israel are involved in mass murder and racial slaughtering. In Gaza, Palestinians were walled into a ghetto, not allowed any exit, starved, and then systematically slaughtered. 1,400 men, women and children died in that ghetto. Do you know how many Israelis died? fourteen — I repeat, fourteen.And about four of those were killed by friendly fire.

    Here are the Gaza facts as found by a United Nations enquiry —

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIpA6sXksNw&feature=related

    And here’s Rotten’s comment on the Israeli situation — see the 2nd video on the page.

    http://www.pilofficial.com/info.html

    These are the people Lydon defends, and plays gigs for, and he laughs at the victims.

    Yes, I am angered by him.

    Sorry if that offends your ‘punk rock/pop music’ feelings about ‘seditionaries’ and fecking snow white T shirts and other such mythologising, vicarious bullshit.

  19. Sam
    Sam
    October 8, 2010 at 2:11 pm

    No I’m not offended but you described early punk as ‘Post Glam fashion hype’ – which it wasn’t. What was your idea of ‘real’ punk. Crusties with dogs on bits of string? Dirt as fashion accessory? Lydon’s a wanker these days. I’m not disputing that.

  20. Lion
    Lion
    October 8, 2010 at 2:20 pm

    I love punk rock. I love nearly every phase of it, and inevitably, it deeply influenced my life. What I do not like is the Toby’s and Rottens and Yorks and Iggy’s in TV ads, and Velvet Underground members joining hard right parties, and the countless assorted wankers that lurk around ‘punk’ trying to bask in its vicarious glamour, jealously define it and glorify it and wallow in it. These kinds of ‘conferences’ are a prime example ( No disrespect to Tony — I rate his definitions/contributions and love of the music far far more than the other panelists. Home is another very good critic and commentator on the ‘punk’ scene, who doesn’t fall prey to all the romanticising and mythologising )

    You say I am ‘obssesed’ with Rotten — well, I find his stances shocking, and I am also suprised that hardly anyone in the ‘punk rock world’, cyber or real, has pulled him up on it. Yes, I find mass slaughter and racial/relgious inspired murder carried out by Israelis to be very depressing.

  21. Lion
    Lion
    October 8, 2010 at 6:59 pm

    Sam wrote — “I do think that punk had much to do with Thatcherist ideas of the individual… I think squatting defused areas of London, making it safe for wine bars and lefty bookshops… We’re all part of a bigger machine that we’ll never fully understand.”

    And you think that what *I* wrote was bollocks Sam?

  22. Sam
    Sam
    October 8, 2010 at 7:58 pm

    At least don’t misquote me:
    “I do think that punk had much to do with Thatcherist ideas of the individual, even if the slogans and visual rhetoric were otherwise. I think squatting defused areas of London, making it safe for wine bars and lefty bookshops. Nobody was scared of punk rockers after a while. We’re all part of a bigger machine that we’ll never fully understand.”

    Yeah ok you’re right. Elgin Avenue, Stoke Newington, Ladbroke Grove, Hackney…all solid working class communities untouched by gentrification.

  23. Martin C
    Martin C
    October 9, 2010 at 2:10 am

    With all due respect Lion, I’m getting sick of hearing this black and white stance on Israel, and I’m bored of the PSC equating everything related to ‘Israel’ with ‘Zionism’. I personally couldn’t care less about Johnny Rotten (I went off his late PiL and solo stuff ages ago, tho ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’, ‘Flowers of Romance’ and ‘Metal Box’ will always be musically brilliant, regardless of anything).

    The Israeli government isn’t the Israeli people and I’m fucked off with this attitude where if you’re interested in any aspect of Israeli culture – or, daringly, find stuff within it to really like – you’re automatically ‘laughing’ at Palestinian corpses in the West Bank. Yes, I think the Dec ’08 /Jan ’09 attacks were scandalous and repulsive, and those directly responsible in the govt and military should be punished severely via the UN (possibly under war crimes, tho I’m not clued up on the legal aspects). But sod this view of the whole country being filled with demented Zionists, snickering at dead families while they get their groove on to PiL (no doubt clinking champagne glasses and sacrificing a goat, with a mushroom cloud in the background, if some fifth rate Gee Vaucher was doing the artwork).

