I wanna be Anarchy

I missed punk by just a cou­ple of years, and I've re­gret­ted it ever since. Born in 1967, I was 10 when I saw my first punk - spiked dyed hair, painted leather jacket, tight tar­tan trousers criss-crossed with zips and Doc Marten boots halfway up the calf. To a 10-year old out shop­ping with his mum and still in flares it was a fright­en­ing sight.

The end of the 1970s was when my child­hood leash was being loos­ened, and at week­ends I was al­lowed to go un­ac­com­pa­nied into Liv­er­pool city cen­tre. It was in the cen­tre that I saw more punks, but at the time I think I saw them more as mem­bers of an alien race rather than just local ado­les­cents who had signed up to the lat­est craze. Ei­ther way they ex­erted a strange fas­ci­na­tion; punks wore their re­bel­lion (quite lit­er­ally) on their sleeve, they didn't seem to care what any­one thought of them (cer­tainly not true given they were angst-rid­den teenagers) and their sym­bol­ogy and the ‘phi­los­o­phy' they pro­fessed (mostly just for fash­ion's sake in truth) ap­pealed to a young mind that was be­gin­ning to sus­pect that adults were full of bull.

Just about all teenagers come to the re­al­i­sa­tion that the older gen­er­a­tion have about as lit­tle idea of nav­i­gat­ing the world as they do. At the time it seems like a be­trayal and the nat­ural re­ac­tion is to kick out against your el­ders and show your anger. Teenagers at the end of the ‘70s were lucky, as punk pro­vided them with the per­fect means to do so. (My chance came a few years later with the New Ro­man­tics, but the less said the bet­ter).

Those ado­les­cents grew up and moved on and punk dis­ap­peared. Or did it? Forty years after Johnny Rot­ten screamed “I am the An­tichrist” into the mic while Sid Vi­cious pre­tended to play the bass next to him, punk is still around. Nat­u­rally it lives on in the mem­o­ries of those who were there (see the in­ter­view with Jordi Valls on pages 22-24) but for such a fleet­ing move­ment it left in­deli­ble marks on our cul­ture (see the re­port on punk-in­spired films on pages 28 & 29). Its reach was also wide­spread. De­spite the as­so­ci­a­tion with the British cul­ture from which it emerged (God Save the Queen - see our fan­tas­tic front cover, or An­ar­chy in the UK), young peo­ple every­where could not re­sist its pull, in­clud­ing in Cat­alo­nia (see Xavi Cot's sum­mary of the punk scene here on page 25, or the re­port on punk and Cata­lan artists on pages 26 & 27).

Trans­gres­sive, en­er­getic, flam­boy­ant, rude, non-apolo­getic, the at­trac­tions of punk are many. It fas­ci­nated me at the time, and 40 years later I still wanna be An­ar­chy.