Punk

By the mid-1970s, many young British people felt locked out of life. The country was struggling, the future uncertain, and for a generation coming of age, there was a growing sense that no one was listening. In cities across the nation, and in parallel scenes in America and beyond, young people decided to make themselves heard. Picking up instruments with little training and forming bands with no expectation of success, they created something raw, fast and confrontational. Punk was a movement that burned brightly, fractured quickly, and left a legacy that far outlived its brief, explosive heyday. But why did Punk resonate so powerfully with a generation that felt shut out? Who were the artists and activists who drove it, and the fans who embraced it? And how did something so chaotic and short-lived go on to reshape music, culture and identity for decades to come? This is a Short History Of Punk. A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Matthew Worley, a British academic and author of No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture. Written by Sean Coleman | Produced by Kate Simants | Production Assistant: Chris McDonald | Exec produced by Katrina Hughes | Sound supervisor: Tom Pink | Sound design by Mirianna Pitman-Latham and Matthew Peaty | Assembly edit by Dorry Macaulay | Compositions by Oliver Baines, Dorry Macaulay, Tom Pink | Mix & mastering: Cody Reynolds-Shaw Unlock the next two episodes of Short History Of… right now by subscribing to Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening and early access to shows across the Noiser podcast network, including Real Survival Stories and Sherlock Holmes Short Stories. Just click the subscription banner at the top of the feed, or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to get started. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:03Speaker 00

  It's the 7th of June 1977, in London.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  It's been a day of high celebration in the capital, as Britain came together for the Queen's Silver Jubilee. Now, as evening draws in, the street parties continue, long after the pomp and circumstance has passed. For one day, the country has felt united.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Or, most of it, anyway.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  Out on the river, on a small boat chugging along the choppy waters, the mood is distinctly different. Amid a vibrant crowd of around a hundred people, a young man stands on the deck, bleached blond hair gelled up in jagged spikes, and face as pale as the moon. He grips the rail with one hand to steady himself as the boat rocks beneath his feet.

• 0:53Speaker 00

  Like everyone aboard, he's been drinking most of the afternoon, swept up in the excitement, until he finds himself on this private boat, hired as a floating stage for the punk band The Sex Pistols.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Right now, they're cruising the Thames, playing a live concert for this party of fans, friends, entourage, and a few selected journalists. As a fan, listening to the band's anarchic new single "God Save the Queen", live, is a defining moment in the young man's life. As the bass thuds into his chest and the guitar slices through the air, the young punk grins, shouting the lyrics along with the song. He's not quite in time, not quite in tune. Who cares?

• 1:40Speaker 00

  Ahead, the outline of the Houses of Parliament looms against the fading light, the harsh, thumping music bouncing off its ancient walls.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Suddenly, from behind, a police launch cuts across the river towards them, sirens blaring, blue lights bouncing off the water. The young man turns, squinting into the dim light.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Other people begin to notice now, pointing and jeering over the rails. The fan holds on tight as the wake from the police boat rocks the deck. For now, the band keeps playing, loud, fast, and defiant. But the atmosphere has changed, and the boat is already slowing.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  As the police draw alongside and officers clamber aboard, the music collapses into a piercing whine of feedback, followed by sudden silence. The stage lights flicker and die.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  Police shout at the fans, who give as good as they get. The band themselves cry prejudice, while their manager Malcolm McLaren protests that he's paid good money to rent the vessel. But it all falls on deaf ears, and soon they're being escorted back to the dock.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  There, McLaren is arrested and led away, while the musicians are corralled through a line of police officers in the glare of press flashbulbs and shouted questions.

• 3:07Speaker 00

  The party is over, but the moment has left its mark.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  In the celebrations today, two versions of Britain have collided: one rooted in tradition and ceremony, the other restless, angry, and refusing to wait it's turn to be heard.

• 3:29Speaker 00

  By the mid-1970s, popular music had become a huge, polished beast. Rock stars were playing to vast stadiums, but the gap between performer and audience felt wider than ever.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  At the same time, many young British people felt locked out of life. The country was struggling, the future uncertain, and for a generation coming of age, there was a growing sense that no one was listening.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  In cities across the nation, and in parallel scenes in America and beyond, young people decided to make themselves heard. Picking up instruments with little training, forming bands with no expectation of success, they created something raw, fast, and confrontational.