    “You don’t seem to know that the people Lydon played to last month in Israel are involved in mass murder and racial slaughtering” – oh right…the whole audience? I call bullshit .

    By the way, my background’s London Irish, so I haven’t got any vested interests in either side (though I’m 100% Yid Army, lol)

    It annoyed me when those students and academics put pressure on some university to refuse to admit overseas students from Israel a few years back. Great – way to sock it to the IDF, deny some young person the chance of the greatest education of all, travel and new experiences. I wouldn’t have minded so much if the protesters had actually suffered as a result of Israeli government aggression, but the fact they were actually lazy UK red student honkies who’d bought some keffiyehs in the hope of getting a shag really rankled . Anyway, in short, I’m against the imperialism but that doesn’t mean that going to Israel (I would love to go, but can’t exactly afford it right now) equals approval of governmental war crimes. And to reiterate, this ain’t in support of Lydon, PiL or anything else, just a personal view. I personally think the PSC should grow up a bit and try some mature tactics if they really want to affect change.

  24. Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
    Kerr Ray Z. Fokker
    October 9, 2010 at 9:41 am

    @Martin C

    Fucking A!

    As for the video posted, I personally thought John Lydon was spot on about the obsessive one trick political ponies who clutter our streets protesting about foreign issues du jour and then don’t have the brass arsehole to actually visit these places. Or even understand the rudiments of the problems protested about. And his general condemnation of all Middle East violence and suspicion of all governments in the region, seemed fairly sensible and non-partisan to me, if a tad naive.

    As for lightweights who spam up message boards with their interminable off-the-shelf asinine spew and thus reduce complex political problems into a paranoiac ‘You-are-condoning-genocide blahblah if you disagree with me’……Zzzzzzzzzz……….I would have thought that a more efficacious approach to changing the world on any issue would at least to be to select a forum (internet or otherwise) more appropriate to that issue. But then it is more about the said lightweight’s personal and emotional problems than the issue itself. Which is why I refuse to directly address such irritating attention whores. Psychiatric conditions are usually too mired in helpless repetition to warrant any coherent response.

    As for the whole phenomenon of the Israel issue in the UK, it seems to be picking up domestically the more that US/UK cruise missiles, combat drones and soldiers kill muslim civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I am wondering if a lot of it isn’t just good old fashioned Brit hypocrisy, with a little psychological projection thrown in for good measure. We had several centuries of that re:Ireland, where barbarities on our own doorstep were ignored so barbarities less close to home could be comfortably obsessed over instead. Let’s face it, uncivilised and despicable foreigners are always to blame for the world’s ills! If only they could be more British in their methods when it comes to subjugating and murdering captive populations!

    But then what do I know, according to the ‘logic’ that dictates that the people of a country are all collectively guilty for the more unsavoury aspects of their government’s foreign policies, then I must be a ‘fascist baby-killer’ extraordinaire.

    Still better than being an anti-Jew kook.

  25. Steve
    Steve
    October 10, 2010 at 3:49 pm

    Well said, Martin.

  26. John no last name
    John no last name
    October 10, 2010 at 9:53 pm

    Well said Martin and Kerr, couldn’t agree more on all points.

  27. baronvonzubb
    baronvonzubb
    October 11, 2010 at 6:25 pm

    i think this should stop now. we all know as good lefties that jews are nazis and islamo fascists are freedom fighters.
    just to make the point clear ; the green revolution in iran is no more the iranian state, than is the isreali state the isreali people.
    if you knew people from those places you couldnt be so easily judgemental lion 🙂

  28. AL Puppy
    AL Puppy
    October 11, 2010 at 8:42 pm

    And since 1984 we have always been at war with Eastasia. Eurasia has always been our ally.

