Post-Punk 1978-1981 Punk Britannia

This programme contains some strong language

-January 14th, 1978. The last Sex Pistols gig.

-No fun. This is no fun.

Beset by internal problems, the Sex Pistols broke up.

For many, the end of punk.

The universe they created around this mythological Johnny Rotten creature,

is an impossibility.

No-one can be that...

obtusely, permanently, insanely wonderful, could they?

'Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Good night.'

As Britain teetered on the brink of seismic political upheaval,

the spotlight would shift to a new cast of punk-inspired idealists.

I suppose the punks were like the early revolutionaries in Russia,

they did the job of breaking everything down,

and then in came the next lot, and kind of, expanded it, really, musically.

What happened after punk was very much a result of what punk did.

And it didn't sound like punk rock.

Anything was possible,

so long as you didn't have a great desire to become rich and famous.

It's like after the Cold War, it's like the beatnik scene in San Francisco -

you suddenly felt you could do anything you wanted to do.

They would take up the challenge left by the Pistols,

and re-imagine Britain and its rock 'n' roll post-punk.

If the Sex Pistols had been punk's avant-garde,

in their wake emerged a second wave

who took the spirit of punk and made it base.

By 1978, punk was becoming a parody of yobbish manners

and three-chord thrash.

It had got quite ugly and tawdry and dark and desperate.

How many fucking tunes can go...

You know what I mean? How many times, yeah?

I mean, the truth is that a lot of hardcore punks

actually ended up begging outside Tube stations

with a dog on a piece of string. You know, it was such a nihilistic,

self-destructive thing in a lot of ways.

I mean, Sid Vicious, kind of, committed suicide

and took his girlfriend with him for our entertainment, you know?

And it was, kind of, getting very, very negative and self-destructive.

Punk may have painted itself into a corner,

but its spirit would inspire a new generation

of underground musicians across the country.

These post-punks would throw the musical rulebook out of the window,

hell-bent on questioning the nature of society,

capitalism and rock 'n' roll itself.

The post-punk era would be kicked off

by one of punk's founding fathers.

After leaving The Buzzcocks,

Howard Devoto would look to the future and start again.

I stuck up a sign in the Virgin record shop in Manchester

looking for other band members.

It certainly said something about playing fast and slow music,

because, of course, punk had been a very disciplined thing

where people kind of only did music in one general direction.

There was an advert up saying Howard Devoto is looking for musicians

and I remember at the time thinking,

"Wow, maybe I should apply for that."

Formed in the white heat of punk in '77,

Manchester-based Magazine set out to deconstruct the rules of punk rock.

Magazine was more developed,

more clever musically than most of punk.

The songs were tightly arranged. They were well edited.

That was something from punk.

# Time flies

# Time pours

# Like an insect

# Up and down the walls

# The light pours out of me. #

We were offered Top Of The Pops

and I turned it down.

And that was the first time I saw Virgin Records,

our record company, go, "Argh!"

One of the year's most talked-about new bands is this one -

they're called Magazine and here's their debut single, Shot By Both Sides.

Despite Devoto's misgivings,

Magazine became the first post-punk band on Top Of The Pops.

Punk finished, really, with the Pistols when they split up in January 1978,

and a week or two later, Shot By Both Sides came out.

# This and that They must be the same

# What is legal Is just what's real

# What I'm given to understand

# Is exactly what I steal. #

I'm afraid Top Of The Pops was a little bit of an anathema, you know?

# I was shocked to find What was allowed

# I didn't lose myself In the crowd. #

You know, most people mimed - it was fakery,

and I had my problems with things like that.

# Shot by both sides. #

Magazine were first to market,

but their commercial success caught them off guard.

Well, you know, the record was popular,

so, I guess there's a thing that happens where it charts,

and you go on Top Of The Pops, and given your performance, it goes up the charts.

I think our record was the first for a long time that actually went down.

I never really thought about commercial success.

# They'll have to rewrite All the books again

# As a matter of course

# I wormed my way Into the heart of the crowd. #

And yet there was some unformed ambition.

Well, we weren't really about entertainment.

We were about this thing of expression

and getting out our stuff,

and that's what everybody seemed to be doing within this unit

and under this umbrella.

Post-punk was characterised by refuseniks and malcontents

who shunned the bright lights of the big time.

One of its most fitting bastions was Manchester,

a city traditionally suspicious of metropolitan glamour.

# Entrances uncovered

# The street signs you never saw... #

It was nice, actually.