• 4:13Speaker 00

  Punk was a movement that burned brightly, fractured quickly, and left a legacy that far outlived its brief, explosive heyday.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  But why did punk resonate so powerfully with a generation that felt shut out? Who were the artists and activists who drove it, and the fans who embraced it? And how did something so chaotic and short-lived go on to reshape music, culture, and identity for decades to come? I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is A Short History of Punk.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  In the mid-1970s, much of the western world feels unsettled. The optimism and energy of the post-war decades have given way to economic uncertainty, political strain, and a growing fear about the future.

• 5:10Speaker 00

  In Britain, that mood is especially potent. Inflation is rising and industrial conflict is deepening. For many young people, especially in working-class communities, opportunities seem narrow and uninspiring.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Matthew Worley is a British academic and author of No Future: Punk, Politics, and British Youth Culture.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  In Britain in particular, there was the post-three-day-week ramifications, there was an increase in industrial conflict, there were social tensions. There was a sense in which the government, which was by 1976-77 is a minority government, a Labour government, that can't quite really govern. There was a sense of ungovernability. You've got inflation going through the roof, the National Front on the streets, a global oil crisis. So there are lots of things that suggested the world was in a very unstable position.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Cities feel run down and neglected, and there is a real sense of distance between ordinary people and those in power. But the Malaise is cultural too.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Popular music has drifted away from its roots. Progressive rock bands like Yes and Emerson Lakin Palmer may be selling out stadium shows, but ticket prices are beyond many pockets. And even when audiences can afford the shows, the music itself feels overblown, with long solos and elaborate stagecraft. Rock has become more about spectacle and authenticity.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  The problem is, little else in the charts seems to be hitting the right notes either.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  So glam's kind of had its day. Progressive rock's kind of almost getting parody of itself and ridiculous. Top of the pops is inundated or dominated by try novelty records, do be the disco duck and all this kind of stuff. It's aimed as much at your mum and dad as it is at the kids on the street. So I think there was certainly enough people beginning to feel a sense that rock had lost touch with its grassroots. The general disaffection that something exciting and new was needed to kind of re-live and reignite popular music in the 1970s.

• 7:20Speaker 00

  Across the West, bands are arriving at a similar idea, that rock music needs to be stripped back, sped up and made raw again. By the mid 1970s, that impulse needs a name. Punk was once a term of insult, suggesting something worthless, unruly or juvenile. But it's now re-appropriated as a title for this harsh, back-to-basics art form and the attitude that comes with it. From Australia to Paris, the roots of punk are starting to emerge. In clubs like New York's CBGB, artists such as Patti Smith, Television and the Ramones are showing that music doesn't need polish or virtuosity to have value.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Far from turning people off, being as direct and abrasive as possible is what draws the crowds. And because New York and London are linked by constant exchange of people, records and ideas, each scene helps energize the other.

• 8:28Speaker 00

  This October, on the Noiser Podcast Network, Real Dictators returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On Short History Of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam and follow Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. On Real Survival Stories, a modern Viking adventure as a replica Norse vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea and a man is struck blind, all alone, at the very top of the world. In Jane Austen's stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews. And in Sherlock Holmes' short stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in The Sign of Four.

• 9:10Speaker 00

  Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  When punk emerges into public view in Britain, its sound has already been shaped in the margins on both sides of the Atlantic. And in 1976, it suddenly comes of age.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  1976 is when the IMF crisis means the British economy looks at its most vulnerable and people are talking about economic collapse. A run on the pound, inflation's 25%, unemployment passes 1 million for a first time. So you've got all those kind of socially-economic things too. It's also the year in which someone like Mick Farren for the NME writes the famous article called "The Titanic Sails at Dawn", basically saying, "Rock and roll is lost. We need something new. We need something to kind of save it."

• 10:06Speaker 00

  Against a backdrop of strikes, rising unemployment, and a national mood of decline, punk steps defiantly into the space that has opened up.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  It did the opposite of everything that was the prevailing tropes of the time. So as albums were usurping singles, punk was back to short songs released on 7inths singles. The fact that they were short songs, not long songs, the fact that it was rough and ready, not well-produced, the fact that it didn't put an emphasis on musical sophistication, the rougher the better, the rawer the better.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Bands like The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, and The Buzzcocks begin to attract attention, first in London and then further afield. It's all about being real and relatable, with lyrics drawing unashamedly from daily life, warts and all.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  British punk takes on a particular form, I think, again relating to some of the politics and the aesthetic and the way in which bands like The Clash spoke to peculiarly British concerns. So if you listen to the first Clash album, it's full of references to the Bakerloo line and the career opportunities, working for the BBC. It's very kind of specific to its place.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  But British punk is not confined to London. It spreads quickly to places like Manchester, Liverpool and Sheffield, where local scenes form and begin to take on identities of their own. Part of its force lies in how open it feels. With its roots in rock and roll, glam, garage rock and reggae, punk doesn't require or ask for permission. It thrives on amateurism, the idea that anyone can pick up an instrument, start a band, make a fanzine, or simply claim a style and a point of view.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  The most important thing that punk did was make people think, the cliche is, you know, do it themselves, do it yourself. And you see that very quickly as Sex Pistols play and people think either they're rubbish, I could do better than that, or they're brilliant, I want to do that. And as we all know, there's also a load of people just thought it was terrible and didn't want anything to do with it, which is great as well because it creates a kind of frisson that can blow things up. But that sense of agency, to not be spectators but to participate, to do it rather than consume it, that's where, when people talk about the politics of punk, that's the politics of punk. It created the impulse to do something. It gave people a belief that they could do something themselves.

