Punk Is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night

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Introduction

Prose for Heroes

by Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix

Our becoming is done. We are what we are. Now it is just a question of rocking along with things as they are until we are dead.

— Donald Barthelme, Snow White

This anthology of articles and interviews, featuring some of our most astute and active commentators and participants, is about punk’s becoming — and about what it, and we, became.

The notion quickly emerges, via more than one of our writers, that at the very beginning punk was constantly in the process of forming. If the pertinent sense of punk is to be found anywhere, it is in this formative gap, this disjuncture.

Early fans and writers offer explorations of this blank zone inhabited by a Blank Generation — a term I use in the way Richard Hell originally intended: a void to be filled by whatever might be conjured and created.

Malcolm McLaren’s biographer Paul Gorman describes the King’s Road scene of the mid-Seventies, and how he was (probably) in the Roebuck pub on the very night Johnny Rotten first auditioned for the Pistols, round the corner in SEX.

Jonh Ingham, who wrote the very first music press interview with the Pistols, published in Sounds on 24 April 1976, examines the soaring influence of Patti Smith in a piece — ‘The Divining Rod and the Lost Vowel’ — which, when it appeared in Sounds in a different form, was lauded by guitarist and rock historian Lenny Kaye as the best on-the-road article he had ever read.

Cultural anthropologist Ted Polhemus — who, while organising a fashion forum at the ICA in 1975, stood as character witness for McLaren and Westwood in an obscenity trial involving one of their T-shirts — describes the intersection of style and subversion. He makes it clear that, as with all proper youth movement shakers, the Pistols offered not just a style but also a matrix via which fans could propose and propel their own styles.

Dorothy Max Prior, who also worked at the ICA at that time, muses on sex and punk in the Seventies — her private, and sometimes very public, acts connecting her with the larger social sphere. David Wilkinson does the same with his piece ‘Ever Fallen in Love?’ We are left with little doubt that it was desire, with its power and scope to shock and embolden, that shifted punk beyond the realms of the rational.

Cumulatively, these pieces hint that any sense of nostalgia we feel for punk might best be reserved for this period of becoming — which is, in some respects, marked by an innocence characteristic of childhood.

Punk at this time — before the Clash essentially — was not fixed in a standard left-wing stance but was, rather, a defiant and stylish boho response to the modern world of inertia and consumption. As Jon Savage points out, ‘Punk was informed by utopian anarchism in its most recent form, the Situationists.’ This not-uncommon notion is affirmed in this book by psychogeographer Tom Vague in his piece ‘King Mob Echo,’ which points out the intense associations between punk and the Situs.

Prompted by Situationism, punks were not interested in restructuring economic systems, but in how fast modern society could be destroyed. Cool, or what! They were entirely reasonable in their demands for the impossible. They were not in the least afraid of the ruins. They wanted to sabotage the Spectacle… before it had sunk in that, as postmodern theorists had pointed out, the very idea of such subversion was a childish chimera.

Via negation, punks wanted to upend the world… before the PoMos et al. sneered (like punks!) at any supposed dissimilarities between the Real and the Spectacle… before the gist of meaning and truth became but a haze… before attention to a ‘new kind of superficiality’ and depthlessness, buzzing with numbing codes and signs, assumed theoretical urgency.

Before all of this, punk continued to become — consumed with boredom, and driven to feel, create and strive for meaning — and to live.

Here, both the annotated version of Tony D’s 1980 ‘Sid Vicious March’ piece from Kill Your Pet Puppy (‘Learning to Fight’), and Penny Rimbaud’s ‘Banned From the Roxy’ commentary, which Penny typed up by hand for us from its original source International Anthem, with an exclusive new introduction, point to a quest for truth and significance.

Sometimes, eventually, the aforementioned negation turned into self-negation, as described in art historian Neal Brown’s article ‘Camera Squat Art Smiler,’ which is amongst those pieces that add something entirely lacking in too many narratives of punk: personality, humour — albeit a mad laughter — and lyricism. The self-negation, it is suggested, is a substitute for punk’s original sense of unformed desire, impossible to attain, sustain or grasp.

