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fans like the damned the vibrators and clash who've been playing for about six months what is there in their apparently negative and destructive lyrics for fans to identify with i went along to the rehearsal rooms in camden to ask clowns why do you think punk rock started in the first place well because it's like it's got nothing to do with them anymore when like what stuart gets up there and starts like going on with his string orchestra you know i mean it's not what you feel like so you got to have some music what

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you feel like otherwise you go barmy don't you i think their attitudes really stink now anyways it's just like there just has to be new groups and then that's what you got the sex pistols say they hate hippies everything they stand for and the hippies what went wrong with music what do you think about that yes right i think that's where the complexities came in you know and people thought oh we better buy our moog synthesizer or we'll get caught out you know maybe if there's anything around if you

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like you know jump into action immediately because you know i suppose you ain't here for i've had too much dope yeah going on the floor and looking at the ceiling but it's another generation shield yeah one that went wrong what sort of thing do you write about what's going on at the moment like what like what um career opportunities what right yeah tell me about white right what's it about you're not in your gate like you know that right they had well we was down there me and him and uh we got searched by policemen

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looking for bricks like and then uh later on we got searched by rasta looking for pound notes in my pocket so no red it was books and bottles but still but one of the lines in it is everybody does what they're told to yeah it's true i mean do you think what's happened to a lot of young people is that they've been pushed around a lot yeah the school i went to right i mean it's sort of like all the kids are supposed to sort of like be factory project you know that sort of stuff and like the school's sort of built it's a real

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depressing school in there and you go there you don't learn nothing all you sort of like working for is just going to the factory which is around the corner or something like that and uh well most of the mates i know all working in the factory i know a lot of your fans are the doll i mean do they feel the same way yeah they wouldn't come to my gig today if they weren't on the doll would they be your fans well i mean if there was jobs and they wouldn't be on the dole and maybe we'd be singing about

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love and kissing or so the new groups claim they're singing about the situations that they and their fans find themselves in where are they the sex pistols first single is aggressively called anarchy in the uk but what do they mean by [Music] thought i anarchy [Music] i just say [Music]

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[Music] the summer of 77 the summer of the Jubilee a time when the nation United in spontaneous gestures of patriotism a time when the then top 20 record charts were dominated by this original version of the national anthem by The Sex Pistols God the queen she ain't no human being it is no future and [Music] England what you want and what you need there now future now future now future for you the summer of 77 was also the summer of punk despite a ban by the BBC pop Network Radio 1 The Sex Pistols loyal

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tribute Ted the charts in Jubilee week and in the Kings Road Chelsea the Exotic Punk fans mystified the tourists with clothes and makeup even more bizarre than their music but to the music business itself they represented something far more significant nothing less than the first twitch of life in 10 years offensive outrageous but potentially [Music] [Applause] profitable as far as the general public was concerned Punk first surfest in the Autumn of 1976 when the sex pistols with lead singer Johnny ruton suddenly made punk

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music front page news they outraged pretty well everyone by what seemed a string of gratuitous and Mindless [Applause] obscenities but what the headline writers didn't realize was that punk wasn't just a publicity gimmick it already had a steadily building audience amongst young people and they felt that punk was radically different from the existing rock music establishment hello what musicians do right I me you think it's a good singer I don't I don't have any Heroes they're

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all useless but there's no bands around is there none none that are accessible well before you unless you pay a f to see them and then you can't see them and what sort of people came to see you in the beginning I don't know just bored people bored out their brains with ippies what's you thing you got against sipp they're complacent you just attacking Cho pops and the sort of bands that are on there what do you think they're relevant to the kids 16 17 of course they're

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not relevant to their moms and dads but that's about all what about man like R Stewart what about him moms and dads yeah he's all around is he all around entertainment he's you really want to be aob got R opportunity the one never KN every job I offer used to K rejecting established music Heroes was crucial to punk another successful London group The Clash put the boot into aging Rock millionaires whose music and lifestyle have been dominant for so long it's got nothing to do with them anymore

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when like rod do it gets up there and starts like going on with his String orchestra you know I mean it's not what you feel like so you got to have some music what you feel like other you go bom me don't you I think their attitude is really stink now anyway it's just like they just there has to be new groups and then that's what you got the sex pistol say they hate hippies everything they stand for and the hippie what what went wrong with music what do you think about that yeah right I think

