The Problem with Punk

On the 1st December 1976 the already hugely successful band Queen was booked to appear on the popular ITV teatime show Today, hosted by the equally popular Bill Grundy. Freddy Mercury though was suffering with toothache which caused them to cancel their appearance causing the shows’ producers to search around for a last-minute replacement. The one London band available had recently released their debut single, Anarchy in the UK, which barely troubled the charts, peaking at no.38 in November.  

The band, of course, was the Sex Pistols and their appearance on that live teatime show has gone down in both TV and rock history. Along with several groupies, including Susie Sioux, the band had been drinking all afternoon as had their host who spent ten minutes both insulting them and encouraging them to use as many four-letter words as possible.  

If very few of the population had heard of the Sex Pistols or punk that afternoon, they certainly knew all about it the next morning when the show was headline news. For Bill Grundy it marked the beginning of the end of his career. For the Sex Pistols this appearance launched them from relative obscurity into legend.  

There are many punk documentaries available on YouTube, quite a few of which are originally BBC productions, as well as any number of publications on the internet. Invariably they feature those involved at the time as well as their disciples and, just as invariably, they lack any kind of critical analysis. The position taken is that punk changed the world of music and is summed up by an article in the Punktastic web magazine regarding the Sex Pistols June 1976 gig at the Manchester Trade Hall which states that ‘’The impact of punk music was arguably the biggest impact a genre has ever had in music. The punk revolution brought a totally new breed of musician. Ones that were doing it because it was a direct expression of how they were feeling, no matter what ability or background they were. Any hint of anarchy in a band’s sound today can be traced back to punk and all can be traced back to the Sex Pistols’ show that night.’’  

Of course, the reality is less dramatic than the myth. The Sex Pistols had played their first gig at St. Martins School of Art on the Charing Cross Road on the 6th November 1975 supporting Bazooka Joe, playing covers such as "Substitute," the Small Faces' "Whatcha Gonna Do About It" and "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone," which was made famous by the Monkees. “We set up and played for 20 minutes,” Bassist Paul Cook recalled. “Total chaos. None of us knew what we were doing.” That is something that all of us, as new musicians, have been through though it should be said that Cook and guitarist Steve Jones had been playing together since 1972. By the time the Pistols played at the Manchester Trade Hall they’d been gigging for months and were competent musicians and, in bassist Glen Matlock they had the writer of the music for Anarchy in the UK, God Save the Queen and Pretty Vacant. 

There’s rarely such a thing as a new genre in music simply because music is an evolutionary process. On the 4th July 1976 US bands the Ramones supported the Flamin’ Groovies at Dingwall's and ended up with Marc Bolan joining them onstage. The next night’s gig had an important influence on the likes of Captain Sensible of the Damned who later said that ‘’When the Ramones came over that was a bit of revelation. Everyone sped up after that Dingwall's gig. Everyone in the audience, you knew most of them. The funny thing was when you did your first gig in those days, like that Ramones gig at Dingwall's, if there was anyone who walked in there who didn’t know what it was, they would walk out again.’’  

The Ramones had released their debut album in the US a few months previously, inspired by bands of the sixties, but played both fast and with few songs lasting more than two minutes. At the same time the Sex Pistols, based at fashion legend Vivienne Westwood’s shop Sex on the Kings Road and managed by former New York Dolls manager Malcolm McLaren was beginning to find a unique style in merging Glen Matlock’s musical sensibilities with Johnny Rotten’s extraordinary lyrics. 

Then, over two nights in September 1976, the 100 Club on Oxford Street hosted a punk showcase. On Monday, the 20th the line-up was The Subway Sect, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash and Sex Pistols. The next night included The Damned, The Vibrators and The Buzzcocks. Various scratchy bootleg recordings still exist and it’s obvious that the Sex Pistols were on a different level to everyone else. Nevertheless, the concept of punk very much included the ethos of getting up on stage and giving it a go and that has rarely been better demonstrated than by Siouxsie and the Banshees shambolic debut on the Monday night. 

This all happened during the long hot summer of 1976 and the reality is that, for the vast majority of my music-loving generation in our late teens, we never noticed it until the Grundy moment. That’s not to say that I hadn’t noticed something new in the air. My teenage diaries include monthly lists of my top five singles and, in August of that year, behind Elton John and Kiki Dee who occupied top spot, Eddie and The Hotrods cover of Woolly Bully was in fourth place. Then, in October, Joan Armatrading’s Love and Affection was number three and Dr. Feelgood’s Roxette at number four. The Hotrods were back in November with Teenage Depression at number Three. It seems though that anarchy in the UK passed me by at the time. 

The Sex Pistols had been signed by EMI in October around the same time as the Damned with Stiff Records and the Vibrators with RAK. The Damned beat the Sex Pistols to the first recognised punk single with New Rose but just like the Vibrators debut We Vibrate it failed to chart. 

For the Sex Pistols, the Grundy incident turned them from an ambitious and talented underground band into a newspaper sensation. Most of the dates on their subsequent UK tour were cancelled by the local authorities with London Conservative chairman Bernard Brook Partridge summing up the establishment horror, "Most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death. The worst of the punk rock groups I suppose currently are the Sex Pistols. They are unbelievably nauseating. They are the antithesis of humankind. I would like to see somebody dig a very, very large, exceedingly deep hole and drop the whole bloody lot down it.’’ 