Meanwhile, Jon Savage, with his extensive ‘Punk Etymology,’ underlines the fact that at the beginning — and at the end — is the word. Jon would like it stressed that readers should add their own punk culture finds to his list, to which he has written a fresh introduction. Modestly, Jon hasn’t included any references to his own works, of which there are many, of course. Of these my own favourite, perhaps, is an article in The Face, issue 70, February 1986:

Regard it [punk] rather as an ambitious cultural movement that connected, as so few do, with the world outside, and like Dada and Surrealism, sought to turn it on its head. Or even better regard it as an attitude that can be captured at any time, in a laugh, a toss of the head and the refusal to accept anything less than total possibility.

(Jon Savage)

— Richard Cabut

I can still picture a small advertisement for Better Badges in the back pages of some music magazine. This must have been around 1980. I believe it was in Smash Hits but have chosen to forget that rather embarrassing detail. A black-and-white ink drawing — possibly by Savage Pencil or Ray Lowry, but probably by someone else — featured above a chart listing their current bestsellers. It depicted a spiky-haired couple in full bondage regalia. If memory serves, the girl — I should say woman, really — wore a kilt and fishnets. I faintly recall a dainty chain hanging between one of her earlobes and nostrils. A safety pin was no doubt involved at one end or the other, possibly both, although by then safety pins were no longer in currency. Her companion was hunched over a walking stick. Or perhaps she had the walking stick and he was hunched over a Zimmer frame, unless it was the other way round. The visual punchline is that these hardcore punks were also OAPs. It seemed a totally incongruous conceit at the time, akin to a child struggling to picture itself as a grown-up. And yet, here we are. All the old dudes. Commemorating punk’s fortieth anniversary, or, as is more likely, bemoaning it Victor Meldrew-fashion. Five days ago, social media alerted me to the fact that Paul Cook had just turned sixty. Sixty! The surviving Pistols were all born in 1956 save for Steve Jones (1955). Ironically, Sid was the youngest (1957). I discovered punk rock in 1976, when I was only eleven — eleven! — and ‘officially’ remained a punk for the following decade. It was a home for those who felt homeless; somewhere to fit in when you did not. It had the same impact on me as Surrealism or May 1968 had on many others. Those of us lucky to still be here are in our fifties and sixties, and the Better Badges cartoon appears prescient rather than absurd. Context is everything.

The Museum of London recently shared a picture of a group of punks on their Twitter feed. What immediately caught my attention was the date: 1975. I got in touch with them, pointing out that there had to be a mistake. Nobody, I explained, looked like that at the time. The style is already codified — almost a uniform. It could have been taken in 1978 at the earliest. Given that no band names or logos, or slogans, were painted on the backs of the leather jackets, this was probably before 1981. 1979 sounded just about right, the year when punk was thriving — largely unnoticed — underground, and we attempted to reconcile the Ants’ dark glamour with the equally seductive puritan zeal of Crass. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that the photographer’s wife was adamant and that, anyway, some people did look like that in 75. Eventually, Danny Baker got involved, confirming what I had said; the photographer’s wife double-checked and realised the error of her ways. Beyond proving me right, none of this is very important in the grand scheme of things, but it is indicative of the way in which the past is subtly rewritten, every nuance gradually airbrushed out of the picture. Yet punk was lived — and how it was experienced is our primary concern here — in breathless weekly instalments. Not only was 1977 completely different from 1978, 1979 or 1980, but the mood kept changing throughout the year. Punk was still in its infancy during the early months. The period running from spring to early September — encompassing the Silver Jubilee and the ‘Summer of Hate,’ as the NME called it — constituted the movement’s high-water mark. The autumn and winter got much darker, culminating in the Pistols’ split in early 78. The movement was quickly reinterpreted retrospectively, from the vantage point of the early Eighties: anachronic mohican haircuts already crop up in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy movie from 1986. If you believe certain punk memoirs, the streets of London, in 1977, were thronging with skinheads. They were not. Apart from pictures of Skrewdriver, I never saw one before 1978. By 1979, every other boy round our way sported a crop, braces and DMs.

Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism. Our politicians speak of drawing a line under the past and turning our back on ancient quarrels. In this way, we can leap forward into a scrubbed, blank, amnesiac future. If [Walter] Benjamin rejected this kind of philistinism, it was because he was aware that the past holds vital resources for the renewal of the present. Those who wipe out the past are in danger of abolishing the future as well. Nobody was more intent on eradicating the past than the Nazis, who would, like the Stalinists, simply scrub from historical record whatever they found inconvenient. (Terry Eagleton, ‘Waking the Dead,’ New Statesman 12 November 2009)

This book was partly inspired by the almost universal knee-jerk reaction against nostalgia. Without nostalgia, we would have no Homer or Proust. It is the wellspring of countless — perhaps all — great works of art. The cult of the future, upon which our system is predicated, seems far more pernicious to me. No future indeed! Besides, punk’s cultural importance should, I think, be officially recognised in museums and galleries. After all, a case can be made for punk as the last great youth subculture in the rock ‘n’ roll mould. Jon Savage writes, in his introduction to Teenage: The Creation of Youth 1875-1945 (2007), that punk’s ‘historical collage… marked the moment when the linear forward movement of the sixties was replaced by the loop.’ Grunge was indeed essentially an offshoot of the American hardcore punk movement of the early Eighties. Britpop was a collage of earlier British youth styles. The early-Noughties wave of American bands that came in the wake of the Strokes harked back to CBGBs and post-punk… Punk should also be commemorated in museums because it was a summation of all the avant-garde movements of the 20th century. In fact, it may even have been the avant-garde’s last stand (which would cast the title of this book in a new light). The movement brought about a revolution of everyday life, turning it into a permanent adventure and abolishing the boundary between artists and audience; art and life. Everything, from fanzines to clothes, became part of this total artwork that was punk. Boris Groys writes that ‘the contemporary museum realizes the modernist dream of a theatre in which there is no clear boundary between the stage and the space for the audience — a dream that the theatre itself was never able to fully realize’ (In the Flow, 2016). Having succeeded where theatre failed, punk should take pride of place in the contemporary museum he describes. The last reason I will invoke here is that punk was almost universally reviled at the time. It is time to take pride in our eventual victory.

My contention is that what we are commemorating is not so much punk itself as the past commemorations of punk. In a piece written on the occasion of the phenomenon’s tenth anniversary, reproduced here for the first time, Simon Reynolds argued that it was punk’s ubiquity — rather than its death or betrayal — which was stifling the progress of popular culture. 1986 was perhaps too close to take stock. It was the year I finally recognised that I no longer had anything in common with those people, who looked like me, but whose sole ambition in life seemed to be to fight or wallow in their own vomit, frequently combining both activities. If the Pistols had reformed to mark the anniversary, they would have been the biggest band in the world. There were doubtless complex contractual and personal reasons why this did not happen, but what is sure is that it would also have been seen as a travesty and a cop-out. By 1996 — and the Filthy Lucre tour — such qualms had been set aside, proving that something which was still alive in 86 was now dead as a dodo. Since then, the tripartite division of punk history (pre-punk, punk, post-punk) has become the norm. BBC Four’s excellent Punk Britannia (2012) series follows this format, which is logical — chronological — but pays as much attention to punk’s ancestry and legacy as to the explosion itself. In this model, punk increasingly becomes the squeezed middle.

Punk is probably the most analysed youth cult ever, but also one of the most resistant to academic analysis — a problem the following book has not quite solved.

Punk gigs had a very distinctive, surprisingly sweet, smell. It was a subtle blend of Crazy Color hair dye, hairspray, smoke and lager. That smell has completely evaporated. We should bring it back; bottle it. We need a phenomenology of punk.

The first punks I ever saw walked past me at Clapham Junction station. They looked like they had stepped out of the future.

I know exactly where I was when I read a certain piece in the music press or bought a given record.

I remember visiting Seditionaries for the first time, not only with my mum, but also my dear Auntie Jenny, who gasped, ‘What have they done to our Queen?’ My acute embarrassment has dissipated, but I still regret having hurt her feelings by exposing her to Jamie Reid’s work without a word of warning.

I remember hiding my chains and safety pins under my jacket, during the summer of 1977, whenever I spotted Teddy Boys on the King’s Road.

Across the road from the Electric Ballroom, 3 November 1979. Two sisters who were picked up by their parents after the Penetration gig. You were about my age, maybe a bit older. You certainly looked more punk, with your fishnet mohair jumpers, than I did at the time. I always found them too itchy those jumpers. Your parents arrived in their nice car. I imagined you being whisked away to some Peter Pan dwelling, all warm and cosy. A proper home. Your bedroom walls were covered in punk posters and press cuttings. You would lie awake a while, the concert still buzzing in your ears. If you’re reading this, have a drink on me.

