 Right, thank you very much for waiting. Welcome to the British Library, obviously, the home of punk rock. And I'm sure that there are mixed feelings about whether the British Library, 40 years on from the birth of punk, should or shouldn't be doing this. But the fact remains, whether you liked it or not, the library was collecting punk 40 years ago in 1976. So a lot of what you see in the exhibition today has been collected over that time. So all the vinyl, pretty much, the fanzines, the lights of sniffing glue lovingly bound up in leather by the British Library curators for future generations to enjoy. Has been augmented with fantastic loans from all sorts of places, letters, posters of ephemera, fashion and some fantastic photography. So I'm sure a lot of you have seen it already, but it is open all night. So in the interval and at the end, do have another look around if you haven't seen it already tonight. So we're very, very delighted to be teaming up tonight with Faber Social to present a really special night of discussions. Faber Social is a monthly event run by Faber and Faber Publishers and it's a fantastic occasion to celebrate music, culture, literature, ideas. And so do look it out. So we're very, very happy to be doing this together with them tonight and they're two great authors. So tonight you're going to hear first from John Savage talking to the New Statesman, Kate Mossman. A little break after that. And then we'll have Viv Albertine and then they'll both be up for a question and answer session at the end. If I could ask you just a little point of order when you've leave your seats at the break or whatever to take your glasses back to the bar, that'd be a great help. Anyway, really nice to see you all. Enjoy the evening and please welcome to the stage John Savage and Kate Mossman. Hello, John. Hello, Kate. Hello, you all. Thanks very much for coming. Nice turnout. So we both have our Remain badges on. Yes, we both got our Vote Remain badges on. I voted Remain. I saw an old documentary on public that said, you've got to remember it was a completely different time, you know, Britain felt like a small island. The far right was trying to get rid of the immigrants and the politicians looked like they walked out of 1940 and I thought it hasn't changed that much, has it? Do you want the short round or the long round? Yes, well, I'm afraid, during the last few days, I felt ashamed to be British. And I have to say that I find the whole thing completely disgusting. As far as I'm concerned, there's not a mandate for the changes that are going to occur. The leave people have no idea what's going to happen to them and I'm afraid will probably happen to the rest of us. And while I may very well have to live with the consequences of the vote, I do not and never will accept it. Good stuff. And I never thought I'd have to live through this crap again. I lived through it with Mrs. Satcher for so many years and now it's all come back even worse. And can't this bloody country get used to the idea that it's lost its empire? I thought that that was something that punk rock was supposed to be talking about 40 years ago. But we have platilas on the Thames again. Yes. Yeah, in a great way, it kind of makes what we're going to talk about even more relevant today. And I wondered if... I wanted to take you right back because I've heard you say before that your attachment to punk and your interest in it was completely instinctual. Yes. And I wondered if you could tell me a bit about the young man that got sucked into this movement. Oh God, no! All the gory details. Thank you, Kate. Well, I think first off, if you... I mean, I got into all this and writing through music because I love music and was and still am a pop fan from an early age. To me, pop music was the way that I interpreted the world. I was born in 1953 when I was 12, 13 in 1966. I was living in Ealing, sub-overwest London, listening to part radio obsessively. And that really was what created my world. By 1975, I think like a lot of people who got involved with punk rock, I knew that something was going to happen and I knew that I wanted to be part of what was going to happen. And people are always asking me about this and saying, why did punk rock happen? And they say, oh, well, it's dreadful excesses of prog rock and it wasn't. It was dreadful, dreadful, dreadful pop music in 1976. And there's a wonderful Buzzcocks lyric where Pete Shelley sings, how I hate modern music, disco boogie and pop. It goes on and on and on and on and on how I wish it would stop. And so that was the punk basically came about to begin with because there was a need for a 70s kind of rock music, a truly 70s rock music that had nothing to do with the 60s and didn't appear with the 60s as they had become, which is, you know, I'm afraid, Wings triple albums. And it was also to do with, you know, dreadful records like, I've got a brand new Combine Harvester by Edge Cutler and the Wurzels or Save Your Kisses for Me by the Brotherhood of Man. Do you remember that, anybody? That made you want to throw up. And it was number one for six weeks. So that, and again for me, and I said this before at the opening night, I knew something was going to happen. I read a piece by Charles Charles Murray in the wonderful writer in the NME in November 75 where he talked about the CVGB scene. And this is