I used to like Manchester, cos you couldn't see a thing.

I mean, it was like...

With the smog and everything, you couldn't see anything.

# Street signs you never saw

# All entrances delivered... #

It was like gangster films about New York, you know. You see...

Film noir, sort of thing, you know?

# Entrances uncovered... #

People would literally come out of the fog at you.

So it was all very mysterious.

# You got Manny in the library

# Working off his hangover 3.30 Get the spleen... #

Once they got all the pollution laws passed,

you saw Manchester, it was like, "What a horrible place!"

Manchester saw a flowering of truculent bands.

But not a scene.

The subconscious effect that Manchester had on you

and your personality, your thoughts, your actions,

it came through in the music. It was a pretty grim place.

And you felt - I don't know - dark, I suppose.

Joy Division had originally formed as a punk bank in 1976,

after witnessing the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall.

Once I saw Johnny Rotten, I realised that the only thing

I wanted to do in the world was tell everyone to fuck off.

It was literally the next day I went out and bought a bass guitar,

Bernard had a guitar and we started our punk band.

As our playing capabilities got better,

we started writing better and better songs

and that happened quite quickly.

# To the centre of the city

# Where our roads meet Waiting for you. #

Literally within the space of six months,

we'd turned from Warsaw, a dodgy punk band, to Joy Division.

# Booming through the silence Without motion waiting for you

# In a room with no window In the corner, I found truth. #

In a time of three-chord thrash,

Joy Division interpreted punk's DIY ethos

as permission to be different

Determined only to be truthful, they combined a brooding sound

with the existential lyrics of Ian Curtis.

Joy Division.

They took the anger of punk, the rage of punk,

but that was all externalised stuff.

What was interesting about Joy Division

was the rage was internalised.

# In the shadow play Acting out your own

# But knowing no more

# As the assassins All grouped in four lines

# Dancing on the floor

# And with cold steel Odour on their bodies. #

In 1978, post-punk was no communal scene of kindred spirits.

Rather the opposite.

Then you kind of had a slight frostiness with everybody.

You know, I can remember - empty landscape,

bump into somebody from another band,

"Are you all right?" "Yeah. Are you all right?" "Yeah." That was it.

Bands are very competitive,

and there's always a great rivalry,

and there was always a great rivalry between us and The Fall.

I've never paid much attention to our competition

or anything like that, other groups.

I'm a big Fall fan, believe it or not. HE LAUGHS

Like Joy Division, Mark E Smith had witnessed the Sex Pistols

at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976,

and set out on his own path with The Fall.

-# Totally wired

-Totally wired

# Totally biased... #

The Pistols, when they started out,

I think they were quite garage, really.

But in the space of a couple of singles,

it went almost heavy metal, didn't it?

# When the going gets weird

# The weird turn pro

# So I'm totally wired

# T-t-t-totally wired

-# I'm totally wired

-Can't you see?

# T-t-t-totally wired now. #

Taking the band's name from a novel by Camus,

there was no mistaking Mark E Smith's existential street poetry

for the initial agitprop of punk.

The more you didn't dress like them, the more you got spat at.

# My heart and I agree... #

We would get attacked for having long hair and all sorts.

You got attacked for having long hair?

Yeah, cos, you know, if they saw you and you forgot to cut your hair,

you know what I mean... Used to come off stage all green.

Back in metropolitan London,

the big question on every interviewer's lips in 1978 was,

what was Johnny going to do next?

The Pistols broke up in a really unclarified and corrupting way,

due to mismanagement, really, more than anything.

and it left me completely frustrated

and I wanted to do something, cos I wanted to continue with music,

so I, kind of, pooled the friends I had around me, and formed PiL.

The record company, Virgin, weren't too interested in a new band.

They were really, kind of, very angry with me

for daring to suggest complete unknowns to them,

but I had to remind them that, you know,

up until two years before that, I was a complete unknown.

John was up to do something radical.

I was known for playing a little bit of bass,

I'm not quite sure how people knew, that, but I love bass -

I was synonymous with playing bass, I was at one with playing bass.

There's only other thing, which was clay pigeon shooting,

which I took up once and was very, very good at from the word go,

and got afraid because it might displace playing bass.

I love cacophony, I mean, I loved the Captain Beefheart approach to music.

You know, fill a room full of amateurs and let's see what happens.

Fantastic.

Who could have known that there would be no more Sex Pistols?

Next thing I knew, John's saying, "Let's do it,"

and I knew Wobble, and they said, "We want to use Wobble,"

and I said, "Great," and it was on.

