I n a North London photo studio, a casual observer might have trouble spotting the erstwhile punks who helped revolutionize British society three decades ago. The besuited, bespectacled man reading a newspaper on the sofa is Hugh Cornwell, formerly of the Stranglers. The dapper gent chatting next to him is Dave Ruffy of the Ruts, who once warned a troubled Britain that Babylon was burning. The teacher and the social worker used to be in teen terrors Eater. The soft-spoken blonde woman was, in another life, a Nipple Erector. Then, two hours after everyone else, Charlie Harper of the U.K. Subs arrives, all spiked hair and tattoos. Here, at least, is one unmistakable product of the year that punk broke. During the shoot, the upbeat 53-year-old Damned guitarist who still answers to the name Captain Sensible delivers a steady stream of reminiscences, including one memorable night when Harper attempted to make a move on one of Sensible’s backing singers. “You were so drunk you threw up all over her!” Sensible cackles. Harper laughs but looks confused. “I don’t remember,” he says apologetically. It was all a very long time ago.
EDDIE: When the Ramones came over with the Flamin’ Groovies, the whole audience was basically every band playing in London. And everyone said, “Bloody hell! The Ramones are that much better than all of us. We’ve got to get up to their standard.” HARPER: The Ramones learned from English bands, as well. Once they came to England, they sped up. Actually, through that period there was a cross-Atlantic thing. We were all into Iggy Pop. If you hear the Sex Pistols’ early stuff, they’re trying to copy Iggy Pop.
POLY STYRENE: It was quite gray and industrial. It was before all the Starbucks and the coffeehouses. CAPTAIN SENSIBLE: It was a class-ridden society, and everyone loved the queen, if I remember rightly. Until we came along. STYRENE: I think our parents just wanted us to have nice, clean jobs. SENSIBLE: In those days, if you were a working-class person, you didn’t have a chance to break out. All we had to look forward to was maybe becoming the foreman. EDDIE: And maybe two weeks holiday in Spain. But you couldn’t fly to America very easily. It was too expensive. That’s why I got in a band—a chance to see a bit of the world before you died. STYRENE: Society’s a lot more affluent now than it was. You couldn’t buy youth culture then; you had to make it.
HUGH CORNWELL: At the early gigs, a lot of the audience was made up of musicians, rather than just punters.
SENSIBLE: We were all watching each other’s acts, but none of the bands sounded remotely the same. STYRENE: Now punk rock is a music genre. At the time, it was more of a lifestyle.
SENSIBLE: I remember the next day the tabloids were whipping up anti-punk fervor. If you walked down the street, you’d pretty much get chased by people. STYRENE: You either got photographed or beaten up. PIRRONI: Punk, as people think of it today, was created by [U.K. tabloid] The Sun. They had pictures of punks saying, “This is what they wear.” They had diagrams.
ANDY BLADE: The tabloids started printing the a-to-z of how to be a punk rocker. Even though those of us involved in the scene saw that and said, “This is crap,” a lot of kids did indeed think, “This is what you do.” A lot of the bands that started cropping up were a tabloid depiction of what a punk-rock band should be. STYRENE: Tartan [plaid] trousers with a safety pin at the back. PIRRONI: For a lot of people, punk came to them fully formed. It had fashions, it had ideas, and it had this music. For us, it just developed every day. SHANNE BRADLEY: It became another youth movement. PIRRONI: I didn’t even know it was a youth movement until I read it in The Sun.
EDDIE: The seismic gig was the 100 Club festival in ’ 76. The Damned, the Vibrators, the Pistols. Every band that was around came together and thought, “Bloody hell! We’re all trying to do the same thing here. We’re trying to turn the clock back and make real rock’n’roll again—not 20-minute drum solos, but two-minute sharp, fast, loud, aggressive songs.” It was to get back to the experience you had when you heard your first Chuck Berry or Little Richard record. Music was so boring, with Emerson, Lake & Palmer and all those bands with a double-album set with three songs on it. KNOX: The press used punk rock as a weapon to get rid of prog rock. I think a lot of those bands got destroyed by punk.
MARCO PIRRONI: You didn’t have long hair, and you didn’t wear leather trousers. That was it. STYRENE: And you didn’t play long guitar solos. PIRRONI: Not that anyone could have if they had wanted to. EDDIE: You definitely couldn’t go onstage in flares. You could have long hair, because the Ramones got away with that. Some of the Stranglers had long hair—the keyboard player [Dave Greenfield]. And he had a mustache. And he smoked a pipe. And he had a keyboard. But he didn’t wear flares. So he was all right. SENSIBLE: The Damned used to say that the first rule of punk was, there were no rules.
EDDIE: I don’t think at the time people liked Sid Vicious much, but the rest of the Sex Pistols everybody got on with. The press used to build up rivalries between the bands, because the bands were intensely competitive. If we did a gig with the Stranglers, we’d do anything to try and upstage them, knowing full well that they’d do as much as they could to upstage us next time.
STYRENE: X-Ray Spex didn’t try to do that; they just did it. [Laughs]
STYRENE: Either Sid Vicious or someone from the Clash did it, and the press picked it up and said that’s what punks do.
EDDIE: The first people I remember spitting were when we played with the Sex Pistols in Amsterdam. John Blake from the Evening Standard wrote an article saying that punks liked to be spat on while onstage, and that was it. The following week, every time you went to a gig, there were kids down the front gobbing on the band. There wasn’t a band that liked that. DAVE RUFFY: If it managed to reach the cymbals, they’d go green. EDDIE: It would get in your guitar strings. SENSIBLE: That’s why I started wearing a hat, because spit bakes into your hair under the stage lights, and you can’t wash it out. BLADE: If only he’d written something like, “At punk gigs, everybody gives the band blowjobs.”
EDDIE: We had to abandon gigs all the time.
DEE GENERATE: People used to come up to you in
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