• 12:37Speaker 00

  While men still dominate much of the music industry, punk's disruptive, anti-establishment nature means that women aren't just watching from the sidelines, but helping define what the movement looks and sounds like.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Suzy Sue, who first comes to attention as part of the so-called Bromley contingent of fans following the Sex Pistols, quickly transforms herself into a striking and confrontational presence. With her heavy eye makeup and unflinching stare, the cold, controlled persona she creates is a deliberate counterpoint to the anarchy around her. Meanwhile, as lead singer of X-Ray Specs, Polly Styrene arrives from a very different place. The daughter of a Somali-born father and a Scottish-Irish mother, she brings a voice that is fresh, urgent, and unmistakably her own. Rejecting the polished image expected of female performers, she wears braces, writes

• 13:30Speaker 00

  lyrics about consumerism and identity, and delivers them with a restless, almost breathless intensity. This new breed of artists challenges the assumptions of who gets to be loud, visible, and culturally relevant. Across the country, teenagers form bands and small independent labels begin pressing records quickly and cheaply. Photocopied fanzines appear, documenting local scenes as they spring up across the country. People start booking their own shows, making their own artwork, and creating their own networks. It's still fragmented and underground, but that is precisely what gives it its force.

• 14:10Speaker 00

  Punk is loose and fast-moving, passed between fans by word-of-mouth and scrappy, hand-drawn flyers. It shows a generation that culture isn't something handed down from above, but something you can make yourself. And the shared language they use to that end is defined as much by style as by music. Everything, from clothes and hairstyles to posture and attitude, becomes part of the statement. Safety pins, ripped fabric, mohawks, bleach, dye, slogans, and bondage trousers are all part of an aesthetic designed to outrage.

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Much of that visual language is sharpened in West London by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. McLaren is a former art student fascinated by antagonism and performance who understands the power of publicity. Restless, talkative, and drawn to disruption, he is less interested in music for its own sake than in the spectacle that can form around it. Westwood, by contrast, is more grounded and exacting. A former primary school teacher, she's a self-taught designer with a keen eye for the politics of appearance, whose clothes draw on fetish wear, street style, and historical fashion.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  The importance of people like Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood was in framing what the Sex Pistols were doing. They gave it a point and a purpose. They kind of conceptualized it, really. A lot of people talk about that they were a manufactured band. I don't think they were manufactured. I think they were conceptualized. That's what they did.

• 15:48Speaker 00

  Punk is still chaotic and spontaneous, but figures like McLaren and Westwood help give it direction by defining its look and focusing its presentation and meaning.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  That framing is reinforced by the work of graphic designer Jamie Reed, whose artwork gives punk some of its most enduring images.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  I think Reed's the most important in some ways because just that poster for Anarchy in the UK, a picture of a Union Jack torn to pieces, held together by safety pins and ball clips. That's what I mean when I talk about punk reflecting the time because in 1976, if you talk about Anarchy in the UK, anarchy could either mean the country falling into total disrepair because there's industrial action and inflation and the IMF baiting it out. But it's also anarchy is a call to freedom and excitement and that kind of double meaning of are we on the cusp of something amazing and the world opening up? Or are we on the cusp of everything collapsing in on us and descending into misery and chaos of a different sort? So with Jamie Reed's framing of the pistols, creating that aesthetic around it,

• 16:50Speaker 01

  it suddenly made a brilliant rock and roll band, an incredible rock and roll band and something more akin to a kind of cultural intervention rather than simply great music to listen to.

• 17:00Speaker 00

  The look and the sound are now inseparable. Together they give punk a recognisable identity that outgrows its spaces in the fringes, the clubs and the record shops.

