It was a lucrative line of attack for the Tories, to paint Labour as luddites, clinging on to an overgrown, stagnant way of life, whilst suggesting that turning the clock back to Victorian England was somehow a path to progress (wonder if they’ll try that trick again). Thatcher would return order, trim the fat, get Britain working again (three million would soon be unemployed). Then as now, the Tory presses spammed the notion that the turmoil was caused by Jack Jones and the corrupt trade unionists, and an overblown public sector protected by Jim Callaghan’s faltering government (ignore Callaghan’s significant and pioneering privatisation, that’s just Fake News). It’s another weird quirk of history to remember that Thatcher cast herself as the “change” candidate in late-70s Britain- when the lights were going out, in millions of homes and thousands of flats, guarded by the growing garbage monuments of discontent. Upon whose shoulders falls the responsibility to take on the fascists? – and particularly targeted The Jam, who famously worked to tear down the established order by encouraging their fans to vote Conservative (a call Paul Weller later regretted). In (White Man), he took aim at his punk contemporaries – More than anything, Strummer was moved by black activism in West London embodied in the scorched streets of the ’76 summer and the Notting Hill carnivaliants’ response to police abuse that year. Indeed, the Clash’s political articulation was inspired as much by the activist reggae – the roots, rock, rebel – of Marley, Cliff, Tosh and Marvin than elsewhere. Its iconoclasm is a sign that Strummer felt isolated in his views within the scene, rather than an embodiment of punk ethics. So declared Strummer in the 1977 reggae-inspired track “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais”, which railed at both the punk and pop reggae scenes for ignoring the racial inequality and bubbling white supremacy in the streets of late-70s London. I’ve seen this often in response to accusations from Johnny-come-lately historian types that punk “didn’t do enough” to oppose racism and the rising fascist tide of the late ‘70s.Īs it turned out, due to the movement’s initial actions and the turmoil of the late-70s, punk rockers had to deal with the Nazis within, whether they wanted to or not.
Many of the old guard insist that punk was not a political event. No punk would have been even slightly surprised when John Lydon backed Trump and Brexit. Yet so much more washed through the maelstrom of punk. There always was in punk a leftist appeal, and the movement quickly developed an activist wing, exemplified by the famous Rock Against Racism carnivals of ’78.
You talk to the old punks now, and their recollections lack the political romance us third-gen Clash disciples ascribe to that moment. Sometimes wonderful things can be produced, when the centre fails to hold. It was the creation of a new voice, but it was also in its founding moments a REACTION against the tame, the overblown, and the delusionary.
Punk is (and was) polarisation writ loud, a centrifugal splattering of all things, an explosion of possibilities and frustrations. The memory of this spirit of ’76 is incomplete. Its British origin story is dominated by the memory of the Pistols and the Clash – between anarchy and socialism – between the expression of ‘70s working class feeling and those who tried to channel that anger into a revolutionary riot. Young(er) punks like me came to the culture at its nadir, and knew it as a scene that welcomed anyone and everyone so long as you shared its passion, its strip-it-down catharsis, and its tolerance. Nostalgia observed through blinders can be a dangerous thing. There’s something “punk” about donning a swastika, for shock or for awe. In 2017 I’ve often kept London Calling in my earphones, blasting out Clampdown for inspiration, for strength.īut there’s also something in punk that embodies the mass appeal of manifest right-wing hate, which is once again loose, having bubbled for years. There’s something very ’76 about now, and it makes a lot of sense for people to draw from a moment where people were moved by art, music and fashion to stand up for themselves. There’s something very punk, after all, about tearing down a goading monument to those who wished you in shackles. This age is ripe for it, as there’s a whole host of reasons for people to be frustrated and angry, particularly for the young among us, as opportunities diminish.
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