  29. gerard
    gerard
    October 22, 2010 at 10:25 pm

    Just spent the last hour watching this – certaiinly better than Question Time! Nice one Tony, very mixed bunch on the panel. Don’t forget to bring me the head of Peter York as promised 🙂

  30. Observer
    Observer
    October 24, 2010 at 4:54 am

    Tony D’s contribution to the discussion was far,far more genuine and worthwhile than the others — Peter York is an upper middle class socialite who had ‘the honour’ of writing one or two articles for Harpers and Queens for other curious members of the minor aristocracy, who perhaps wanted to find a new way to dress up, to find ‘interesting new working class people’ to shag, and new drugs to take on the weekend. He speaks of ‘punks’ with thinly veiled condescension.

    The other contributor, Toby whoever he is from Pimlico, is also an upper middle class socialite who later speaks on the video of ‘branding himself’ to sell his product.

    The other guy, Ray Gange ( sp?) seems like a nice guy with good intention, but has to his credit, been in a Clash film which no one took seriously at the time, in which vowels were dropped predictably and there was much cliched mumbled talk about rolls royces and socialism from people who were only concerned about making it in America and being hip in London.

    Next, regarding ‘real punk’ John Lydon, who recently stooped so low as to play to IDF soldiers in Israel, a man who everyone still vicariously romanticises , here’s a video of how audiences actually *should* have responded when he played in Tel Aviv :

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yrna_jNArqk&feature=player_embedded

    And here’s someone with far,far more spirit than John Lydon —

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-St2hn_qPwE&feature=player_embedded

    The problem with ‘punk’ is — great as it surely was — it’s all just romanticised now, with bleary eyed nostalgia, in which ‘we’ all embellish myths of how it ‘really was for us’. It’s living in fantasy projection land.

    It’s not real at all.

  31. Observer
    Observer
    October 24, 2010 at 5:18 am

    PS The above is not meant as any slight to the convention members BTW — all of them, to a man, were at least honest about their view of ‘punk’ and transparent too when they had any agenda to speak of. Ray Gange seems like a good man to meet, and Toby is an unashamed urban business man, and is honest as such.

  32. Sam
    Sam
    October 25, 2010 at 4:42 pm

    Hmmm…this Israel talk sounds familiar.

    “The problem with ‘punk’ is — great as it surely was — it’s all just romanticised now, with bleary eyed nostalgia, in which ‘we’ all embellish myths of how it ‘really was for us’. It’s living in fantasy projection land.

    It’s not real at all.”

    I think the romanticism is in seeing punk in the same terms as we did at the time, which Peter York isn’t. He’s a bit of a wanker (you can divide the people in the debate by their crossed legs/foot on knee) – and he looks strangely like Nicholas Parsons these days but I think in retrospect punk DID pre-empt 80s entrepreneurial culture. I don’t think ‘Thatcher was punk’ as was said. I think she was horribly stiff and seemingly against everything young, but, like it or not, the revolution that actually happened in Britain at that time was not anarcho or socialist but the dismantling of the welfare state and privitisation of Britain.
    ID Magazine was mentioned and it IS a good example of something that started as a fanzine and became a glossy publication. One of the founders used to hang around Iverson Rd in 1981 or so. Druggy, goth type but full of ideas. I see nothing wrong with wanting to be sucessful at something you love doing. It beats signing on and waiting for the revolution. Youth movements expose gaps in the consumer market as much as anything else.
    I can’t agree with Tony that Crass marked the beginning of any kind of true punk. I think they were incredibly reactionary. Their stance was based on much older, much more clearly defined divisions of ‘left’ and ‘right’ and a return to hard-hippy rules about vegetarianism and feminism. It all became very didactic and introduced a nasty inverted snobbery. I think early punk’s dismissal of any fence at all was an instinctive recognition of a new paradigm which was much more forward-thinking. The change still needs to happen. We are no longer in the Industrial Revolution.
    I agree that punk was largely a middle class movement, though one of the things it did was levelled the playing field and one of the things I still value is that I met a huge cross section of people from all over the world and all over Britain.

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