Released on October 13th, 1978,

Public Image marked the moment Johnny Rotten stepped out of costume

to reveal John, the visionary.

# You never listened To a word that I said

# You only see me For the clothes that I wear

# Or did the interest Go so much deeper

# It must have been The colour of my hair

# The public image. #

You know, everybody was waiting for Rotten's new record, after leaving the Pistols,

what was it going to be like? When he came back with the single Public Image Ltd,

it was just like...

# What you wanted Was never made clear

# Behind the image Was ignorance and fear. #

Levene's...smacked-out, Byrds, arpeggio guitar...

# Public image... #

But more than that, right, it was rock music,

but it wasn't rock music like the Pistols or The Clash,

it wasn't traditional like that, it was like a departure.

It was like a way into the future.

# I'm not the same as when I began

# I will not be Treated as property

# Public image. #

Public Image Ltd, very warm welcome to Check It Out.

Where did you get the name Public Image Ltd from?

Most people who would interview me had a negative attitude towards me

and so it was... Again, it was another battle I had to take on

in order to get my point across.

I don't have to explain myself to anybody, and I ain't going to bother.

Now, I was asked here, right, to interview with the band here, PiL,

but now we're facing a cheapskate, comedy interrogation act

and it just ain't on, pal.

It was relentlessly tedious to be presumed to be

a thick, ignorant oik, over and over again.

Well, it sounds like we've heard this story before.

-Really, would you like to tell me where? Good night.

-Good night.

They didn't want an explanation of the songs.

They didn't want to know that this was an ongoing force

and something to be reckoned with and all coming from a really nice person!

-Cop out.

-Cop out.

-BEEP.

Well, I'm pleased I didn't pick the short straw for THAT interview.

If post-punk was characterised by darkness and paranoia,

Britain in '78 was the perfect backdrop.

As the fag-end of Callaghan's socialist Government played out,

the trade unions went into overdrive,

creating a "Winter of Discontent".

Well, I think capitalism was collapsing rather than fading,

and then was going to be shored up when Thatcher got in.

You know, the climate at the time was pretty desperate.

People were on three-day weeks, no rubbish collections.

# How many dead or alive? #

England was a very, very miserable, burnt-out oil rig, basically.

# How many dead or alive? #

There was an American photographer came over,

and we did a promo shoot with him in Leicester Square,

when Leicester Square was, I don't know, eight bin bags deep.

It was just like walls of bin bags,

it was like a rainy, grey day in London,

with starling shit all over these black bin bags.

I think it stinks, like all the other damn strikes in this country,

run by the filthy, socialist, communist unions.

It is not an exaggeration to say

the country was on the verge of civil war.

In fact, the most paranoid voices at that time

believed that the Government was planning to bring in martial law.

There was a certainly a cabal within the army and the establishment to do that.

I think there was an armed wing of the Tory Party

that were trying to organise a coup at the time of the Labour Government.

There's a book called A Very British Coup, and there's a film about it.

As Lady Di said, there's dark forces at heart in British politics.

One of my favourite films from that era

is called Radio On, by Chris Petit.

It's filmed in black and white. It could be, like, the '50s almost.

Everything seemed very grey and very pessimistic.

What was great about that film, of course,

was the soundtrack was Radioactivity by Kraftwerk

which really threw the whole thing

into a completely different, weird spin.

One of the key ingredients of post-punk

would be the fearless assimilation of a kaleidoscope of musical styles.

Punk had championed DIY,

and post-punk made it the sound of the future.

# Radioactivity... #

Well, I think punks hated synthesisers generally,

from a, kind of, ideological point of view,

because if you looked at the uses of synthesisers in those days,

it was in prog rock bands to play very fast, pseudo-classical riffs.

You know, to me, the synthesiser felt like a punk instrument,

because it was much easier to play than a guitar,

and you just had to twiddle a few knobs, play one note.

You get a half-decent sound and a half-decent idea and you had a song.

Now, if you listen to people like Human League,

or anybody who were completely disillusioned

with the music of the time, felt the synthesiser

was a logical place to go next.

The Human League were so far removed in look and sound,

that even the king of punk himself

had trouble spotting kindred spirits.

# Faced with the choice

# What would you say

# The path of least resistance

# It seems the only way. #

When Being Boiled came out, John Lydon was doing the reviews at NME,

which at that time was like the emperor going...yeah?

