23 comments
  1. Nic
    Nic
    January 17, 2008 at 10:38 am

    Yes…

    The Dada-ist rupture of the text/image sign melded with an overtly political position…

    The offset litho agitation of Oz and I.T. pre-empts the more politically engaged fanzines of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s (KYPP, Toxic Grafity, Black Dwarf, Cobalt Hate, Vague, Enigma, Fack, Scum, A-Z, Protesting Children Minus the Bondage, Precautions Essentielles pour la Bonne, Book of Revelations, A New Body, Acts of Defiance, Anathema, and so on)…

    Did you hear Part 1 of the ‘Fanzine’ programme on Radio 4 this week (presented by musician Jarvis Cocker)?
    If not, it is available to listen again for 1 week on the BBC’s iplayer site…

  3. AL Puppy
    AL Puppy • Post Author •
    March 28, 2010 at 6:54 am

    OK Nick, if the OZ image is not punk, then how about this ?

    https://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/?p=443

    It is a situationist text from the cover of International Times No. 26 in 1968 and was (so it says) fly posted on their offices – I assume by the short lived English Section of the Situationist International.
    From which and whom a questionable line can be drawn to Jamie Read’s art work for the Sex Pistols, e.g. the cover of Holidays in the Sun.

    The question “Is this punk?” was asked in context of “What is counterculture” and “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones… in 1971” See
    https://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/?p=444
    And
    https://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/?p=450
    or “Punk is dead- part 23”
    https://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/?p=2722

    The argument made (over several similar contributions to KYPP) is that 1976 was not a Year Zero. That punk emerged / evolved from and out of an existing counterculture, stimulated and renewed the counterculture before becoming dissolved back into the counterculture. The ATV/ Here and Now album ‘What you see is what you get’ was part of the process – see/hear
    https://www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk/news/?p=451

    The Zounds/ Mob (etc) axis of anarcho-punk was a continuation and (linked via Joly McPhie/ Better Badges to IT and pre-punk counterculture) so was KYPP the fanzine. The sheer diversity of musics here on KYPP online is another strand of the argument – or does the diversity mean that KYPP is not punk?
    AL Puppy

  4. Nick Hydra
    Nick Hydra
    March 29, 2010 at 9:32 am

    Hokay… I have GOT to stop leaving posts when I’m drunk.

    The “No” (left at 2.04 am, which might give you an idea of my state) was supossed to be a kind of comment on/ celebration of the ‘Year Zero’ attitude of punk, aggressively cynical and dismissive… rather than any deeply felt critique of the material (which I didn’t even look at). So a conceptual joke rather than anything deeper.

    Having said that, being slightly (but significantly) younger than most people who contribute to this site (born in 1965), I have very few memories of actively liking any music music before punk, and I think that the ‘Year Zero’ approach was absolutely vital to my understanding of what was going on.

    To me it has the same effect as “All whites are devils” and “All men are rapists”. Statements that are obviously not true, and to an extent are not even meant to be true, but are meant to slap you in the face so hard you take an involuntary step back, and in the process of formulating your answer you have to consider ugly truths that you had always known, but never admitted consiously (All men are POTENTIAL if not actual rapists, for example. But then if rape is about power and violence rather than sex, all women are potential rapists as well).

    Essentially it meant that you escsped from the monolithic shadow cast by the ‘classic lineage’ of rock/ pop that was accepted at the time. Nothing got a free ride; in order to push through the ‘Year Zero’ barrier it had to have something more than the weight of familiarity.

    Obviously, punk had it’s own classic lineage; early 50’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, Spector, Stones, Who, Small Faces, Kinks, 60’s garage/ punk, VU, Stooges, MC5, NY Dolls, and some people (not me) would include The Doors.

    I can remember growing up in the early 70’s with music like the early Beatles being constantly on the radio, so familiar it almost defied critiscism – it was just THERE. I assumed that I liked it, but I had never considered it in any serious way. It turns out I fucking hate the Beatles, which gave me a kind of liberating/ guilty frisson at the time, and can still start pub rows to this day.

    Punk made me re-evaluate everything, holding it up to the light and exanining it through the often very harsh prism of the new ideology.