• 17:12Speaker 00

  And the moment it finally bursts well and truly into the broader culture is broadcast live on early evening television.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  On the 1st of December 1976, The Sex Pistols appear on Thames Television's Today programme, a tea time chat show. They're there almost by accident, booked at the last minute after the rock band Queen cancel. With the band in the studio are figures from the Bromley contingent, a loose circle of young fans and followers from South East London, including Susie Sue.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  What follows becomes one of the most notorious interviews in British television history.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  The host, 53-year-old Bill Grundy, introduces the group as being, in his words, "as drunk as I am", and is patronising and goading from the outset, apparently keen to get a rise out of his guests. He teases them about their image and attitude, and then flirts awkwardly with Susie Sue, prompting guitarist Steve Jones to label him "a dirty old man". Instead of bringing the interview back on course, Grundy doubles down, pressing Jones to say something shocking. The musician duly obliges, unleashing a few choice expletives.

• 18:30Speaker 00

  The swearing lasts only a few seconds, but on live television in 1976, it detonates like a grenade.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  Within hours, the press have mobilised, denouncing punk as filthy, degenerate and out of control. What was a growing underground movement becomes front page news.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  The Grundy thing at the end of 1976 is the point in which punk and the Pistols stop being of interest to people who read the music press and become part of the broader cultural fabric. The Grundy moment serves as the moment when punk moves from being a subterranean, slightly left-field and oppositional to something that is infusing the popular culture.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  On one hand, the notoriety is exactly what the bands have been looking for. Headlines condemn the band as foul-mouthed and dangerous, and punk quickly acquires a reputation for disorder and trouble.

• 19:27Speaker 00

  Some of that image is exaggerated, some of it actively cultivated, but once attached, it proves hard to shake. Venues grow nervous, and some local authorities begin to talk about bands.

• 19:40Speaker 00

  But the more it's condemned, the more popular it grows, and the music press helps to spread that sense of difference.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  We're so familiar with how punk looks nowadays, and spiky hair and whatever. But when you're peeling through the NME in 1976, and every page has got somebody with a beard and someone with long hair, and someone wearing a denim suit, flared trousers, posing onstage in a certain way, and then you turn the page and there's suddenly Johnny Rotten, you really get a sense of how different it looked.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  Punk isn't, however, just about shock value. Beneath the headlines and the outrage is a deeper expression about class, power, boredom, and belonging. Its lyrics, imagery, and attitude speak to youth alienation, to distrust of authority, and to the feeling that the country has nothing to offer the people coming of age within it.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  One phrase in particular comes to capture that mood: "No future."

• 20:41Speaker 00

  Made famous by the Sex Pistols, the sentiment is easy to interpret as pure, sneering nihilism. But it also identifies a generation's sense that the promised future of stable work and social progress is beginning to slip out of reach, and a very real sense that the nation is not working as it should.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  Meanwhile, those in power appear distant from the frustration on the streets. They're still speaking the language of order and national pride, while much of the country feels neglected, tense, and stuck.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  The disaffection reaches a fever pitch in 1977. As Britain marks the Queen's Silver Jubilee with bunting and pageantry, the Sex Pistols release "God Save the Queen."

• 21:28Speaker 01

  I think God Save the Queen is the kind of hide point of the Pistols being seen as anti-establishment thing, where you could put the politics word to them, in that it was a willfully provocative, seditious, very insightful critique of where Britain was at in the mid 1970s. This is a country that's, its empire is dissolving and disappearing. It's just entered Europe, so it's into a new phase. It's come out of the optimistic swinging 60s and all talk of the white heat of technology, and yet it finds itself in the kind of economic problems in the mid 1970s.

• 22:02Speaker 00

  To release a song like that in Jubilee Year feels to many like a deliberate act of desecration. For supporters, it is thrilling. For critics, it is offensive to the point of unforgivable.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  They're made for brilliant theatre and a brilliant spectacular response to the mad parade of the Jubilee. And again, see crucial to it. I mean, Rotten's lyrics are fantastic, but it's also Jamie Reid framing it with that brilliant cover of the Queen muted and blinded with blackmail lettering across it, which really just added to the idea that they weren't just antisocial delinquents who swore on television, they were actually trying to bring the whole thing down.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Punk presses directly on the fault lines of British life, poking at class, authority, identity, nationalism, and race. Yet even as bands and fans rail against the system, punk never speaks with one clear political voice, with different people drawing different meanings from it. It does, however, create a space in which people can stake out a position for themselves and insist that their voice matters.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  It's not like punk had an ideological position explicitly, but implicitly, the whole thing about punk, about being yourself, doing what you want to do, being who you want to be, having a voice, lent itself to a particular kind of politics. Like I say, the politics of punk are really bound up in the fact that it gave people a sense of agency, a belief that they could do something, that they weren't actually worthless and useless, that they'd had something to say, they could say it.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  That openness is part of punk's power, but it is also where the trouble begins. Because once a movement defines itself through provocation and the right to offend, it becomes harder to control who can and should be provoked and offended.