pre-internet, pre-social media, pre-everything. He used to get scraps of information from wherever you could. And he wrote a paragraph about the Ramones and he said they were one, two, three, four at the start of every number. They heard birds, sunglasses, their songs all lasted 90 seconds and they were all I won or I don't won. And I thought, right, that's it. That's 70s rock music. I love the idea that, and this was an age, of course, where you read about the music before you heard it. Yeah. And I know this is something Viv mentioned in her book, which was written by the Patty Smith record and hoping that it was actually as good as the pieces of criticism said it was. Yes, I bought it because of the cover. The cover was wonderful, taken by Robert Maple Thorpe. And I wasn't disappointed. And I wasn't disappointed by the Ramones either, which completely changed my work, because I had bought the record before I saw the Sex Busters. So, and as a young man, 22, 23, yeah, I was pretty much a mess. I was I taking drugs? Not many by that stage. I'm gay, so I was gay then, and being gay in 1976 was pretty bloody awful. The main role models, Larry Grayson and John Inman, are you being served, sir? I have his album, by the way, it's really great. And so, and I was doing a job that I hated and I thought that I would never get to be the person that I wanted to be. And I felt very alienated and isolated. And I found Punk Rock. Thank you, Punk Rock. Tell me a little bit about the idea of, I think one of the things that we've lost a little now, is the sense of a generation gap, because little kids now are having their parents go, you must hear the Smith, this is where it's at. And it can't have been fun having it. I mean, the generation gap, to me, sounds kind of exciting, because there was something to kick against, but it wasn't, was it? No, and I'm very happy now that, I mean, I don't have children, but my friends and mine have got children, or slightly younger, they've got teenage children. They're much closer to their children than I was to my parents. There's a complete generation gap. My parents did not get it whatsoever. It was a complete disaster. Because they, of course, were, my father was born in 18, my mother was born in 28, so they were pre-pop culture. They didn't get it at all. They were the wartime generation. And so, that was a major source of difference. But I have to say that my mum, who's 87, came to the exhibition last week and she bought one of those, his accord, and here's another now former band T-shirts, and she's wearing it at home. Do you remember the first night that you felt that you found something new? Yes, very strongly. It was seeing the clash at Fulham Town Hall right at the end of October 76. And that night I had taken drugs, I'm afraid to say. And I'd met Polly Starring, Marie Elliott, as she was called, on the same evening. And Marie and I went to see the clash at Fulham Town Hall and within five seconds that was it. I knew exactly this is what I'd been waiting for and I'd found it and it was happening in front of my eyes. And what was interesting about the clash then was that everybody thinks of the clash in terms of machismo because of the later image. But in fact, the clash seemed to me then, they were all in their paint-spattered hand-me-downs and they seemed to me to be like hurt and scared boys. And I found that very interesting. They weren't macho at all. They were actually sort of quite damaged and almost sort of, almost pathetic and they were just trying to rise above it. I thought that was very interesting. How did it feel different from having seen larger rock bands in the past? Did you feel closer to them physically, emotionally? Yes, well I mean it was a small place so a lot of punk events in the first year were held in small clubs which to me is a fantastic place to see. I've never been a festival person, I don't like them. I've met many people. And I've never liked arena shows either. I went to see a lot in the 80s. And clubs, ballrooms, theatres, that's the place to see groups. And yes, obviously you could be very, very close to, you could be right up in front of the stage. It wasn't that crowded then. The first time I saw the Sex Pist was shortly afterwards. I started at the back of the crowd because I wasn't sure by the third song I was right at the front, right next to the stage and it was possible to do that. And that course is fantastic because you're seeing the whites of their eyes and they're seeing the whites of your eyes. And I think one of the things that happened to the Sex Pistols is that they had this very close contact with the audience who mirrored them very strongly, either hating them or loving them. And so you had this very, and it was great for groups because they had this very intense relationship with the audience. And they could see exactly what was happening, what was good, what was bad, which happened when I saw the clash at the Royal College of Art. I'd never seen anybody put his guitar down and leap into the audience and start hitting somebody, which Joe Strummer did. Because there were students there and they were throwing glasses at the group and quite rightly, Joe Strummer took exception. I'd never seen anybody do that. That was new. One of the sort of popular stories about punk is that it was completely London-based. Is that a myth? Well, I