    Obviously, there were hundreds of stands that lead into (and out of) punk (Black Mask/ Up Against the Wall Motherfucker/ King Mob et al – I even like Jefferson Airplane for fuck’s sake), and what I love about this site is that it shows another side to the anarcho-punk scene. It wasn’t all black and white record sleeves, with serious young men in black banging on about ‘the system’.

    It was that of course, but it was also a lot of fun, and exiting, and dangerous, and druggy, and sexual, and colouful, and bitchy, and gay, and straight, and whatever.

    No one only listened to just anarcho bands, and even the ‘anarcho’ bands were much more interesting and diverse than you would think from the way the scene is depicted (if it mentioned at all). I mean, Crass were ‘Crass’, but the Poison Girls didn’t sound like Crass, the Mob didn’t sound like the Poison Girls, Peni didn’t sound like the Mob, Hagar didn’t sound like Peni, Amebix didn’t sound like Hagar and on and on…

    I think you could argue that Conflict and Flux out of all the ‘1st wave’ anarcho bands wear their Craass influence most obviously, but even they were off doing their own thing. It was only when you got the bands who only listened to anarcho punk that it got really terrible, and that’s when the scene disintigrated for me.

    I was on the outskirts of the group of people who are mentioned/ contribute to this site, so I think I have a slightly different view of things, but people were still going to see The Damned et al, while listening to Bauhaus, Killing Joke, Theatre of Hate, UK Decay, Psychedelic Furs, Motorhead, Gang of Four, Ants (both versions – people forget how good “Kings” was) – loads of different stuff.

    Anyway, I’ve got a bit ‘off subject’ now, so I’ll shut up, only pausing to say that anyone who hasn’t already read John Savage’s “England’s Dreaming” should do so.

  5. alistairliv
    alistairliv • Post Author •
    March 29, 2010 at 10:33 am

    Thanks Nick. I think you will find that most of the anarcho-punk generation were born in the mid-sixties like your self and not boring old farts like myself who were born in the late fifties.

    I think what you said about being born in 1965 so that you “ have very few memories of actively liking any music before punk, and I think that the ‘Year Zero’ approach was absolutely vital to my understanding of what was going on.” is significant.

    You would have been 16 in 1981, I was 16 in 1974 and the first record I bought was Jeepster by T.Rex in 1971…to quote Lou Reed/ VU “those were different times”. I came to punk with a whole baggage of what was then recent rock and pop history with glam rock and prog rock still fresh and new in the early seventies…so when punk came along it was like the Cultural Revolution in China – I had to voluntarily under go re-education “Two minute songs good. Twenty minute songs bad.” and shave off my bad old beard and cut my bad old long hair short while listening to the first Clash album…

    So punk was a Year Zero for me ( I even did a reverse Khmer Rouge and moved from the country to the city). When, a few years later (1982/3/4) punks started going to Stonehenge Free Festival I became very confused…punks going to a hippy festival? Punks living in tipis and buses? Felt more like Animal Farm than 1984.…I looked from punk to hippy and hippy to punk and could no longer see any difference. [Exaggeration, yer actual old hippies like Sid Rawles and John Pendragon were totally bemused and worried when the punks started appearing]

    So at the time 1976 was a Year Zero, it is only 30 + years on that the continuities (which only emerged in the eighties) have become more apparent.

  6. Nick Hydra
    Nick Hydra
    April 3, 2010 at 9:49 am

    Hi Al,

    I’m in the middle of uploading the Arena documentary on early punk which is based on Jon Savage’s “England’s Dreaming”, and it contains excerpts from the original TV version of “Quatermass and the Pit”.

    http://www.youtube.com/user/eyesaw77#p/u/6/Cg5vKaukc3U

    I was too young to see the TV version, but I remember watching the Hammer film on TV at a very young age and the idea that we are all to a greater or lesser degree descended from Martians and the violent spasms of history like world wars and genocides were trace memories of a kind of ‘cleansing of the hive’ really did my head in at the time (and with the rise of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’, who knows…).

    Which brings me to another point that I was going to make… The influence of Science Fiction on the political worldview of punk.

    Obviously, all good Science Fiction isn’t actually about the future, it’s about NOW, but couched in a way that you can get away with concepts and ideas that wouldn’t pass the censor if they were presented in a non-genre film. The same is true of Horror to a lesser exstent.