Once we were part of punk; punk is now part of us.

— Andrew Gallix

1

The Boy Looked at Eurydice

by Andrew Gallix

Retrofuturism, as we now call it, came out of the closet in the late Seventies due to the widespread feeling that there was indeed ‘no future’ any more. Whilst Johnny Rotten waxed apocalyptical, Howard Devoto screeched existentially about his future no longer being what it was. Time seemed topsy-turvy, out of joint; the future not something to look forward to, but to look back on. ‘About the future I can only reminisce,’ sang Pete Shelley on a dotty ditty dedicated to ‘nostalgia for an age yet to come.’ (Significantly enough, it was almost immediately covered — recycled — by Penetration.) This trend was knowing and ‘ironic’ in typical postmodern mode (à la Rezillos or B-52s), but also imbued with a genuine longing for a time — mainly the Fifties and Sixties — when the march of progress (in the shape of the space age and consumer society) seemed unstoppable. A time, crucially, when the future punks were still children, or twinkles in their parents’ eyes. Twinkling little stars.

When we were young, we were very young. It was de rigueur. Kate Phillips, the first journalist to ever mention the Sex Pistols, focused almost exclusively on their youth: ‘They are all about 12 years old. Or maybe about 19, but you could be fooled’ (NME, 27 December 1975). ‘We were 17; they were 25,’ John Lydon recalls, dismissing the musicians on the New York scene as ‘dirty old people.’ Malcolm McLaren had fancied himself as the band’s singer, rather than their manager, but, according to Nick Kent, his ‘old paranoia’ about ‘being too old got the better of him.’ After seeing the Pistols live for the first time, Richard Strange (Doctors of Madness) suddenly sensed that his time was up: ‘I’m two years too old,’ he lamented. Explaining that he was slightly younger than the Pistols and their entourage, Marco Pirroni feels the need to add that ‘two years was a big gap, gigantic’ at the time. Unlike Brian Eno, Judy Nylon ‘fell on the punk side of Boring Old Fart’ despite being the same age as him: ‘There was one interesting moment when I was hanging out with Paul Simonon and Eno was spending time with Paul’s mother.’ Joe Strummer could have drawn the very same conclusion as Strange or Eno. Upon joining the Clash, he was deemed ‘a bit old’ by Glen Matlock (himself only four years his junior). Concealing his real age would be an essential part of the public schoolboy-cum-pub rocker’s reinvention as a bona fide punk. A year on from the Pistols’ acrimonious demise, Steve Jones confided in Sounds, ‘I feel a bit old. I walk down the street and see these little punk rockers, about 13, and they don’t even recognise me.’ Already in his mid-thirties by 1980, Charlie Harper (UK Subs) screamed his desire to be ‘teenage’ as though it were a state of mind, or perhaps even the only way to be: ‘Teenage / I wanna be teenage / I wanna be teenage / I wanna be.’

We were so young, we were so goddamn young. Sid Vicious boasted that he ‘didn’t even know the Summer of Love was happening’ because he was ‘too busy playing with [his] Action Men.’ ‘See my face, not a trace / No reality,’ sang the Pistols on ‘Seventeen,’ the closest they ever got to a generational manifesto. Buzzcocks, who had barely reached adulthood, penned a paean to ‘feeling almost sixteen again.’ In a cheeky act of lèse-majesté — given that this was the single John Lydon had mimed to during his fabled King’s Road audition — Eater wound back Alice Cooper’s ‘I’m Eighteen’ to ‘Fifteen,’ thus reflecting the group’s average age. The Lurkers, and others, glamorised the growing pains of being ‘Just Thirteen’… I can still see that picture of two prepubescent, second-generation skinheads in a black-and-white photo spread — doubtless compiled by Garry Bushell — from around 1979. If memory serves, the humorous caption read: ‘Hope I die before my voice breaks.’

