Why are you still banging on about punk rock?” someone asked me recently. “That stuff’s been dead for over forty years, hasn’t it?”
Dead? Really? Well, maybe dead in the sense that a vampire is dead, i.e., it’s a creature of the night and shuns the sunshine.
But – leaving aside the fact that The Damned are still alive and performing – the strain of rebellion that characterized much of the movement is still with us. It has simply evolved, in much the same way that punk itself had its roots in garage rock (and the availability of cheap guitars!). One only has to watch the news to see that the spirit of anarchy and struggle against the System continues.
So maybe it’s time to re-visit those days of stripped-down, anti-establishment music. Though, for some of us, we’re not really paying a visit to the past: a part of us never left it to begin with.