was always, I mean, I was always very interested. Obviously the first groups I saw were in London, but I was always very interested in the idea of punk being an international phenomenon anyway. I didn't like the way that in 1977 it became an English thing. We own punk. Well, nobody owns punk really. And I always liked the fact that there were these groups. I didn't find out until about 1977 I knew about Perubu in Electric Eels in Cleveland and the CBGB scene. Then London, bit in Paris, and then of course in 1977 it went to the West Coast of America. And I went out to the West Coast of America in 1978 and saw a lot of these punk bands like The Weirdos and The Screamers. And they were just fantastic. And so I was always into this, I never liked the idea of one person or one city owning it. But yes, it did start in London, but very quickly spread to, obviously to Manchester in the famous June show, which actually is a very interesting show and Richard Boone who was here was very much involved with it, because it was pretty much the first show ever promoted by Sex Pistols fans by people who actually liked the group. And that's one of the reasons why it's so memorable. Previously they just played pubs and places where people hated them. Here was a situation whereby they actually had fans and this is one of the first times they started the spread out to Manchester where I lived from 1979 on because of one of the reasons I moved there probably the fact I got a job there was that I loved the punk scene there much more after a while than the London punk scene because the London punk scene by awesome 1977 had become a very music industry and there was a lot of cocaine. And as everyone knows, cocaine means bad art. In the exhibition here we've got some examples of your magazine you're producing Secret Public? I did two fanzines. I did one called London's Outrage which was End of 76 and then I did another one called Secret Public. These images you're seeing up here are photographs of Notting Hill and Nottingdale West 10, West 11, West 14 taken in January 1977 for use in a fanzine and it shows some of what parts of London were like in 1977. I think what's harder for younger people to realise was just how derelict a lot of London was. Whole areas of North Kensington were completely Covent Garden was derelict. A very good record of the tat of London in 1977 can be seen in Derrick Jarman's Tubely which is one of the only films to have actually been shot in that year in future films which of course the slits were briefly in. They're in, you know, Viv. Viv was in as one of the slits smashing up a car. The Roxy was in Covent Garden. The Roxy was in Covent Garden and of course the market, this is again the dereliction, the market had just moved, the fruit market had just moved out and so the whole point of the whole area had gone and so there were squats there. Chrissy Hind had a squat in Covent Garden. I used to visit her there just around the corner from the sound's office which is where I used to work and so the other thing about that time is young people could leave right near the centre of the city which was as impossible now. Yes, and obviously you could sign on. You could live for free, you could sign on and then you could actually write music and get involved. Yes, and of course successive governments particularly beginning in the 80s with Thatcher have taken those possibilities and those freedoms away to which leads us to the situation that we're in now. So tell me a bit about your fanzines. What was the idea behind the secret public? I mean the imagery that you were using that's gone down in history as being the front face of punk in some ways. Well, obviously being gay I was interested in non-standard masculinity even then and I was interested in gender difference and different aspects of gender and so for instance one of my favourite male punk bands was Subway Sect because they were a bit hopeless and I liked the fact that Vic would come out on stage and kind of go that was great, that was so exciting and so liberating because it wasn't you know and so and at that point I was reconstructing recently the gay movement wasn't so well organised, it really got itself organised, it was in existence obviously but it was much more organised in the 80s onwards whereas the second wave of feminism was already up and running and so I teamed up with an artist called Sterling who was who still remains a fine artist very well known fine artist and performance artist and we did a magazine called Secret Public which was all montages no words except captions to the montages and that was a way I saw montages being a fantastic way of assimilating data very quickly you could put lots of stuff in there and also montage had suggested itself to me by seeing the punks at the very early shows I went to because what happened if you went to shows in 76 or even early 77 the kids would be wearing the audience would be wearing 40s, 50s and 60s clothes all put together and mashed up with safety pins and they almost looked like a living collage of youth culture history which to me was just completely fantastic and I was also very influenced partly partly by Linda as well whose work I thought and still think is fantastic and also in compendium books does anybody remember compendium? Yes, they sold very cheaply publications by a publisher called Beach