{"id":305,"date":"2007-11-16T11:13:42","date_gmt":"2007-11-16T10:13:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/?p=305"},"modified":"2008-01-20T18:22:15","modified_gmt":"2008-01-20T17:22:15","slug":"305","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/305\/","title":{"rendered":"A beginning of sorts ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kill Your Pet Puppy<\/strong><\/p>\n

So where to begin?\u00a0\u00a0 Hell, I don\u2019t know. Faced with the same blank page\u00a0 problem two years ago, I\u00a0 said:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the beginning there was punk. It was the summer of 76, the summer the earth stood still and burnt\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Which became the first entry – 01 March 2005 – on my\u00a0 http:\/\/greengalloway.blogspot.com\/<\/a> blog site. To my surprise it got six positive comments, which encouraged me to persevere with the blog, although it has yet to become the record of Green (as in eco- social politics) Galloway that inspired the title. The idea for doing a blog came from\u00a0 reading Mogg Morgan\u2019s one.\u00a0 Mogg being a Thelemic (as in Aleister Crowley,\u00a0 Kenneth Grant and Maggie Ingalls) magickian and publisher – Madrake of Oxford.<\/p>\n

A year\u00a0 later I got a scanner and started pasting images with the text. I posted\u00a0 some scans of\u00a0 Kill Your Pet Puppy as a way to illustrate that\u00a0 \u2018anarcho-punk\u2019 was not all black and white, but a colourful and creative chaos\u00a0 which gave birth to a still expanding universe of\u00a0 revolutionary possibilities.<\/p>\n

Having written that sentence, I can either let it stand\u00a0 or\u00a0 put a bit of meat on its bones.\u00a0 The punk in me says \u2018let it stand\u2019 – either you get it or you don\u2019t; but the historian in me says \u2018go for the meat\u2019. [Or veggie option if you prefer].\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Punk was once an answer to years of crap
\nA way of saying no when you\u2019d always said yep<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well was it? Yes it was, but \u2026 there is a big difference between \u2018punk\u2019 as it has been\u00a0 recuperated by observers and \u2018punk\u2019 as it was\/ is\/will be for participants.\u00a0 The punk of Kill Your Pet Puppy\u00a0 was punk as a totality of lived experience. This was not the\u00a0\u00a0 punk\u00a0 of\u00a0 (un)popular music – as in the Sex Pistols\u00a0 God Save the Queen which reached No. 2 in the UK charts in 1977 – it was the punk\u00a0 of the few thousand teenagers\u00a0 who flocked to London from around the English speaking world in response to the (un)popularisation of punk. [This movement of young people to the\u00a0 perceived centre of a popular music based\u00a0 counterculture was similar to that which occurred in San Francisco in 1967.]<\/p>\n

The teenage\u00a0 punks who moved to London from 1976\/7 onwards\u00a0 were effectively \u2018homeless\u00a0 persons\u2019 and so gravitated to squatting as a\u00a0 practical way to\u00a0 survive. Squatting – the\u00a0 occupation of unused land\/ empty houses and other\u00a0 properties\u00a0 – already existed as part of\u00a0 London\u2019s\u00a0 pre-punk counterculture and had a previous history stretching back several hundred years to the 17th century Diggers\u00a0 and medieval occupiers of\u00a0 commons,\u00a0 forests and wastelands.\u00a0 At the same time, the UK benefit\/welfare system still reflected the post – world war two consensus\u00a0 that\u00a0 unemployment\u00a0 was a crime and so it was just\u00a0 about possible for punks to get paid a pittance by the state.<\/p>\n

Squatting was not an easy option though. Few managed to stick it out.\u00a0 Punks were also, thanks to the UK\u2019s tabloid press, figures of hate. Punks were folk devils at the centre of a moral panic, liable to be beaten up on the street, raped or have their squats fire-bombed. [These\u00a0 all did happen – see the Gay Punx page in KYPP 4].\u00a0 And the drugs didn\u2019t help much either. Since many of these\u00a0 teenage punks were escaping intolerable\/abusive\u00a0 family situations,\u00a0 personality\u00a0 disorders ranging\u00a0 from the mild to the extreme were common.\u00a0 Far from their spectacular image as anarchist folk devils hell bent on destroying the state, these teenage punks were psychically disturbed\u00a0 street kids for whom even the most disgusting squat\u00a0 offered\u00a0 temporary respite from their actual status as victims of society.<\/p>\n