• 23:57Speaker 00

  This October on the Noiser Podcast Network, Real Dictators returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On Short History of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam and follow Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. On Real Survival Stories, a modern Viking adventure as a replica Norse vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea, and a man is struck blind, all alone, at the very top of the world. In Jane Austen Stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews, and in Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in The Sign of Four.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  By now, the far-right National Front political group is experiencing a surge in popularity, exploiting economic anxiety and racial tension with a message of white nationalism.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  In many parts of Britain, that racism is lived as intimidation, harassment and street violence, especially for black and Asian communities.

• 25:09Speaker 00

  From the outset, punk has been associated with the rejection of establishment values. But that antagonism towards the status quo also attracts those who want to turn grievance into something more exclusionary.

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Punk is being pulled in very different political directions, and some of them are openly racist.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  I think it's a mistake to think punk had a definite politics. I think the politics of punk are always contested and you can read different types of politics into it. We're talking ideology or anything like that. And I think over time, punk then manifests quite a lot of different types of political responses, to the extent that you've got bands like Crass really taking anarchy seriously and creating an arco-punk thing. But you've also, unfortunately, got a load of kind of right-wing bands who created a whole, let's face it, bands like Screwdriver played punk rock and did it in a way that denigrated Nazi politics and racist politics.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Some of this overlap comes from youth subcultures already mixing and colliding on the street. Punk does not emerge in a vacuum. It rubs up against existing skinhead and football cultures, and while some of that is rooted in working-class pride and local identity, other aspects become increasingly entangled with racism and the far-right.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  The original skinhead scene drew heavily on Jamaican music and multicultural working-class life, but by the late 1970s, parts of that culture are becoming decidedly nationalistic.

• 26:38Speaker 00

  And while swastikas are worn by some as a way of aggravating respectable society, rather than as a coherent statement of belief, to others, they offer a true representation of deeply-held ideology. But in the climate of rising racism and far-right activity, punk's taste for scandal becomes harder to defend as mere theatre.

• 27:01Speaker 01

  I always think, for me, the way in which McLaren and Westwood used swastika is always in juxtaposition with other things. So the famous "Destroy" t-shirt is a swastika with an upside-down crucifix and a picture of a postage stamp with the Queen's head being decapitated and "Destroy" above it. And so you're destroying the three pillars of authority, religion, politics, and monarchy. You can read that in a more sophisticated way, but people just wearing a swastika just shock people, and it's more problematic.

• 27:29Speaker 00

  For many, that ambiguity becomes intolerable. They don't want their culture to be captured, stained, or confused with fascism, which they see as just another facet of an establishment they want no part of. Plenty of punk music straddles racial lines, with bands like The Clash drawing openly on reggae influences. Black and white youth are meeting in clubs, at gigs, and on the street, even as the National Front tries to turn British people against each other.

• 27:58Speaker 00

  So when prominent musician Eric Clapton drunkenly voices support for Enoch Powell, the conservative politician notorious for his anti-immigration rhetoric, many in the music community decide that enough is enough.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  Rock Against Racism is formed after activists publish a letter condemning Clapton's outburst and calling for a visible anti-racist response. It starts as a loose network of gigs and soon grows into a movement that brings together punk bands, reggae artists, and anti-racist activists in open opposition to the far-right.

• 28:38Speaker 00

  It's April 1978, near Victoria Park, East London.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  A vast column of protesters is on the move, thousands strong, their voices and banners filling the streets. Among them, a 16-year-old girl in a scuffed leather jacket, tartan miniskirt, and ladded tights is carried along, her hair stiff with cheap hairspray and backcombing.

• 29:03Speaker 00

  She came in by tube with two friends from South London, clutching a hand-painted "Rock Against Racism" sign she made on her bedroom floor last night.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Now, after hours on the move, her legs ache and her throat hurts from chanting.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  But her energy, and that of the sea of people she's part of, shows no sign of running out. All around her are punks in ripped shirts and leather jackets while trade-union banners bob above the crowd. Black-and-white teenagers, veteran activists, women with children on their shoulders, students and socialists, all blur together as locals leaning from windows watch them pass.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  The sound is constant as voices rise and fall in waves, and chants are taken up and lost again to laughter and chatter.