And he's gone into all these reviews and said, "Oh, it's bloody rubbish,"

and it comes round to Being Boiled, and he just said, "Bloody hippies."

Two words. I'm going, "Are you sure, John?"

Because essentially, this is the difference

between the London scene, as it is a was at the time,

to them, they were still in this thing like,

"If I have a quiff, I'm cool."

After that...

..initial classic British punk rock phase

things went all over the place, and things weren't homogeneous -

very far from it.

In 1979, the future of music was up for grabs

amongst the factions of post-punk.

# Ah

# A-a-a-ow

# Ah

# A-a-a-ow

The term "post-punk" is, I always thought, quite interesting,

and it is literally true that what we did was after punk.

# In my arms

# We shall begin

# With none of the rocks There's no charge. #

I think there was something else going on, in a sense,

that people were trying out, I suppose, proto-mash-ups.

We thought we were a mixture of a funk band and a rock band,

somehow or other.

Post-punk will do, won't it?

I think I prefer it to punk funk.

I think there was that sense that anything was possible,

so long as you didn't have a great desire to become rich and famous.

The dilemma between integrity and entertainment

was caught perfectly in 1979,

when Gang Of Four were offered a spot on Top Of The Pops

to perform their expose of consumerism, At Home He's A Tourist.

We were doing rehearsals for the show,

and they picked up on the word "rubbers", cos it's in the song -

it's "the rubbers you hide in your top-left pocket".

They said, "You can't use the word 'rubbers'," and we said, "Why not?"

And they said, "Because this is a family show

"and we don't want that disgusting word used on our family show."

# And the rubbers you hide

# In your top-left pocket. #

We had a long chat about this, whether censorship

was something that we were prepared to embrace.

So we changed the word "rubbers" to "packets".

"The packets you hide in your top-left pocket". And the producer said,

"You've changed the word to packets," and we said, "Yes."

He said, "Yes, but it's still got the same meaning, hasn't it?

"So what we'd like you to do, we'd like you to re-record it

"with the word "rubbish" instead."

I told him in quite short, pithy words,

that I didn't think that was a very good idea, and we walked off the show.

We gained nothing by standing our ground.

Except to prove that we could be really bloody minded.

# We are the sultans

# We are the sultans of swing. #

To my eternal shame, Dire Straits, whose single, Sultans Of Swing,

had been in the same place in the charts for two weeks running

and was likely to go out of the charts, were invited in at the last minute,

having already re-recorded their track, to come on Top Of The Pops,

and that's why their single went up the charts and became a hit.

'The much-criticised Radio 1 playlist committee.'

-John Cooper Clarke.

-That's weird.

-It is a weirdy.

Cooper Clarke?

John Cooper Clarke.

It came out and then they took it back for remixing.

Boring.

Boring. It doesn't mean much.

Same tempo as the last one. Exactly the same tempo.

The conceptual nature of post-punk

is no easy shoe-in for radio playlists.

Two minutes 30, fades, yes!

British radio was really not open to what we were doing.

We were not considered a radio-friendly band.

# I remark. #

We had definitely arrived by 1979 as far as the press was concerned,

but we had no radio. There was very little radio play, outside of John Peel.

# Like a heartbeat

# Like a heartbeat

# Like a heartbeat

# Like a heartbeat

# Like a heartbeat. #

Off air, there was one medium,

which lent itself perfectly to the new music.

I mean, that was the time when a lot of people bought the NME,

and a lot of people bought it because there were really interesting conversations going on.

I mean, you had NME and Sounds, and, latterly, the Melody Maker,

that were very big supporters of us. I mean, we got...

There was another one, as well, wasn't there? Record Mirror?

Record Mirror. They didn't love us so much.

There was a fascinating - or what seemed to us fascinating -

debate going on about what it was all about.

To categorise post-punk as being purely outside the mainstream

was not the full picture.

There were musicians who launched stellar careers

on a new wave of punk-inspired pop.

# I don't want to... #

You know, there's The Fall, and there's New Wave.

# ..go to Chelsea. #

I think it was very appropriate, actually.

Elvis Costello and all that crap.

New Wave, no, no. You daft h'apporths.

It's really getting it wrong.

It was an instant record company movement to try and turn punk

into just a fad and here's the new fad.

# Message in a bottle... #

People like Sting were all part of that. They definitely were.

# Message in a bottle... #

He's very far removed from the Buddhist he pretends to be,

when there's a dollar in it.

This is Public Image Ltd, and Death Disco.

While the Police were happy to court fame, Johnny still didn't care.