Books and they had a lot of montage magazines in them by people like Claude Pellier and also there was John Hartfield and so we did this magazine Richard Boone thank you very much helped to get it printed and put it out on Buscox label New Hormones and it sold very few because because we didn't put a price on it because we were so out of our minds in a good way So people just took it for free? Presumably One of the other fan scenes that they have down there says on the front guaranteed 100% stranglers free What does that mean? Explain to us what that means Well there was a bit of a split going on wasn't there? That's very provocative of you Kate Oh dear I've gotten into so much trouble with all this over the years I really really dislike the stranglers I thought there were everything that punk rock was supposed not to be and I didn't actually think they were punk rock people now say they're punk rock and stranglers fans say you wrote the stranglers I had a punk rock history but actually I never thought they were part of punk rock history there was something different and they came along and they profited from the space that punk had opened up fair enough doesn't mean I have to like it but I don't And they were a bit later as well weren't they? No they were going well before punk they were doing the festival circuit in 75 but I thought they were bullies You had a run in didn't you? I had a run yeah and I don't like bullies so and I don't think many people here probably like bullies but again in the way that people tell the story about punk there's a sense of it suddenly becoming commercialised at the point when the jubilee happened and the sex pistols boat went down the tent you don't feel that way about that moment do you? I thought it had got by the awesome 77 I was no longer particularly interested in London punk as it had been because I thought there were lots of horrible groups coming out I remember one there was one particular two particular groups that I saw pictures on I thought uh oh this is all going wrong a group called London and a group called the maniacs and they just looked like old geezers with their hair cut short playing sped up pub rock which is not the idea and also the sex pistols I'd been on the boat trip the sex pistols boat trip which to me was the climactic moment of the whole thing and I still am in awe of what the sex pistols did really because they were very very brave coming out now and playing an anti-Brexit gig in the middle of you know Parliament Square because they were the only people to protest the Queens jubilee and the Queens jubilee in 1977 was worth protesting but there's exactly the same idea that it's worth protesting Brexit now and then there was an attempt to roll back this country into some ridiculous fantasy we won the war we still got an impar type crap tell me a bit about what the atmosphere on that day was like it was really heavy it was awful a lot of people on the boat were taking speed the people doling out speed speed is not particularly good drug for the head really and the weather was awful as per and it just felt like the summation of something I've never been on a boat trip since because you start there you can't get off and you start there for hours and so they played and it was all very difficult and very noisy but very exciting and then the boat they played anarchy in the UK outside the house of the parliament which is a wonderful moment never forget that and then the police came around police launches boat comes in, serid ranks of police riot it was very and I just always thought with the sex pistols what is the problem they're just a pop group and they're actually saying what they think and God Save the Queen is fantastic record probably one of the best rock and roll records ever and so what's the problem but the extraordinary thing about the sex pistols at that moment and this is what I think they were very brave is that they were the only people to actually stand up and say this is a load of bullets which it was and they were the only people that record God Save the Queen was it was really difficult to press people objected to the covers they objected to pressing the record they objected to distributing it no radio played it once on John Peel no adverts on commercial radio nothing on the BBC effectively made number one was kept off the charts in the music industry for nagling in the shops in Smith's where they had all the records racked it wasn't even on the rack even though it was number two so there was a concerted attempt by the establishment to stop this record now I still find that absolutely incredible just a pop record what was the problem it's incredible to think that music at that point had such power to shock and offend but all they were doing was telling the truth they couldn't happen now could it you couldn't get well this is something we can maybe talk about later well yeah maybe it's about the power of music having been downgraded on some level that it doesn't have that if a band turned up on a live TV and swore now their entire tour would not be cancelled as half of the Sex Pistols tour was I think that punk certainly to me was a product of scarcity and focus and I think scarcity because there wasn't much youth media or pop music worth the name most of the people involved with punk probably born between 52 and 58 had all grown up through