• 29:52Speaker 00

  Up ahead, a drumbeat sets a rhythm. Below it all, police sirens pulse and fade.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  As the march slows at a junction, the noise changes with a burst of aggressive shouting erupting from the pavement ahead. She cranes her neck to see a small knot of men gathered behind a line of police. Skinheads. Faces hard, arms folded, waving Union Jacks and National Front placards.

• 30:22Speaker 00

  One of them cups his hands and yells vicious slurs, while another spits towards the demonstrators. The police hold the line, shoulders squared as the march pushes past in a wave of jeers, raised fists, and lobbed bottles.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  Confronted by this common enemy, the punks are reinvigorated. After all, this is exactly why they're here: a show of strength against these fascist thugs and everything they stand for. Their chants start up again, and the girl joins in with enthusiasm, louder than ever, drowning out the abuse. By the time they reach Victoria Park, the march has swollen into an enormous crowd. People pour through the gates and out across the grass, spreading in every direction. The air smells of beer, smoke, and sweat. At the centre is a stage and an enormous sound system, and as a band gets started, it sends out a deep, rolling throb of reggae bass that rises through the soles of the girl's boots and into her ribs.

• 31:26Speaker 00

  She stops for a moment and turns slowly in a circle, taking it in. There are skinheads here, too, braces bright against their shirts, and again she feels that flicker of uncertainty. But one of them lifts a "Rock Against Racism" sign above his head, and another is already dancing to the bassline, laughing as the crowd surges toward the stage.

• 31:49Speaker 00

  Up ahead, the platform is rough and makeshift, but the force gathering around it is immense. The march, the jeering, the police lines, the threat hanging over the streets outside, all of it has funneled into this one place.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  Outside the park, are men who want Britain smaller, whiter, and meaner. In here, for one afternoon, another version of the country is making itself heard.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Rock Against Racism shows that punk can do more than just provoke outrage. It can also build alliances, draw lines, and help imagine a different kind of Britain.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  By the end of the 1970s, punk is past its outrageous first wave, and its momentum is splintering off in different directions. Which isn't to say it's failed as a movement, but more that it has opened too many possibilities to remain one unified thing.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  One way of thinking about The Sex Pistols was almost like a kind of kamikaze mission into the heart of the music industry, to blow it all up and just get rid of all the rules and the expectations that people had about pop music and rock and roll. And then it was up to people to then put the pieces back together in the way that they wanted to.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  That is exactly what begins to happen. Some artists take punk's principles into politics, some into pop, some into art, experimentation, and electronics. The result is not one future for punk, but many.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Of course you can mix punk with a bit of free jazz and a bit of funk and become the pop group. Of course you can take a punk attitude to things and put really harsh electronics on it and think about paranoia and deindustrialization and become cabaret rolls there. And of course punk doesn't have to be four boys in a band. It can be The Slits, or it can be The Raincoats or something like that. And of course punk rock doesn't just have to be three chords played quick. You can bring reggae in there. Reggae is singing about what's happening to the black community, so we're gonna sing about what's happening to our community. And then it's our community's black and white, so we sing about what's happening to both of us. And it just breaks everything down and gets re-put into place.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  But while punk is opening out into new forms, the band most closely identified with its early days is beginning to fall apart.

• 34:15Speaker 00

  The Sex Pistols have burned fast and hard, generating scandal wherever they go. But by the time they reach the end of a chaotic and demoralizing US tour, they're coming apart at the seams. Bassist and singer Sid Vicious is sinking deeper into heroin addiction. Manager Malcolm McLaren is pushing the band ever harder, and lead vocalist Johnny Rotten has grown bitter, exhausted, and increasingly convinced he's being used.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  As the final gig of the tour rolls around, it all comes to a head.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  It is the fourteenth of January 1978 in the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco.

• 34:58Speaker 00

  A young fan, a student, near the front of the packed room braces himself against the crush and looks up at the band onstage.

