In Search of Punk in 2015
As the generally acknowledged history of punk goes, the genre was badly maimed in 1978 when Johnny Rotten née Lydon spat out the immortal words ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? at the end of his (then) last Sex Pistols performance.
Punk was then finally put down when Lydon sold us butter after years of limping through, bleeding badly and castrated with the pop-punk of Kerrang! tours and then the emo, vampire film soundtracks. All this to ask, if you’re in the mood for a little musical necrophilia, where would you find punk nowadays?
You could pick any of the bands that grace the covers of music magazines around this time of year as we writers fight like wild animals for the right to claim the latest success as our discovery on Twitter accounts and blogs.
Every year we are presented with the latest band that is going to save guitar music in general and often punk specifically. You can always spot them: they’ll be four or five young, white guys with impeccable musical reference from the world of early garage rock. They’ll generally have at least two fuck-able members, a drummer and one more, presumably for balance. Despite this, what links all of these bands together is their total inability to save punk, or even really identify with it.
Last year’s Great White Hope was 2014 Mercury Prize nominees Royal Blood. The band consists of only two members, which concentrates the formula to ‘fuck-able and other’ but otherwise, the song remains the same.
Sure the music is nice (a word I’m using for deliberate effect to those of you who will judge me for using it), with that song they repeat on Radio 1 being especially enjoyable.
Despite this, punk’s saviours they are not. Of course, this is not the fault of these boys, who make perfectly serviceable music. It is the fault of us, music writers and our total white-wash of what we think punk should be. We’re the real enemy.
What has remained in the collective imagination of punk, quite simply, are its white, male and heterosexual bits, forgetting the infinitely fascinating body of work produced by artists like Patti Smith, The Slits, Derek Jarman and X-Ray Spex. In fact, Oh Bondage, Up Yours! remains for me the greatest punk song of all time as a guttural, snarl free change from the canny marketing that lurks behind God Save the Queen or Anarchy in the UK. These reasons and more are why we keep missing what punk is.
Punk is not going to be found on Radio 1, a station that recently made the new Fall Out Boy single its Song of the Day (not wanting to pick on Fall Out Boy here, because it’s low hanging fruit but their new song is particularly piss-poor).
Punk is going to be found on the fringes of society, it needs to be. In my view, if you want to find punk, you have to look not for the boys with the guitars but the boys with the glitter and the lipstick.
In drag nights across London, you’ll find the real punk scene, as boys and girls cause anarchy against societal expectations of gender, performance and what constitutes acceptable clothes to go out in.
Performers like Scottee are the real punks of today and their weapons aren’t riffs and power chords but Edith Piaf songs and intimidating eyewear.
These people and the ranks of other performers on nights in East and deep, South London that, like The Slits in their prime, make up for a lack of musicality with attitude, concept and performance.
Check out Scottee at the Roundhouse in Camden from the 4th through the 15th of February.
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