Witold Gombrowicz’s debut novel, Ferdydurke (1937), reflected the emergence of the ‘new Hedonism’ Lord Henry had called for in Dorian Gray as well as the shifting human relations Virginia Woolf had observed in the early years of the twentieth century. Outwardly, we strive for completion, perfection and maturity; inwardly, we crave incompletion, imperfection and immaturity. The Polish author suggests that the natural progression from immaturity to maturity (and death) is paralleled by a corresponding covert regression from maturity to immaturity. Mankind is suspended between divinity and puerility, torn between transcendence and pubescence. In 1941, Max Horkheimer declared that the Oedipal struggle was over and that Oedipus had won: ‘Since Freud the relation between father and son has been reversed. The child not the father stands for reality. The awe which the Hitler youth enjoys from his parents is but the political expression of a universal state of affairs.’ ‘It’s funny,’ says Nicky in The Vortex, ‘how mother’s generation always longed to be old when they were young, and we strain every nerve to keep young.’ Was the Vortex club named after Noël Coward’s 1924 play, or was it a nod to Ezra Pound’s 1914 essay? All we can say for sure is that, more than any other subculture before or since, punk was afflicted with Peter Pan syndrome. Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism — ‘To be premature is to be perfect’ — had found its ideal embodiment. Early gigs frequently resembled a St Trinian’s prom night gatecrashed by the Bash Street Kids. The ubiquitous school uniforms — all wonky ties and peekaboo stockings — were designed to rub punks’ youthfulness in the wrinkled faces of the rock dinosaurs and other Boring Old Farts. One could also flag up the recurring theme of onanism (‘Orgasm Addict’ and ‘Teenage Kicks’ being the prime examples) as well as McLaren’s dodgy flirtation with paedophilia (from the early nude boy T-shirt through Bow Wow Wow) to argue that the Blank Generation was more clockwork satsuma than orange. Bliss was it in that dawn to be young. But to be a punk rocker was very heaven!

The critic Brian Dillon describes the surface of Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing (1953) as being ‘startlingly alive, active, palimpsestic.’ The same could be said of punk, whose myriad influences shone through despite the tabula rasa of Year Zero; the attempt to wipe the slate clean (‘No Elvis, Beatles, or the Rolling Stones / In 1977’). By the early Seventies, mainstream pop music — which now boasted a relatively long tradition — was becoming increasingly self-referential and started plundering its back catalogue. The Fifties haunted glam rock, and even teenybopper outfits like the Bay City Rollers (not to mention the likes of Mud and Showaddywaddy). Meanwhile, a proper Teddy Boy revival was in full swing (its sartorial needs catered for by none other than McLaren and Westwood). Punk was the culmination of this excavation of popular music history and regression — via the hardcore rhythm and blues being played in British pubs, the rediscovery of Sixties American garage bands (Nuggets was released in 1972) and discovery of the Stooges et al. — towards a stripped-back, primitive version of rock ‘n’ roll embodied by the Ramones’ reductio ad absurdum of surf music and bubblegum pop. A regression running counter to the so-called progression of prog rock.

Punk’s enduring legacy notwithstanding, the original movement had nowhere to go: literally, no future. Going forward meant that it would no longer be an event, just another collection of professional bands releasing records at regular intervals and touring to promote them. Musical progression, for a genre that rejected virtuosity in favour of enthusiasm and inventiveness, would also prove problematic: ‘We say noise is for heroes (heroes) / Leave the music for zeroes (zeroes) / Noise, Noise, Noise is for heroes (heroes) / Oh yeah’ (The Damned, Machine Gun Etquette, 1979). As Chrissie Hynde has often pointed out, the curse of the punk was to turn — imperceptibly, but almost inevitably — into a muso. In those days, lest we forget, Paul Weller would get a lot of flak simply for tuning up on stage. Punk’s spirited DIY approach to music was symbolised by those hasty sketches of three guitar chords that featured in the January 1977 issue of a fanzine called Sideburns: ‘This is a chord. This is another. This is a third. Now form a band.’ They were famously referenced on Stiff Records’ poster for the Damned’s tour, that same year, supported by one-chord wonders the Adverts: ‘The Damned can now play three chords. The Adverts can play one. Hear all four of them at…’ But what happens when the band you have formed can play those three chords as effortlessly as seasoned session musicians? How many times can ‘White Riot’ be imbued with the conviction, vitriol and sheer hormonal energy it warrants?