the 60s and being used to this idea that pop music was completely fabulous and was actually saying something and was involved with some idea of counter culture and some kind of autonomous youth culture and that had gone effectively by 1976 so I think that everybody involved with punk wanted that to happen in whatever way they could and I think that that's why in one reason why it's still celebrated it was quite spontaneous it wasn't put together and there was so little happening I mean these pictures I took of Notting Hill and Nottingdale there were 35 in the set and oh incidentally in case you hate punk being in the libraries and the museums there's a set in the Tate okay and and also in case you hate punk being in the museums what do you want in the museums do you want Adge Cutler do you want Brotherhood of Man in the museums please tell me maybe we can arrange it so and it was I think McLaren Westwood did fantastically well to focus everything so hard and with such clear lines in their shop and I actually don't think they've got enough credit for that I thought what they did was extraordinary in areas problematic which I could talk about for hours but that simple thing of focus everything like the Sex Pistols did like Jamie did on their record sleeves it's so clear and complicated ideas expressed in a simple way that people could readily understand I thought that was fantastic and the best punk groups another classic example being the Buzzcocks and Linda Sterling's sleeve for the orgasmatic single which is probably my actual favourite piece of art in the whole punk period I just think it's completely fantastic I was wondering about things like the tits t-shirt from Sex how prevalent was the tits t-shirt how many people out of 20 had that probably not that many how much did it cost probably cost too much people were always upset about how much those clothes cost I was never worried I've still got one of those mohair five colour electric colour mohair sweaters absolutely stringy mohair sweaters fabulous I interviewed Johnny Rotten once and he said Vivian's clothes were always awful she had no concept of men's dangly bits all those zips all those safety pins well no I mean I like the when I worked in television in my first year I had a pair of these sex corduroy seditious corduroy trousers which were beautiful striped corduroy and then they had a zip that went right from here right round the arse and I got into terrible trouble where I thought they were great you know great for women take a piss anyway I liked Vivian's clothes and I do I've got a lot of time for her clothes I think they're great and I still think some of her clothes are great I think a lot of what those guys do now is they're still provoking I mean we interviewed Vivian for the new statesman and she said oh punk was just a marketing opportunity and you don't say that kind of thing unless you want to annoy a lot of people no I can't be bothered now I just want to celebrate it really and be as truthful as possible and also it helps me to still think about it was a very formative part of my life and doing these things helps me to still think about it and to make it new and to keep on making it interesting for myself and hopefully other people I can't be bothered to be provocative all that sort of burning sex pistols clothes thing it's not a good look is it the best has done it in history how did you first feel when you saw this movement that you loved starting to be associated with violence and scuffles well it was inevitable because punk mirrored England it was actually a very very it was very in tune with what was going on it was a true mirror of the country which is why I call the booking and dreaming why God saved the Queen was so powerful it really did and it mirrored also the unconscious of the country went very deep in certain aspects some of the best groups went very very deep and I mean I'll reel out the best groups buzz cocks early clash sex pistols Suzy the slits subway sect all of those groups really said something about the place and the time that they were in in a very profound way and I think they made great art as it happens and that's what great art does it takes you into the time it helps you to get out of the time and so I I have to say I did get irritated when but I did get you know the violent but the violence in in British society then and this is what worries me about what's happening now the violence then was completely endemic I keep on telling younger people like yourself how violent everything was in retrospect it was really scary and I now think I must have had a guardian angel looking over me because I didn't get into serious trouble then but I could easily have done and I like that and obviously there was the national front who were worse than the UKIP their day and they were having I saw some footage recently and there was massed marches and then massed anti-marches and huge pitched pitched battles and the punk gigs were so violent sometimes you know like I told you about the clash one I went to wire Bruce Gilbert told me about playing in Newcastle and this guy just came down all the punks were there walked through the city hall Clue Cluck's clan hoed over his head and just started beating the crap out of people and that was the sort of thing that would happen it was just a matter of course and we were all used