On July 12th, 1979, PiL appeared live on Top Of The Pops

performing a fusion of dub, disco and Tchaikovsky,

with lyrics about the recent death of Lydon's mother.

# Words can never can say the way

# You told me in your eyes. #

Death Disco was on Top Of The Pops,

that is subversive

because it was being beamed into millions of people's living rooms.

# Never no more hope away

# Final in a fade. #

It's actually not subversive,

because I see the shit-stem as being morally bankrupt,

and anyway around, out or through is actually to the benefit of mankind,

so...it's inverted subversiveness.

Is there such a concept? There probably is.

# Never really know

# 'Til it's gone away... #

I mean, who wouldn't go on Top Of The Pops, yeah?

I mean, there's no point saying, "I'm not going on Top Of The Pops,

"cos we're so punk and different."

It wasn't like that, it was like, "Wow, this is great."

All I cared about when we did Death Disco on Top Of The Pops,

was getting to the make-up department and getting my teeth blacked out.

Death Disco featured on Second Edition, "the" post-punk album.

It was presented in a metal box,

like a time capsule for a bygone era.

To me, that record sounds...

It's pure art because it sounds like Britain

felt like to live in back in 1979.

It's dank record.

It's dark, it's damp

and it's slightly depressed.

# Drive to the forest in a Japanese car

# The smell of rubber on country tar... #

It just feels like Britain, you know.

It's kind of like a greyness and a kind of...

Not rain but after the rain.

# ..the cassette played

# Poptones... #

I paint pictures with words and sounds.

And I want those pictures to be as accurate as possible

and to tell a complete true story,

and it's all part of the progression of earth, life, death, all of it.

# You left a hole in the back of my head

# I don't like hiding in this foliage and peat

# It's wet and I'm losing my body heat

# The cassette played

# Poptones. #

The Metal Box record was, I think,

one of the albums that changed things for a lot of people.

You know, rather than the restricted sort of chord thrash,

there was, like, soundscapes, and Wobble doing this other thing altogether,

which no-one had sort of heard outside of reggae, really.

HE PLAYS THE BASS RIFF TO "POPTONES"

MUSIC: "Poptones" by PiL

Poptones musically and lyrically deconstructed all notions of rock.

The tribes of post-punk were challenging the retro orthodoxy

that punk rock had become.

The interesting thing is that bands like the Pistols and The Clash

were seen as so experimental and so different,

but actually they were rock 'n' roll bands.

They acted and dressed like rock stars, really,

and had the whole pose on stage.

Whereas I think The Slits were utterly different.

We challenged all that. We made sure we even stood differently.

We didn't fall into all the sort of, I don't know,

the cliches of rock 'n' roll.

In 1979, The Slits' fusion of punk and reggae was a soundtrack for a new Britain.

MUSIC: "Newtown" by The Slits

It's talking about the new towns

appearing all over England, which were just these soulless

little mini-cities.

It's quite ominous. The bass line is quite ominous.

It's talking about people's addictions, basically, in the city.

What's that one they built? Oh, Milton Keynes, yeah.

It just somehow caught the whole ordinariness

and desolation of living in a new town.

Post-punk was a flowering of creativity and idealism

that proved rock 'n' roll didn't have to be a swindle.

There was this whole idea of somehow controlling the means of production.

Again, through questioning things, we were questioning contracts,

we were realising things were being corrupted and taken away

and polished up and made into, like, Showaddywaddy punk,

or children's TV punk, right?

So we wanted to have control over what we were doing.

Formed by Geoff Travis in 1978,

Rough Trade was an indie label with a Marxist heart

that took its cue from punk.

Rough Trade was very important

because they were so open to different styles.

If you get, like, the first five records they did, for instance,

you'll find synthesiser music,

guitar music, women, men, mixed.

You know, they were distributing reggae as well. It just felt very, very open.

If you walked into Rough Trade,

they had a catalogue of scores of artists,

doing maybe two or three records,

most of which wouldn't sell very much at all.

That was their business model. It was wonderful.

Prior to Margaret Thatcher coming to power, you know,

the whole idea of money and commerciality was not an issue.

It was kind of almost a bad thing, you know,

the idea of seeking fame, success and money, was...

You know, we weren't about that at all. In fact almost the opposite.

What Rough Trade was to London, Factory Records was to Manchester.

Fronted by colourful TV personality Tony Wilson,

Factory signed Joy Division.

They didn't care about making pots of money.

They focused on the presentation of new music.