    Again, I think this is an age thing, based on the fact that the BBC showed a season of classic 50’s SF films at about 7.00 pm around ’74/ ’75. I remember them having a huge impact on me as most of them had a pretty dour vision of the future.

    Obviously plucky American know how triumphed in the end, but there was real apocalyptic dread running throughout – normally menances created by atomic testing rampage through american cities.

    ‘Them’ – Giant ants kill loads of people including the nominal hero and the professor warns that if this was the result of one test, then who knows what horrors are waiting to be unleasehed as a result of all the other tests being carried out…

    ‘The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’ – the same only a dinosaur, rather than ants…

    and so on.

    Never mind ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’ – christ-like alien is killed by the military, rises from the dead, and goes home after telling the world leaders that if they destroy the Earth, no-one gives a fuck, but if they threaten to infect other planets with their madness there’s a race of giant robots who will snuff the planet out of existance without a second thought.

    But the most influential in terms of politics for me were the “Planet of the Apes” films.

    I really liked the TV series when it was 1st shown, but it didn’t last very long and the films stareted showing up on TV quite soon after that – I think I would have been 11 or 12 when I first saw them.

    Without going into a long plot synopsis, the 1st film was featured a bitter, cynical anti-hero in the shape of Charlton Heston – one of the first things he says is “I leave the 20th Century with few regrets.”, and is based on the concept that humanity not only was capable of destroying civilisation by Nuclear War, but had actually done so before the start of the film.

    It also has a lenghty scene featuring a kind of ape Spanish Inquisition where they refuse to believe that there can be such a thing as a talking human, because it contradicts their religious beliefs even though he’s standing right in front of them.

    The second film featured a race of mutant human survivors of the nuclear war, who worshiped a dooms-day bomb as a God, and a war between them and the Apes based on imperial expansion hidden behind religious window dressing.

    This film ends with Charlton Heston detonating the bomb and destroying the entire world.

    They kind of lost momentum after that, although the 4th one ‘Conquest’ features a slave revolt/ urban uprising of apes which was filmed to look like footage of the Watts riots.

    So this kind of dystopian miasma hung around in the atmosphere for my whole adolescence really. And speaking to most people I knew in the punk scene at the time of roughly the same age, they have very strong memories of these films and the kind of existential dread they caused.

    Any thoughts?

  7. alistairliv
    alistairliv • Post Author •
    April 3, 2010 at 11:47 am

    Wow Nick…totally, missed Punk and the Pistols / Arena when it came out in 1995 …didn’t even know it existed.

    Jon Savage has written about the making of it on his website
    http://www.jonsavage.com/film/punk-and-the-pistols/

    The film was directed by Paul Tickell . Jon says :
    I’d known Paul Tickell since 1980, when we worked on the Melody Maker. I knew he knew what he was talking about: his PhD was in Rimbaud and Lautreamont, and he’d managed post-Punk pin-up Kirk Brandon in a very early incarnation – a group called the Pack. For my research on the book, I’d uncovered about two hours of Pistols footage, so we knew there was enough to make a programme: archive is the prima materia of any music documentary.

    [Aside : Did Paul Tickell get his PhD before or after managing The Pack?]

    Science fiction and punk.?
    This one http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Caught_Fire
    Kept going through my head ( and sweaty body) during the summer of 76, the summer the earth caught fire …at least south England did. There were huge scrub fires that just had to be left -not enough spare water to put ‘em out. It felt apocalyptic even though punk didn’t register with me until after the summer was over.

    I was more a reader of sf than a film fan. I did see the first Planet of the Apes, but that was at cinema in 1968 when it came out . But apart from Jim Ballard (and maybe Bill Burroughs if he is sf) most of the sf I read was space opera/ fantasy., and extended into H.P. Lovecraft .

    Ballard’s near future post-apocalyptic )or just abandoned) landscapes maybe closest, but punk was hot and passionate while Ballard’s fiction is icy cold and detached. My favourite was/ is The Terminal Beach

    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6jS0PYWOGxIC&pg=PA124&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=0_0&sig=ACfU3U2N4mtT5cqcPAQyRQJsttD6KoCCiQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false

    The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, microseconds in duration, of thermonuclear time. Typically the island inverted the geologist’s maxim, ‘The key to the past lies in the present.’ Here, the key to the present lay in the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.