to it and I really hope that nobody ever has to get used to that again it was really awful you were at the rainbow gig when the chairs were being thrown at the stage my ultimate experience was seeing the clash at November at the Apollo in Manchester and I was in the precipit because I was right for the sounds by then and the only other person in the precipit was a photographer called Kevin Cummins and the crowd were deconstructing the theatre by pulling all the chairs out and throwing them at the bands this was the way that they expressed their love and as well as spitting that was the other way and I was in the precipit dodging all these chairs sailing over the front of the audience and I remember I looked at Mick Jones he was up there playing he was just going what the fuck is going on, what have we done it was all mad so they triggered groups triggered something in a way that they didn't necessarily know was there and that's always fascinating what was the spitting about I mean in its essence you could say it's like a long distance kiss yes it wasn't totally aggressive was it it was pretty disgusting I would not like to be in a band then there's a wonderful I'm sure Viv might tell you about that because I don't know whether did you get gobdat? she may tell you about how awful that was I can't imagine what it must have been like it was just weird there was a side of punk that was very Dickensian and very sort of urchin like it was like the phlegm of the industrial revolution all this horrible stuff coming out and being expelled unfortunately they had the groups and there's a wonderful piece of footage at the clash that Granada took and there they all on stage being fabulous and you know and suddenly there's a big dose of flop on the camera lens and you just think oh my god you can hardly see anything from that camera and that camera shuts down I've seen footage of pulling from penetration of those early gigs being beer if it's spit I think it's one of the first gigs they did and it's right in the face and you just think I wonder if a punk band would actually be offended if they weren't spat on after a while because it meant they weren't a real punk band I think they'd have been happy not to be in Kate I think having flop on the strings doesn't really help you hit the notes and also on your clothes would anybody here like to be gobbled on? no? no? thanks yeah, one there how much of a threat to the establishment was it really seen as punk? well I think that of course one always tends to over dramatize this being young and full of energy and full of wish to change things which I think is a wonderful thing that should be encouraged in youth because youth are the future and if they don't have positive ideas about the future then we're not going to have a future and again this is one of the very serious things about this country at the minute in that youth are completely undervalued and disregarded most notably in regard to the leave vote which is a kind of mass sort of generational betrayal as far as I'm concerned by the way, my badge, I voted Remain okay? and so but I think it's easy to over estimate it on the other hand I go back to what I said about the Sex Pistols why did everybody try and stop this record? and a lot of punk records were banned for instance another one that's banned was again one of my favourites was Buzzcox Orgasm addict because it's one of the funniest and the truest songs about sex ever written now to be funny about sex is absolutely incredible and particularly in a song that only lasts two minutes but it was banned it was able to be printed but radio wouldn't play it it was actually kept off the airways and quite a few punk songs were from the boundaries of taste and I think there was a sense in which I always think that punk told a number of truths about this country particularly you know the punk we're talking about London punk in particular and British punk told a number of truths about this country that people did not want to hear and again I think that was very brave I have enormous respect for the musicians who went up and played and stood up for what they believed in in the face of quite a lot of hostility in the early days what do you think some of the biggest misconceptions about punk are because the story is told a particular way yes well we all go around the houses on this don't we I think that a lot of pop history now is seen in terms of personal experience and generational nostalgia which I as a historian I find incredibly tedious and tried so I'm not interested really in whether somebody went to see the clash with his mates from school and they missed the last bus to know dear and I'm always interested when I watch programs about pop culture and culture in general in a bit of analysis bit of abstract thought bit of research, bit of intelligence and I thought that early punk was fantastically intelligent that seems to be a misconception another misconception which I always get because I was brought up middle class moving to upper middle class is that I'm posh and don't have any right to talk about punk well and if you want to get I'm not going to go too much into detail but if you want to be really authentic about punk I'm a gay man look at the historical definition of punk look it up I'm authentic okay we were thinking at the beginning about the situation in the country now