PUNK AT 50 – HOW IT CHANGED EVERYTHING screams the strap line on the cover of last issue of Mojo, with Johnny Rotten, eyes ablaze, on its cover. Well did it?
In 1976, the year the Pistols began to make waves, over 100,000 fans turned up to watch the Stones at Knebworth. Bowie played six nights at Wembley Empire Pool, Paul McCartney’s Wings three. In 1977, Pink Floyd played five nights at the same venue. Heavens only knows how many fans turned up at Knebworth in 1979 to watch Led Zep, well over 200,00 anyway. And that same year The Who played Wembley Stadium, around 80,000 I guess. A glance at the best-selling LPs for those years – step forward Abba, Rod Stewart, Floyd, Zep, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, Bee Gees, etc – reveals a remarkable dearth of punk acts. And let’s not even bother with the situation in America.
All of which leads me to conclude that the ‘punk revolution’ was created largely by staff writers from the hawkish weekly music press baying for the blood of the dinosaurs and not by the overwhelming majority of fans. To a degree, this is reflected on pages 26 and 27 of this same issue of Mojo where an in-house ad features 24 covers, only one of which – the current Sex Pistols issue – can be said to feature a ‘punk’ act, unless you count Paul Weller who wouldn’t be seen dead in a torn tee-shirt. 14 of those covers feature acts that predate punk, most of whom released their first records in the 1960s.
This would seem to confirm the view that, try as they might, the idea that the punks slaughtered the dinosaurs is a myth.
This is not to say that punk didn’t blow away a few cobwebs that needed blowing away, or that several acts carried along in the same momentum didn’t produce some great records. But let’s not get carried away. Punk didn’t change everything. Nothing much changed in the long term. It just created a new(ish) rock genre.
Great Miles Davis CD, by the way.
Regards
Chris Charlesworth
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