    See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-cZnMfCtaY for original H-bomb test which inspired the story.

    More later…

  8. DavidM
    DavidM
    April 3, 2010 at 4:47 pm

    Just watched the eight YouTube clips that make up Arena doc. Punk and the Pistols. Are there perhaps more clips Nick? Ends abrupty. A thoroughly enjoyable watch packed with early film footage I’d previously not seen. Tremendous, with far more insight than most documentaries looking at the subject.

  9. Nick Hydra
    Nick Hydra
    April 3, 2010 at 7:10 pm

    Hi David,

    Yes, there’s about another 15 mins which I hope to get uploaded over the long weekend.

    Watch this space…

  10. Sam
    Sam
    April 3, 2010 at 9:03 pm

    Good doc. What a poncy twat McClaren is though. My Grandmother lived near Bromley and it always amazes me that Sioux et al emerged from that wasteland of normality.

  11. DavidM
    DavidM
    April 3, 2010 at 11:33 pm

    Cool Nick. Have to say that as annoying as I usually find McLaren, did see in this doc. a slightly different side to the man, and not the pontificating one I’m used to, exhibiting certain vulnerabilities and admissions of innocence. Found it all thoroughly fascinating, with some views expressed (by those of Matlock and Jordan in particular) offering new and gripping insights in to the band mechanics and individuals involved. Definitely a must see. Gonna watch it again for sure.

  12. alistairliv
    alistairliv • Post Author •
    April 4, 2010 at 10:20 am

    Science fiction influence on punk…influence of punk on science fiction – cyberpunk. Cyberpunk first used as title of short story by Brue Bethke in 1983, then via Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, esp. Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and following sequence.

    Timing gives synchronity with anarcho-punk – first definite use in print by Tony Puppy in review of Let the Tribe Increase in 1983.

  14. Nick Hydra
    Nick Hydra
    April 4, 2010 at 11:37 am

    Science Fiction/ punk..

    I was a TV child in many ways – I would watch anything and everything that was on that my parents would let me (and some they wouldn’t), and got to see lots of odd stuff – I remember seeing an episode of the documentary series “The World at War” in the early 70’s which dealt specifically with the Nazi Death Camps, which made me feel physically sick and has never left me (I still have a recurring nightmare that I’m a disembodied observer unable to look away, but unable to save anyone to this day).

    Simarly the episode on the bombing of Hiroshima/ Nagasaki, which is intertwined with the Holocaust in the nightmare. It was odd reading Penny Rimbauds ‘Shiboleth’ where he desribes how the same two images have haunted him since his teens.

    I was allowed to watch these because they were ‘educational’. Still, I eventually turned into a song:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubQfIKEW8JY&feature=channel

    I was also allowed to watch most Sci-Fi/ Horror up to the Hammer period because my Mum was a big Sci-Fi buff and most of it had a liberal bent at least in the original books.

    In terms of reading material I was more into Marvel comics and Robert E Howard/ Weird Tales stuff than ‘Hard’ Sci-Fi as it was then known, although I strayed into Michael Moorcock via Elric et al.

    Oddly, I’ve recently re-discovered the pleasures of HP Lovecraft through the art of John Coulthart:
    http://www.johncoulthart.com/pantechnicon/pantechnicon.html

    I take your point about Ballard being ‘cold’ while punk was ‘hot’, but the 1st incarnation of The Banshees were very Ballardian.

    Getting off the point now, but I see my cultural history in the work of Alan Moore, and especially The League of Gentlemen’ TV series, they obviously grew up on the same films/ TV/ comics that I did.

    Getting back to the ‘Is this punk?’ question, obviously Dada was a huge influence on punk (mainly through Heartfield/ Photo-montage – as in The Banshees ‘Metal Postcard’).

    Theres a good doc on youtube here:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTSOEDCLAJk&feature=channel

    More importantly, I think the ‘Hippies’ that punks rejected weren’t really Hippies at all – they were the runty little turds who used the idealism of Hippy politics as an excuse to do nothing.