• 35:07Speaker 00

  The Sex Pistols have come to the end of their American tour, which has been a strange, combustible run through the deep south and beyond. Now in San Francisco, they should be finishing the tour with a bang.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  But tonight, the atmosphere feels brittle. The band members barely acknowledge one another. There is no sense of shared momentum, only the feeling of four people forcing themselves through the mechanics of a performance.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  The student at the front takes a swig of his drink as the guy next to him sloshes beer down his shirt.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  Onstage, the band crash into their next song, "No Fun". The sound is raw and ragged. Steve Jones' guitar snarls, Paul Cook's drums drive hard, and Sid Vicious lurches through the lyrics with the same wounded instability that has followed the whole tour.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  John Lydon, or Johnny Rotten as he's known, stalks the front of the stage with a look that is part disgust and part exhaustion.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  The student in the crowd can sense something is wrong, even if he can't name it. This doesn't feel like the band he's come to love. It feels like a group of people expending the last dregs of their energy and enthusiasm in public.

• 36:22Speaker 00

  Each one of them looks exhausted, tetchy, and almost resentful.

• 36:27Speaker 00

  He looks around. Some people are cheering wildly, some just stare at the band as if infected by the same malaise. But others are apathetic, talking over the music, buying drinks and pushing through the crowd as if this is just another night.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Lydon steps to the microphone.

• 36:47Speaker 00

  For a second, the room hangs there with him. He's breathing hard. Sweat glints under the stage lights. Then he asks the ballroom, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

• 37:01Speaker 00

  It comes across half as a joke, half as an accusation. There's some laughter and cheering, though many in the crowd don't seem to understand what they've just heard. But to the student, the bitterness in the Englishman's tone is unmistakable.

• 37:18Speaker 00

  And then, just like that, it's over.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  With no grand farewell or final pose, and no triumphant encore, the last gig has ended and the band have walked off.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  The house lights flare up, the amplifiers hum, and the crowd begins to disperse, oblivious to the fact that they have just watched the last performance of the band that defined a movement.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  Punk will go on to fracture, evolve, and rebuild itself. But for the Sex Pistols, this is the end. And their final collapse was sudden, sour, theatrical, and unexpected. Everything it was meant to be.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Looking back, I think the Sex Pistols splitting up when they did was probably a good thing. Because it meant that them as a focal point, and them seeming to embody what punk meant for many people. So for them to split in January 1978, to all extents and purposes, was a really good thing, I think. Because it left them with just these four great singles and an album as a testimony to what they'd done. It meant they were never gonna, at the time, gonna go off and become dreadful and release a bad record. It also created this big vacuum after them where some people had to fill it.

• 38:40Speaker 00

  In the space left behind, new directions emerge as the genre continues to mutate.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  Out of punk grows post-punk, new wave, hardcore, and goth in Britain and in parallel scenes across America. Bands like Public Image Limited, Susie and the Banshees, Gang of Four, The Slits, and The Raincoats take punk into stranger and more ambitious territory.

• 39:05Speaker 00

  As this new landscape develops across the late 1970s and into the early 1980s, the political mood sharpens too.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  And with Margaret Thatcher's rise to power, some of punk's anger begins to find a clearer target.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Punk's disaffection before Margaret Thatcher is far more diffuse and in many ways, and again without over-intellectualising it, quite existential. It's just the world's rubbish, pop music's rubbish, telly's rubbish, that pub's rubbish, the road looks rubbish, prices are going up, I don't like it, I'm going to do something else. There's a lot more, just general disaffection. Margaret Thatcher brings real focus. You've got someone to throw your eggs at.

• 39:44Speaker 00

  For some bands, the music becomes more explicitly political, more focused in its opposition. In different cities, local scenes pull punk in new directions. Manchester's bands strip the sound back even further, or turn it towards something colder, artier, and more self-consciously experimental. In Sheffield, musicians begin folding in drum machines, synthesizers, and a harsher industrial mood. The scene around Eric's Club in Liverpool produces bands that keep punk's energetic core but add more melody and pop instinct.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  And over the Irish Sea in Belfast, where everyday life is already shaped by sectarian tension and army patrols, punk carries a different charge altogether, becoming a space where young people can step outside the rigid identities of the troubles.

• 40:36Speaker 00

  But its evolution creates a new problem. The more it spreads, the easier it becomes to imitate, package, and sell.