kind of feeling that has been present here in the last two or three weeks I was wondering whether you feel that something like punk could happen again I would certainly like to see and in any way I can help people protesting against what's happened I certainly do not regard there is a mandate for the huge changes that are going to occur I personally feel that the vote was partially stolen by intimidation and very serious and admitted lies and this actually is a very serious moment in the life of our country I feel very very strongly about it I can't sleep to me this is the biggest crisis we've had for a long long time I think that will inevitably mean protests and I hope that it does because right at the minute it doesn't because though the government is going to listen and so I think people have got to stand up for themselves and I would hope also that some culture would come out of that this is probably the first time that people under probably about your age have ever faced something like this and this is going to be a big change for people of your age and it's your age who in a way are going to be as much out on the streets as anybody else and as much wanting to create a culture of descent which to me is incredibly unnecessary I do see parallels now I wouldn't have seen it earlier on in the year between now and 1976-77 and what worries me what terrifies me is that we're going to go back to the instability of those years and the violence of those years and the general sense of England being very very mean I wonder about you you were talking about the younger generation that have been left voiceless by Brexit and I wonder if there could be a cultural movement in the same way for instance would it be located in music for example or art could that happen now in the same way? I think in a way that's something I like to talk to the audience about I just regard my job now I'm 62 as I'm working in any way I think in a way that's what I'd like to hear from the audience and any younger people here and maybe what do you think Cade? Well I sort of suspect that possibly because our attachment to music is different we don't rush out and buy records that we've read a review of and travel back on the bus with them and listen to them intensively overnight in quite the same way that we did 40 years ago and I wonder whether that is still really the outlet for that kind of I mean I was interested in the way the internet has affected it as well the fact that Facebook now is the forum for people getting angry and it sort of disintegrates people fire their thing and it just goes into a thread and even the March for Europe that was set on the Tuesday of that week was cancelled because it was too large and it was downgraded to a smaller one a few days later so it's been an interesting time to see these kind of anger being sort of dissipated On the other hand, I mean I don't know I'm always hopeful and part of me thinks that rock music is so bad now that it's actually up for grabs I watched Tea in the Park the other night on telly and I saw the red hot chili papers please somebody they're probably the worst group I've ever seen in my life they run a close second maybe to Mum for them sons to and I just and the only people I saw doing it because I don't go to festivals but I do watch them on telly like anybody else I have to say I saw New Order and they were fantastic and they really lifted my spirits it was a day after the vote and he was a group that had begun in Manchester had taken from European music and American music and combined them all and black American music and they were an international act and they showed an EU flag at the end and I think personally I think in my darker moments about all this which are quite frequent I see a lot of this vote and a lot of what's happening politically as a determined attempt to roll back all the freedoms and the rights that people have worked for and lived with happily for the last 40 years and so to stop that happening people really do need to do something about it I guess I wanted to ask you as well do you still feel punk? Yeah The only records I've been able to play it's really sad isn't it since Brexit have been MC5 back in the USA Skip Spence or because it's so sad and I got a copy of the first Ramones album and they've done a mono mix and it's super crunchy and super fantastic and I go upstairs and I write all these angry emails and do all my work and I just have I don't want to go down to the basement on repeat and it's really it's really sad So you feel that anger is the key part of keeping your punkness Well no, turn it round I think it's mirroring my anger at what's happened and I don't like being angry it's not good for me music I can really hear and a bit of dub reggae when I need to call that and I'm just playing my old favourites to be honest and I'm certainly not playing music or Mumford Honestly, how far has it gone down really seriously What do you think almost in terms of a recommendation for us? What are some of the great lost punk records? Oh that's interesting I love a group from Akron called The Bizarros and they did a wonderful LP just called The Bizarros in a single called Going Underground I love Kleenex who are a Swiss all-female punk group as it is here and I do and Tessara here I'm going to say I love the John Peele version of FM by The Slits which I just