A People's History of Punk: radio review

 

It’s 2026. And apparently it’s the “50th anniversary of punk”. There’s going to be a lot of Media Stuff about it this year.

I’ve got a few problems with this.

1. The timing is London-centric. For most of us in the rest of the country, our year zero was 1977.

2. Punk wasn’t supposed to last 50 years.

I might come back to that another time. But for now, here’s the beginning of the Media Stuff: a Radio 4 series fronted by Chris Packham.

The BBC hasn’t got good form on punk, as I’ve noted in the past. The Radio 4 programme The Reunion didn’t ask the right questions.  And Punk Britannia was directed by people too young to know. 

But Packham Was There, as you can read in his memoir Fingers In The Sparkle Jar. And he’s still a believer.

The series (three episodes of half an hour each: I wish they’d been longer) was called A People's History of Punk, and that’s important. Because it wasn’t history being told by someone removed from the story. It was people who Were There. And the bits in between were Packham talking, and he knows what he’s talking about.

I identified with his story about how punk gave an identity to kids who felt like misfits. Like him I was a teenager with undiagnosed autism and a lot of anger. And that led, as he described it, to creativity and idealism and DOING things.

The first episode told of the excitement of the early punk gigs. Packham added: “That amount of energy, that amount of defiance, that amount of determination would have been palpable enough to realise that this was never going to die. It was about that attitude, and you can’t kill an attitude.”

I like to think that I still have that attitude. And so did the other people on the programme.

Some of them were women, which I was pleased about. The series ended with the present-day Riotous Collective from Leicester, punk bands formed by older women. That circled round very satisfyingly, because the story starts with a bunch of young blokes making a racket and ends with a bunch of older women doing the same.

Each interviewee was introduced by how old they are now, and what they ended up doing, both of which are significant. Some of them have had interesting careers that they might not have done otherwise, because punk opened our eyes to possibilities and choice. All of them were old enough to have been around in the first wave of punk, before it fossilised. And that “life changing influence” (Packham again) has stayed with them.

There are people who are “still punk” because of the way they look and people who are still punk because of the way they think.

They’ve all got interesting things to say, but what stood out for me were these words from Phil King, which sums up where we are now. Everyone’s got their own view of what punk is, and most of them are based on a caricature, and it’s been like that since the day Bill Grundy tried to interview the Sex Pistols. This series showed there was so much more.

“When punk dropped it was like a cube of granite. You didn’t know what it was. Then the media and capitalism started to chip away at it. In the end all that was left was a bloke with a Mohican. and a leather jacket.”

“At the start nobody knew what it was, everybody had a different view, everybody interpreted it differently and that was what made it great.”