To read most accounts, even that\u00a0 of Jon Savage [ England\u2018s Dreaming : 1986], the most perceptive and sympathetic (=participant) historian of punk; by 1979\u00a0 punk was dead. The mass media circus had long since moved\u00a0 on\u00a0 and the tabloid press were urging the newly elected Conservative government\u00a0 to begin\u00a0 their assault on\u00a0 the post-war consensus (=\u00a0 start\u00a0 a class war). The pop media, the music papers, had got bored with punk and were busy promoting \u2018post-punk\u2019 [ See Simon Reynolds : Rip it Up and Start Again: 2005].<\/p>\n

But\u00a0 what such retrospective accounts\u00a0 miss is the reach and depth of the punk explosion. Like the shock wave of a nuclear blast, the events of 76\/7 spread out\u00a0 well beyond London as ground zero. The\u00a0 do it your self ethic of punk\u00a0 continued to inspire, infecting a next generation. This generation began creating\u00a0 their own\u00a0 version of punk, starting bands, making music, putting on gigs in village halls\u00a0 or urban pubs up and down the land, churning out\u00a0 cheap photocopied fanzines, dying their hair and adopting the punk attitude as their own. This phenomenon has never been documented, but\u00a0 from Cornwall to\u00a0 Cumbria, from\u00a0 Suffolk to Somerset, across\u00a0 Wales, Ireland and\u00a0 Scotland where ever three or four\u00a0 youths gathered together, there was a punk scene.<\/p>\n

It was this underground punk scene which Crass tapped into from 1978 onwards, playing in community centres and village halls up and down the land. What drove Crass towards this DIY punk community was their\u00a0 ideological commitment to \u2018anarchy and peace\u2019 – a commitment and attitude closer to that of the pre-punk\u00a0 counterculture of underground groups like Hawkwind, the Pink Fairies and the Edgar Broughton Group, but delivered as a hardcore punk package. What this package delivered was a total assault on the senses, a sonic and visual attack\u00a0 equivalent in its way to that of Hawkwind\u2019s\u00a0 acid\u00a0 rock\u00a0 Space Ritual.<\/p>\n

But what worked outside of London\u00a0 was less easily achieved in the city itself. By 1979, London\u2019s punks existed as survivors, politicised by the necessity of survival in their squats and on the streets.\u00a0 Here a harsher reality prevailed and Crass\u2019 pacifist stance was challenged [specifically in relation to conflict at a Crass event at the Conway Hall] in the pages of Kill Your Pet Puppy. Simultaneously,\u00a0 punk\u2019s anarchist credentials were being challenged by the Persons Unknown anarchist conspiracy trial. This was not about \u2018Anarchy in the UK \u2019 as mouthed mindlessly by many punks. It was an attack on real anarchists who were part of\u00a0 a political tradition stretching back\u00a0 a hundred years or more. It was a defining moment. Could punk engage with actual anarchists, or would the moment pass?<\/p>\n

The Poison Girls and Crass chose engagement, as did the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective. The Poison Girls and Crass released a record – Persons Unknown\/ Bloody Revolutions. The profits from this record allowed Iris Mills and Ronan Bennett (two of the \u2018Persons Unknown\u2019 accused) to set up an anarchist social centre in Wapping.\u00a0 As such, the venture was a failure. But out of failure came success. Taken over by punks (who\u00a0 senior anarchist Albert Meltzer later described as destroying it), the Wapping Autonomy Centre spawned\u00a0 a mutant child – anarcho-punk. And the Kill Your Pet Puppy collective were there at the birth.\u00a0 The Wapping Autonomy Centre scarcely survived into 1982, but found a new home at the Centro Iberico [ an abandoned school\u00a0 already squatted by\u00a0 Spanish\u00a0 anarchist refugees]\u00a0 in west London.<\/p>\n

This home did not last very long, but the idea\u00a0 did.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kill Your Pet Puppy So where to begin?\u00a0\u00a0 Hell, I don\u2019t know. Faced with the same blank page\u00a0 problem two years ago, I\u00a0 said: \u201cIn the beginning there was punk. It was the summer of 76, the summer the earth stood still and burnt\u2026\u201d Which became the first entry – 01 March 2005 – on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-al"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/killyourpetpuppy.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}