    Much as the ‘King’s Road’ punks missed the point entirely, and weren’t really punks as far as I was concerned.

    If you look at the original interviews, most people were talking about prog-rock rather than hippy, ELP, Yes, ELO, or Heavy Metal like Deep Purple or Led Zep etc, even Pink Floyd were only given a roasting because of what they had become rather than what they had originally been.

    The only band still operating on any ‘Hippy’ basis were Hawkwind, and no-one seemed to hate them.

  15. Nick Hydra
    Nick Hydra
    April 4, 2010 at 1:24 pm

    Carrying on from “The Day the Earth Caught Fire”, obviously “Village of the Damned” is again very English in its approach, but see also “When Worlds Collide” and THE paranoid 50’s SF film “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers”.

    The clip here is the end of the film, so if you don’t know the story start at part 1, but the original film didn’t have the ‘Flashback’ structure, it just ended with the hero out on the highway shouting at the cars…

    The moment when he kisses his girlfriend, and there’s just nothing behind her eyes is one of my favourite scenes in film. “That moments sleep was death to Becky’s soul.” Well, yes.

    Going back to Planet of the Apes, I’ve found some bits and pieces including the original end to “Conquest” which is better than the one they went wit.

    I’m not in a position to comment on cyberpunk as I never read any of it, but in terms of SF/ Horror that is contempary with punk see “The American Nightmare” which deals with John Carpenter, David Cronenburg, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper and puts them firmly in a “post hippy/ Viet Nam” context.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cniEdq4Jwaw

  16. Nick Hydra
    Nick Hydra
    April 4, 2010 at 1:27 pm

    Carrying on from “The Day the Earth Caught Fire”, obviously “Village of the Damned” is again very English in its approach, but see also “When Worlds Collide” and THE paranoid 50’s SF film “Invasion of the Bodysnatchers”.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wbL1W_X0hM&feature=related

    The clip here is the end of the film, so if you don’t know the story start at part 1, but the original film didn’t have the ‘Flashback’ structure, it just ended with the hero out on the highway shouting at the cars…

    The moment when he kisses his girlfriend, and there’s just nothing behind her eyes is one of my favourite scenes in film. “That moments sleep was death to Becky’s soul.” Well, yes.

    Going back to Planet of the Apes, I’ve found some bits and pieces including the original end to “Conquest” which is better than the one they went with.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB74Wxp8BWw&feature=relatedhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmgs36b1BuU&NR=1http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zax_eHyFUI0&feature=related

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

    I’m not in a position to comment on cyberpunk as I never read any of it, but in terms of SF/ Horror that is contempary with punk see “The American Nightmare” which deals with John Carpenter, David Cronenburg, Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper and puts them firmly in a “post hippy/ Viet Nam” context.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cniEdq4Jwaw

  18. alistairliv
    alistairliv • Post Author •
    April 4, 2010 at 5:44 pm

    “to me they look effiminate. they look like some kind of third sex. they look like invaders from another planet” – A ted on punks from the Arena film, part 1 at 7.06…

  20. Sam
    Sam
    April 5, 2010 at 12:28 am

    Always think that ‘mad granny’ Westwood was a bit of a sort then. Especially her look onstage at the Notre Dame Hall. There’s the full London Weekend doc from late 1976 here:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9fIp3KjWCE

    which is interesting to see the Pistols pre-Grundy Show. Rotten at this time still comes across as such an inspired fly in the ointment. I still feel like this a lot actually. About time someone under the age of 30 found a contemporary way of saying ‘fuck it’ constructively. I hate myself for getting nostalgic about what was (and should have been) a footprint in the sand.

  21. Sam
    Sam
    April 8, 2010 at 8:40 pm

    Blimey….McClaren’s dead. Despite what I said about being a twat [sidesteps lightning bolt] he was a major figure and probably the main reason we all caught wind of punk.

    Me and Jake used to imitate his fey Jewishness for hours:

    “Hello. My name is Malcolm McLaren. My favourite invention was something I liked to call…The Punk Rock.”

  22. DavidM
    DavidM
    April 8, 2010 at 10:56 pm

    Damn, just heard. He was 64. Died after a long battle with cancer. Much as I disliked the man, this is still shocking news.

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