Tony Wilson in particular, I loved his attitude.

When he did the first Durutti Column LP and he and Pete Saville

came up with the idea of putting sandpaper on the sleeve,

so that when you put it in you destroyed all your other records.

I thought that was absolute genius.

That was from the Situationist Manifesto. The Situationists

were going to bring a book out which destroyed the sleeves

of all the other books.

Tony appropriated the idea and said,

"Let's put it on this album." I thought it was great.

We got paid 50p per 100 sheets for sticking it on the LPs,

which was double-bubble. It was great.

It was somewhat diffused by people shrink wrapping it.

Just when the theory was getting interesting, reality bit.

There was a little period where there was this exciting time,

things were really happening at that point,

and then, of course, you have this, you know...

You can't really explain how ugly the Thatcher thing kind of was.

It was kind of like

the sort of really horrible, ugly, accountant types had come in,

and they were kind of going, "Fun time's over."

MUSIC: "By The Rivers Of Babylon" by Boney M

On May 4th, 1979, Margaret Thatcher took office,

A Prime Minister who the post-punks instinctively hated.

To be a punk, you had to keep on changing and questioning.

We thought we were questioning the very structure of society

and the very structure of the music you were playing,

so we ended up wandering into this nether land.

We came out with this demented, you know, God knows what!

Avant-guard jazz meets King Tubby at the roots of hell or something!

# We are prostitutes

# Everyone has their price

# We are prostitutes

# Everyone has their price. #

The ironically-named Pop Group

caught something of the rising monetary zeitgeist in October 1979, with a stinging take on consumerism.

# And you too will learn to live the lie

# And you too will learn to live the lie

# You will learn to live the lie

# Everyone has their price. #

It's not negative to think about politics and the way the world runs.

Since the 1900s, they've been trying to tell us that working people

shouldn't think about how their lives are controlled,

but it's good to feel a bit empowered.

# Ambition

# Consumer fascism... #

That's when Thatcher and all this stuff comes in.

So suddenly your brain's going, "Oh, my God.

"I'm not what they call an adult, am I?"

Of course we weren't until we were about 48!

# We are prostitutes... #

And some of us still aren't! We won't mention names.

Do you know what I mean? Punk isn't standing playing four...

Punk is experimenting, in fashion, in clothes and politics.

That's what punk is, you know?

Not some old fat fart lecturing you about punk on fucking BBC Four.

In 1979, the anger and radicalism of punk

hadn't just dissipated into the realms of musical aestheticism.

There were also now real anarchists involved.

# I am an Antichrist

# I am an anarchist

# Don't know what I want... #

Crass promoted anarchy

as a political ideology, and advocated direct action.

# I...

-# I just wanna be

-He wants to be

# Anarchy. #

We were intervening on something which we saw as just a hedonistic wank.

And although it's a slight misrepresentation

of Lydon's "no future",

we, as the people we were, absolutely would not accept there was no future.

The future is ours to make. That's what we went out to say.

The future is not ours to make by "get pissed destroy".

The future was a positive one and we were going to create a positive one.

# Fuck the politically minded Here's something I want to say

# About the state of nation The way it treats us... #

Punk, to Crass, was all about dogma rather than musical experimentation.

# Then you're a prime example of how they must not be

# This is just a sample of what they've done to you and me

# Do they owe us a living? Of course they do, of course they do

# Owe us a living? Of course they do... #

What I needed was to offer

a substantial concept of freedom,

which I think was best expressed in there is no authority but yourself,

which became our major catchphrase.

-NEWSREEL:

-Crass and what they represent are attacked politically from all sides.

The right see them simply as criminals out to destroy the existing structures of society.

The left see them as hopeless utopians, deviationists, nearer to a bunch of vandals.

As for the authorities, they don't like anarchists in general because they're unpredictable.

You can never tell how they'll react to a given political situation.

MUSIC: "Do They Owe Us A Living" by Crass

# Do they owe us a living? Course they do, course they do

# Owe us a living? Course they do, course they do

# Owe us a living? Course they fucking do. #

One of the worst confrontations I ever experienced,

and we certainly experienced plenty,

with attacks from the British Movement and all that sort of shit,

but one of the most unpleasant ones was when the vegetarians and vegans

decided to have a go at each other. That was just ludicrous.

Anarcho-punks weren't the only ones to reclaim punk.

The Oi! Movement, led by Cockney Rejects,

were the bastard offspring of Sham 69.

They wanted to take punk from the King's Road back to the East End.