A more balanced view of the situation came from the Pistol’s guitarist Steve Jones who reflected that ‘’Grundy was the big dividing line in the Sex Pistols’ story. Before it, we were all about the music, but from then on it was all about the media. In some ways it was our finest moment, but in others it was the beginning of the end … In terms of the Sex Pistols having any kind of long-term future, this sudden acceleration was the worst thing that could possibly happened. I still think we’d have got really big in the end without it, but the entire process would have been much slower and maybe less traumatic. I guess it was never our destiny to be a normal band who make a few albums and then fade away. Grundy was definitely the point where everybody’s egos started to spin out.’’ 

Despite two magnificent singles; God Save the Queen and Pretty Vacant in 1977, The Sex Pistols with its symbiotic relationship with the press became rock’s ultimate slow motion car crash. 

The important result of Grundy and the subsequent press spotlight on the albeit tiny punk movement was to galvanise record companies into finding another Sex Pistols. The Clash were signed to CBS Records in January 1977 for a monumental £100,000 for the time though it would take until 1978 for Siouxsie and the Banshees to be signed. The inherent problem was twofold. Firstly, the DIY ethos of that original punk movement meant that many of those original bands were simply not particularly good and secondly, only a few had the ambition and talent to succeed at the highest level. I believe that it’s a reasonable argument to suggest that the reality of punk also died with Grundy when it was Vivienne Westwood’s fashions that became the overriding influence far more than the music itself. 

In their competitive search for new bands, UK record companies threw their doors open and the result was the real triumph of the punk legacy and that was New Wave, an ironic definition in that the array of bands scooped up were often anything but new and had little to do with punk. During 1977 the list included Ian Dury and the Blockheads, The Stranglers, Elvis Costello, The Boomtown Rats, and The Motors. Add to that list Dr. Feelgood, and Eddie and the Hotrods, who the Sex Pistols had supported in February 1976, and this was a group of bands that did become a staple of the singles charts in following years.  

For all the tabloid exposure and musical press hype it took until November 1978 for a New Wave band to achieve a Number One single and that was Rat Trap by the Boomtown Rats (although this is contentious as there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the BBC contrived to ensure that God Save The Queen was kept from the top spot during the Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977.) The reality was that none of the original generation of punk bands ever achieved a number one single during the late Seventies or indeed a number one album and this included punks’ co-flag bearers, The Clash. Their highest chart single was London Calling which reached number eleven in 1979 though they did eventually reach number one with the re-release of Should I Stay or Should I Go in 1991. The British record-buying teenager was far more obsessed by the worldwide disco phenomenon along with the usual suspects such as Abba and Rod Stewart, thus contradicting a much-repeated punk assertion that their movement mobilised a mass youth audience who were disillusioned, disenfranchised, and struggling to find employment. The reality is that unemployment in 1977 was 5.5% of the population, only slightly higher than the 5.1% in 2021. 

Another much-repeated myth is that punk rid the world of progressive rock. John Lydon, in his days as Johnny Rotten, was a master of the soundbite and took every opportunity to denigrate everything outside of the Sex Pistols world. The music press, and especially journalists such as Caroline Coon, treated his words as gospel and pronounced that prog was dead in the water. The irony was that bands such as Genesis, Pink Floyd and Yes all took notice of what was happening, shortened their songs and became bigger than ever. Pink Floyd had an enormous number one single with Another Brick in the Wall over Christmas 1979 which was plastered with punk lyrical sensibilities long after punk was musical history. Genesis, especially, moved seamlessly from a leading prog band to being one of the biggest bands on the planet from the moment that their 1980 album Duke became their first chart-topping album. 

All of this is not to say that punk wasn’t important because plainly it was for several reasons. Firstly, bands such as the Damned, the Clash and Siouxsie Sioux and the Banshees were there from the start, but these were acts that would very quickly move away from their punk origins and find considerable mainstream success.  

Secondly, and almost entirely due to the Sex Pistols, the major UK record companies all realised that they had to find bands to compete and suddenly the doors were thrown open to a huge variety of new and existing talent that initially became known as New Wave and encompassed a wide range of musical genres, from those directly influenced by punk such as Magazine, XTC, the Jam and Sham 69 through to the likes of the Stranglers, the Police, Ian Dury, the Motors and Squeeze. On the back of punk, two-tone and ska appeared with the Selector, the Specials, and the massively successful Madness as well as early electronic keyboard bands such as Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, Depeche Mode and the Human League. Add to that list Joy Division amongst many others and the importance of punk is clear. It was a very brief moment that happened during the long, hot summer of 1976 that, largely because of one exceptional band, sent a shock wave into the future of rock music. 

Thirdly, and this is personal, if none of this had happened it’s very unlikely that I would have bought my first harmonica and I’m sure that is the case for many musicians of my age group. 

In conclusion, was punk the musical and societal game-changer that its advocates believe with a passion? To a degree yes because it ironically and unknowingly opened the door for many more musically talented acts that might otherwise never have been given an opportunity. As a musical genre though it was a dead end for anything other than the birth of a massive and lucrative fashion industry. As John Lydon later said ‘’Punk became a circus. Everybody got it wrong. The message was supposed to be ‘Don’t follow us, do what you want.’’’ 

Finally, this has not been an essay to denigrate any of those bands that got up on stages in 1976. Looking back to what I’ve always thought of as the ten golden years of music that followed punk and, despite my passion for contemporary indie music, we could do with another Johnny Rotten to shake the world of music up again.