think is incredible What are the obscure punk It's not obscure but I love it The First Saints album which is a wonderful record and obviously the Subway Sect records from the period and when I'm feeling really frivolous I really like Saplanne pour moi by Plastic Bertie which was turned into this really weird gay record by Elton Motello called Jet Boy, Jet Girl That's a good one Occasionally I keep on hearing things my friends send me stuff Do you still find yourself discovering new records that you didn't hear at the time? Not many, I used to write for sounds and I used to get so many records sent to me every week and I take most of them down to Honest John's and get 13th floor elevator albums I don't know how long we've got but I was wondering whether we How are we doing John? Five Five minutes, so we're going to do a bit later on with Viv I was going to say we could do it now Let's do it later on with Bertie I'm just going to think if I have anything else burning that I want to ask you I'll try to think of any A record that I didn't really know at the time I tend to like the more fun punk stuff Recently I found The Boys Album and I really really enjoyed it and I read Andrew Manson's book I'm Sick of You which is so helpless I really enjoyed that too What was the other record I found? I can't remember It's still very occasional but it's more I don't find that many old records now that I'm still interested in new records but new records I like are electronic, I like electronic music and I've just done a very interesting interview with a young woman in her 20s who was telling me all about Grime and that was really interesting When we were speaking before you said something which really resonated with me about the idea that you started going to these gigs and you found yourself talking to complete strangers more openly than to the people that you knew at home among your friends Tell me a bit about that Because I'm at the upper age range because I was turning 23 in 1976 I was younger than Joe Strummer Okay? The punk generation was basically probably I would say 52 to 59 that was about the age range so I was right at the upper limit and I lost almost all my friends because I was involved in this bizarre thing and they didn't get it they were still listening to The Grateful Dead and triple live albums and they were listening to Little Feet and you remember Little Feet and I remember for instance I went to see The Damned in December 76 there were 10 people there and one of the people there was a young man called Shane and he had this fancy which he had just made up called Bondage and it was covered with safety pins and razor blades and he said oh my god this is the thing what am I going to do with it and I said I'll put a copy at work and so I did and I was working in a lawyer's office and I dodged all the lawyers with this thing for Strummer safety pins and got cuts all over me and that was Shane McGahn's fancy in Bondage and I printed about 20 copies of it and that was the sort of thing that would happen so chance encounters and then out of those encounters there would be some bit of culture Do you feel like the teenagers like the sort of younger kids would it be true to say that they'd sort of grown up with this knowledge that the 60s had this massive cultural moment and that they'd sort of missed it in any kind of way and they didn't have their own Yes, yes, yes, yes very much so and I think you know the disappointment really and even you know you didn't have you weren't even able to go to the roundhouse and see a hippie band anymore and that was entertaining well enough Hawkewind wasn't much of Hawkewind anymore 76 so even the alternative had gone so it was very barren But the beauty of it I suppose is that you could get so much closer to these new bands that were emerging you know you see the old clubs and you're actually on the same level as them a lot of the time and you're physically close Well that's what gobbing was all about intimate contacts through bodily fluids couldn't do it, couldn't have done it a few a few years later not with HIV that would have been well dodgy so it was very much a moment in time That is one way in which the younger generation now they do have that sort of close connection to groups physically in small venues and stuff there isn't that sort of sense of the bloated rock music perhaps that you had in the inherited from the 60s Yes the big thing was I think the Rolling Stones at Earl's Court that was a big one being awful and of course the Rolling Stones by 1976 and I'd grown up the Rolling Stones I loved them in the 60s but then Andrew Lou Golden left and Brian Jones died and they became mannered and irritating sorry fans of exile on Main Street it was the heroin years wasn't it and cocaine years I don't know I just think that it's so strange to be still talking about it like this 40 years later but I'm very glad that we are I want to re-emphasize the bravery I have enormous respect for everyone who got up on stage in that period even terrible bands even the Strangler I'm being really generous because they had guts and that's something that and most of the people involved were actually trying to do something we're trying to shape the culture we're trying to change the world and I think that's a wonderful thing and I do think it needs to happen now more than ever thank you very much