They were dragging punk from the art schools

back to the reality of what the mythology of punk was.

They were the reality of punk mythology.

# Gotta break out Find something else to do

# I can't stand being stuck in here with you

# Gonna have a laugh Break into a store

# You know I'm bored I don't care any more... #

Like The Angels With Dirty Faces, they came from places you don't want to go.

That's why there was not a lot written by the middle-class media

about these new bands.

# I'm not so ignorant

# I'm not a fool

# So keep your intelligence

# I'm not a fool

# I'm not a fool... #

The music press had a built-in resistance to punk.

They hated punk in the first place, the normal punk.

They were much happier when New Wave happened.

New Wave was more intellectual, more middle-class,

people who had been to university who were Marxists,

like the Gang Of Four. They loved bands like that because they were more up their street.

The turn of the decade was beset by all sorts of dread and tension.

But by far the most terrifying was the crescendoing Cold War.

Enormous military build-ups in both Russia and Reagan's America,

underscored by the Soviet war in Afghanistan,

had led to a renewed round of political brinkmanship.

There was an office on top of the shop of Rough Trade.

I was walking around in full army gear with a helmet on,

because I thought World War III was about to break out. Honestly.

'If we are attacked by nuclear weapons,

'these are the warning sounds you must recognise.'

You may find some of this film disturbing,

but as long as we remain a likely target for attack,

we must think about the unthinkable.

UK alarm level one. Missile attack.

Would you know what to do if you heard sirens sound?

Waste of time, innit, going anywhere. You've had it, in't ya?

-You've had it, in't ya?

-Will you take any preparations at all?

What preparations? You've had it, in't ya? You've had it, in't ya?

No messing about, is it? You've had it, in't ya?

No point crying over spilt milk, is there?

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

Resourceful Brits that we were, we knew that carefully-placed cushions

would deliver us and our pets from mutually assured destruction.

Nuclear war was a huge threat, you know.

It was a great paranoia that I think a lot of people held,

even if they weren't talking about it all the time.

There was the underlying fear of this great force out there

that could be so destructive.

If post-punk was characterised by gloom,

its darkest masterpiece was Young Marble Giants' Final Day,

a 1 minute 40 minimalist painting of Armageddon,

released on Rough Trade.

# When the rich die last

# Like the rabbits running from a lucky past

# Full of shadow cunning

# And the world lights up for the final day

# We will all be poor having had our say... #

I wrote the song for the plight of humanity.

When the rich die last, like the rabbits running from a lucky past,

full of shallow cunning, I was getting my dig in there.

I quite like digging at the rich. It's just pure jealousy!

HE LAUGHS

# Put a blanket up on the window pane

# When the baby cries lullaby again

# As the night goes out on the final day

# For the people who never had a say. #

Even now when I listen to that track, it's got a very strong energy to it,

in terms of its bleakness and the fear that's in it, really, as well.

# There is so much noise There is too much heat

# And the living floor throws you off your feet

# As the final day falls into the night

# There is peace outside in the narrow light. #

Just when it seemed things couldn't get any darker,

in 1980, post-punk's poster boy took his own life.

Ian Curtis's suicide both canonised and ended Joy Division.

Atmosphere was re-released as a posthumous requiem,

replete with iconic video, which helped create a post-punk legend.

When Ian died, we just cut Joy Division off, cut it adrift.

The group literally was professional for about nine months.

It was such a small, short time, you know.

To look back now and think of the effect you've had,

and the effect that you're having on music now, 30-odd years later,

is ridiculous. It's a great compliment to the songwriters.

He was an incredible poet, more than anything else.

Just amazing. A one-off, a one-off.

MUSIC: "Geno" by Dexys Midnight Runners

In the new decade, there would be a noticeable change of mood.

The term "post-punk" is generally applied to a lot of bands

who couldn't really play but had been at university

and were applying either art theory or Marxist theory to music

that was kind of amateurish but maybe feeling towards something new.

-What about Dexys Midnight Runners?

-What about The Specials, The Pogues?

All bands who took traditional musical forms

and then brought it screaming and kicking right up-to-date,

by writing about life in contemporary Britain.

MUSIC: "You're Wondering Now" by The Specials

2Tone marked the moment when post-punk went positive.

Fusing black ska with the energy of punk, 2Tone was wildly popular.

It was spearheaded by The Specials' Jerry Dammers,

whose ambition was to rescue punk from the darkness.