Simon Reynolds, who rates Plastic Ono Band’s 1970 debut as a ‘seminal proto-punk record,’ provides a possible answer. Yoko Ono achieved the sound on that album by getting ‘superbly skilled musicians’ to play ‘like brain-dead gorillas wearing oven mitts’ (Totally Wired, 2009). Malcolm McLaren came up with another ingenious solution: sacking Glen Matlock, who had most contributed to the composition of the Pistols’ repertoire, and drafting in Sid Vicious, who could not play for heroin, let alone toffee. In a neat instance of life imitating art, the manager’s fanciful refrain about his protégés’ lack of musical proficiency (which tapped into a long avant-garde anti-music tradition) became a self-fulfilling prophecy: ‘Find yourself four kids. Make sure they hate each other. Make sure they can’t play’ (The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, 1980). Neil Spencer’s review of the Pistols at the Marquee — their first piece of exposure — highlighted the band’s anti-music credentials: ‘You can’t play, heckled an irate French punter. So what? countered the bassman, jutting his chin in the direction of the bewildered Frog.’ Incidentally, it was Matlock — probably the band’s most accomplished musician overall, as we have said — who affirmed that they were about more than mere music. And then, of course, there was that clincher of a finale: ‘Actually, we’re not into music, one of the Pistols confided afterwards. Wot then? We’re into chaos’ (NME, 21 February 1976). Early punk had a distinctly Oulipian quality: lack of musical proficiency was exploited as a creative constraint. Not being great players generated a tension, an intensity — but also a fragility — that proper musicians can seldom replicate. The danger of walking a musical tightrope, fearing that it might fall apart at any moment, knowing that it will, and rejoicing in those sonic epiphanies when it all miraculously comes together. The best punk bands never went through the motions; the motions went through them. The American fiction writer Peter Markus has spoken beautifully about the flashes of brilliance that can be conjured up when amateur musicians make a virtue of necessity:

I’m a failed musician. As a kid I used to punk around with pals and find objects along our riverbank to bang on, bought pawnshop guitars and drums and broken-keyed organs and made music out of our not knowing what we were doing. It was pure accident, those moments when we found ourselves in the middle of some sound spell. We knew it when we came out of it, the times that we went there, the times we were somehow taken. I can count the times on one hand, but I hold those times in my hand still like stones or fossils that somehow manage to float, have found a way to displace space and gravity and have pushed back against the failings of memory and the thinning out of time. Those moments stopped occurring, it seemed, even then, once our hands seemed to know where they ought to go, what chords they ought to be playing, and it was this sense of knowing (or thinking that we knew what we were doing) that killed the magic of our song. (The Brooklyn Rail, 5 February 2015)

Punk was carpe diem recollected in cacophony — living out your ‘teenage dreams,’ and sensing, almost simultaneously, that they would be ‘so hard to beat’ (The Undertones). The movement generated an instant nostalgia for itself, so that it was forever borne back to the nebulous primal scene of its own creation. Its forward momentum was backward-looking, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history. The Wasps’ introduction to ‘Can’t Wait ’Till ’78’ is a case in point: ‘I mean it’s still 1977, d’you know what I mean? Remember what happened at the beginning? Let’s have a bit more of it, eh?’ (Live at the Vortex, 1977). 1978 — Year One after Year Zero — is anticipated as a return to ‘the beginning.’ To quote the Cockney Rejects on their debut album,

I wanna go back to where it all began / And I wanna do a gig in my back garden / Wanna have a laugh before the press get in / If you give ’em half a chance / They’ll kill the fucking thing. (‘Join the Rejects’)

By 1980, when that record was released, going back to ‘where it all began’ meant totally different — and even contradictory — things to totally different — and indeed contradictory — people. Every splinter group that joined the ranks of the punk diaspora (Oi!, the mod revival, 2-Tone, no wave, cold wave, post-punk, goth, early new romanticism, anarcho-punk, positive punk, psychobilly, hardcore etc.) was a renewed attempt to recapture an original unity, which the emergence of these very splinter groups made impossible. As Paul Gorman put it in a recent documentary, ‘People began to play with, and tease out, the strands which were therein, and it was so rich, and so full of content, that one strand could lead to a whole movement.’ When Garry Bushell claims that the Rejects were ‘the reality of punk mythology’ — which is precisely what Mark Perry had previously said apropos of Sham 69 — he is referring to a very restrictive, lumpen version of punk that excludes most of the early bands bar the Clash. (Even within the Clash, only Joe ‘Citizen Smith’ Strummer ever really subscribed to this view.) Many Blitz Kids felt that it was their scene —