• 40:49Speaker 00

  This October, on the Noiser Podcast Network, Real Dictators returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On Short History of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam and follow Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. On Real Survival Stories, a modern Viking adventure as a replica Norse vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea, and a man is struck blind, all alone, at the very top of the world. In Jane Austen Stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews. And in Sherlock Holmes Short Stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in the Sign of Four.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  The scale of its success begins to change its heart. By this point, the defiant, anti-establishment movement has proved too big an opportunity for the commercial mainstream to ignore. Record companies move in, and punk fashion, once defined by rebellion, now starts appearing in high-street shop windows. Even the media, which has previously treated punk as a threat, now begins to repackage it as a trend. And nowhere is that tension clearer than around Malcolm McLaren. From the start, he has presented himself as punk's provocateur, an impresario and master manipulator who understands how outrage can be turned into attention, and attention into money.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  By the end of the 1970s, that is making him a more divisive figure. To his admirers, he is a brilliant strategist who helped stage punk's eruption. To critics, he is increasingly the man who commodified it, making it something more palatable and marketable by tearing out its soul.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  Even Vivienne Westwood's designs begin to move into a more rarified world of fashion and high prices. What started as an attack on consumer culture now risks becoming just another expensive thing to buy.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  It can be the most shocking pop band in the end, but ultimately, your record company's going to flog a dead horse, it's going to release some product. Whether the rock and roll swindle was Malcolm McLaren getting a few quid, or actually, the swindle was the record industry turning a dangerous cultural form into near-product is open to question. But punk does very quickly get appropriated, and the signifiers of punk get emptied of their meaning and simply positioned as fashion statements, or aesthetics, or whatever. And the energy of punk is sometimes retained, but the provocations and willful unsettling nature of punk is diluted.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  But even as the industry is turning punk into a capitalist venture, the people at the heart of it still retain its spirit.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  As their visual codes are lifted out of context and sold to the masses, the answer for many artists shaped by punk is not to defend the old form forever, but to keep changing before the culture industry can pin them down.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  We had planted a seed for people to think, right, as soon as people recognise what this is, it has to be something else. We have to find a way to constantly be inventive. So you have to dress up and reconfigure yourself monthly in order to stay ahead of the game. Because if you stand still for a minute, the press will get you and they'll codify you and your cultural brilliance will be transformed into mere commodity.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  One of punk's deepest legacies is that refusal to stay still long enough to be neatly packaged.

• 44:33Speaker 00

  In the years that follow, it becomes clear that punk's true impact reaches far beyond its brief, explosive beginning. It reshapes music, strips away old assumptions about who gets to make culture, and it leaves its mark on fashion, politics, and everything in between.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Punk plays a pretty long game, I think, in terms of the impact that, if we're talking in the British context, Sex Pistols have, just in terms of inspiring a whole generation of musicians to come up with really constantly evolving and interesting and exciting forms of music and musical presentation.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Its influence threads through the decades, surfacing in indie, grunge, Riot Girl, and alternative music. And later, it shows itself in the DIY spirit of online culture, where people create, share, and challenge the mainstream on their own terms.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  What punk left behind was a way of thinking. It showed a generation that they didn't have to wait to be chosen, that they could make something themselves, say what they meant, and claim their space. In that sense, punk is less a genre than an invitation, a lasting reminder that culture can be shaped from the ground up by anyone bold enough to have a go.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Punk's most lasting impact on British culture at the time was that it opened up a space for lots of people who previously probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to do creative things and to do creative things in ways that fundamentally changed the culture of Britain and the world.

• 46:17Speaker 00

  Next time on Short History of, we'll bring you a short history of the Cray Twins.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Home life in the East End in the 40s and early 50s was brutal. They were being bombed by the Germans. They were having to rebuild once the war was over. There was poverty, extreme poverty, and they were fighting for survival in so many ways. And their circumstance and the world they grew up in sent them into this life of crime. And then they made a choice to follow that path. And they made incredibly bad choices along the way and got caught. So they chose to be criminals, they chose to be villains, and they did a really bad job of that because they got caught. And they both died, having spent most of their lives behind bars. Nothing about that is heroic.

• 47:09Speaker 00

  That's next time.

• 47:14Speaker 00

  You can listen to the next two episodes of Short History of right now, without waiting and without adverts, by subscribing to Noiser Plus. Just hit the link in the episode description or head to www.noiser.com/subscriptions to unlock more episodes today. This October, on the Noiser Podcast Network, Real Dictators returns. We're in the Dominican Republic for the story of Rafael Trujillo. On Short History of, we'll uncover the secrets of the Hoover Dam and follow Mary Shelley, the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. On Real Survival Stories, a modern Viking adventure as a replica Norse vessel embarks on a daring voyage across the North Sea, and a man is struck blind, all alone, at the very top of the world.

• 47:59Speaker 00

  In Jane Austen stories, Emma continues with Dame Julie Andrews. And in Sherlock Holmes' short stories, Holmes and Watson unpick an epic mystery of hidden treasure and murder in The Sign of Four. Get all of these shows and more early and ad-free on Noiser Plus.