2Tone revolutionised the pop scene. It revolutionised everything in it,

cos it had a philosophy, it had a person whose vision it was who was driving it,

and it would never have happened without Jerry Dammers. He made that happen.

2Tone was actually more popular than punk ever was.

Punk was quite an extreme thing.

It was quite a minority interest, really.

There was a lot of negative sides to it,

and it was in danger of degenerating into out-and-out fascism.

That's what we felt, with the Sham Army and everything.

That's where we came in, to try and get in there and change the way people thought.

MUSIC: "Ghost Town" by The Specials

Released in 1981, Ghost Town was post-punk's God Save The Queen moment.

Not since the Pistols' searing release of four years prior,

had such social comment caught the imagination of a nation.

We went and did a gig in Glasgow,

and there were a lot of people on the streets selling their household items, just in the street.

It was just really strange.

Little old ladies selling their tea cups.

I'd never seen that in this country before.

That's where I really got the idea for that song.

It wasn't just about Glasgow. It was about the whole country.

It was about Coventry as well.

Factories were closing down.

All the big industries were being closed down, you know, by Thatcher.

# This town is coming like a ghost town

# No jobs to be found in this country

# Can't go on no more

# People getting angry... #

Ghost Town reached number one in July 1981.

It marked a parting of the waves for post-punk.

After years of being wilfully uncommercial,

the most radical thing left for some was to reinvigorate the charts.

MUSIC: "The Sound Of The Crowd" by The Human League

# Don't put your hand in a party wave

# Make a shroud pulling combs through a backwash frame... #

You couldn't get any more avant-garde than

the early Human League.

But by 1982, they were the biggest pop band in the world.

# Stroke a pocket with a print of a laughing sound... #

Something came along in 1982, where suddenly it was cool

to be on the cover of the NME, as it always was,

but even more cool if you could somehow also be on the cover of Smash Hits.

People like Martin Fry, ABC coming along, Billy Mackenzie...

Mavericks.

# I'm standing still

# And you say I dress too well... #

Post Punk's reinvigoration of pop was the apex of this generation's story.

There still remained those for whom there was no success like failure,

and failure was no success at all.

# Have I done something wrong?

# What's wrong? The wrong that's always in wrong...#

It was an explosion and it was very short lived, maybe two or three years,

and then it branched off into these different things.

Then the whole music scene got squeaky clean with groups like Duran Duran and Wham!

Duran Duran were like Wire with nice-looking boys and cheerful tunes.

People talk about the early '80s as being this amazing...

A whole post-punk scene.

Most people didn't even know about that stuff.

What they knew about was pop. Pop suddenly supplanted everything.

The whole thing became unrecognisably glossy and kind of royal blue and shoulder pads.

What happened next? The New Romantics.

It was, like, "Oh!" Tragic, really, you know?

We're the eternal underground. We're the eternal influence.

We're the grumpy granddads who were there before you've been anywhere.

No way. No, no. I'm not having that in.

Perhaps the song that best summed up the post-punk era

was Rip It Up And Start Again.

Edwyn Collins had borne witness to The Clash's White Riot tour in '77,

before forming his own band, Orange Juice.

# Rip it up and start again

# I hope to God you're not as dumb as you make out

# I hope to God... #

I wanted to try something different, something new,

jangly guitars.

# I hope to God.. #

Spencer Davis Group, Stevie Winwood and all that shit.

Raw but interesting. It's a time for a change.

# You know the sea is very... #

The song contained a canny reference to punk originals The Buzzcocks.

Stories of London.

Public Image Ltd 2012.

John Lydon is back with the first new PiL album in 20 years.

From The Sex Pistols to PiL,

Johnny Rotten to John Lydon,

King Johnny remains the ever-contrarian spirit of punk.

MUSIC: "Reggie Song" by PiL

# You see a Reginald

# He is a reasonable man

# And being comfortable

# With a bit of a better plan

# He don't see... #

Over the years there's been some 49 different members of PiL.

It's almost like a working-class university.

I suppose the one thing you learn in PiL the most

is the punk ethos is do it yourself because nobody will do it for you.

# I've been dreaming... #

Don't sit back and try to learn the set formats.

# I'm still living... #

If you do that you become institutionalised

and you become as tedious as everything else in the top 30.

# Back in the garden

# I'm still living... #

I love being on top of the ocean and I love being underneath it too.

I love that.

The colours down there, the life that goes on, it's fantastic.

It's both sides of the picture, the yin and the yang.

# We're all still living

# Back in the garden

# I'll be there. #

Welcome to our world.