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that's where the complexities came in you know and people thought oh we better buy our mood synthesizer or we'll get caught out you know maybe if there's any around we should like you know jump into action immediately cuz you know I suppose you ain't there thought they had too much dope yeah lying on the floor and look at the ceiling but it's another generation she yeah one that went [Music] [Music] wrong unlike the dope generation the new wave bands seem to speak directly to

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Their audience about things they felt mattered to them living in tower blocks and surviving on the doll want to get me make it if they want to get me well I got no choice car uper the school I went to right I mean there sort of like all the kids are supposed to sort of like be Factory project you know that sort of stuff and like the school's sort of built it's a real s depressing school is it and you go there you don't learn nothing all you're sort of like working for is just to going into the factory

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which is around the corner or something like that and uh well most of the mates I know all working in the factory and a lot of your fans on the doll I mean do they feel the same way yeah they wouldn't come to my gig if they weren't on the dog would they be your friends well I mean if there was jobs and they wouldn't be on the do and maybe we'd be singing about love and kissing or something because it's music made by people that feel an oppression and and a depression and uh it's exactly the

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same reason they're singing because they can't get no work they can't get this and the only way they can get it across to like the media is to sing about it and cause Havoc the way they [Music] do another fundamental part of Punk's attraction was the belief that anyone could be a musician this was exciting for the punk fan but it naturally led to some rather basic per [Music] performances because you don't have to be a fantastic musician you you don't have to be old you don't have to be in

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the music business years you can just get a guitar play for a few weeks and go on stage and do it and the punk magazines like sideburns gave advice like [Music] this and fans like Susie took them up on it have you tried to get B together yeah I did The 100 Club HK Festival Susie in the B she what did you s The Lord's Prayer via twist and sht knocking on Heaven store and a bit of deand deand uber Al and what went down the first all of it it got boring in some parts but it picked up are you a singing yeah had you

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sng before not on stage no did you think that was important um no and who was backing you up Sid Vicious on drums Steve spunker on bass Marco on guitar and me just doing the vocals the kids kind of got fed up with copying you know everything was like rejuvenated old stuff and uh they went for a lapse where they didn't know what they were doing and uh well Punk broke loose and gave them a direction which is what they really wanted something of their own something that they could personally identify with and call their

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own though Punk was indeed the kid's own music it couldn't have happened without some imaginative entrepreneur providing the opportunity for it to emerge Malcolm McLaren is the manager of the sex pistols and the owner of the now famous punk clothes shop in London's Kings Road sedition reies when he set up the The Sex Pistols in 1975 McLaren borrowed the label punk from New York where it described a very particular Trend in outrageous clothes but London Punk was very different raw working class and deliberately

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anti-establishment

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but in london as in new york there grew up a vital connection between the music and the clothes punk fashion and makeup was designed from the start to shock and outrage republic that had come to terms with blue jeans and long hair it's it's got nothing to do with the 50s or the 60s it's a fashion from the present and the future it's a symptom it's the ideas come from the violence in the streets and uh kids will know work out of work and a general feeling that there's no nothing to do and they wanted they

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always wanted to be different and they want to express themselves in a violent shocking way it's a grassroots fashion movement the kids dictate what's going to be worn no one tells them what to wear if they don't like it stuff they sell they don't buy it is do you live at home uh some of the time yeah but i mainly like going out places and i get back too late so my mom and dad don't like it too much when you're living at home do you do your makeup like this oh yeah but my mom and dad aren't too

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pleased about it they prefer me to go out and do it what they don't want you to be seen leaving their house like that i think they're a bit ashamed really you know they think you know i brought my daughter up well but you know they look at her it's like comic strip something out of space or something you never know what do your mom and dad do what for a living yeah my dad works for television he works for atv and my mom's just normally house and what did you look like before oh sweet

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what color would you wear oh it was a sort of golden ash blonde um but just down to here you know so i've always had my hair done different styles you know but it was always long and suddenly one day my friend cut my hair mom came upstairs and i sort of hid into the water pretending i was hanging up my stuff goes through all your hair's in the chair like this how do you make it spiky well well i mean at the moment it's sort of gone curly but usually i sort of wash it and dry the roots standing up like this

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all over and then i put gel on it you know hair gel rub it all in usually stands out from lucky oh the combination of music and fashion is one of the factors that has helped punk to succeed where previous exclusively musical vogues had failed and as the new bands caught on among young people a backup industry developed to support them and record shops specialised in selling records on tiny punk labels and xerox punk magazines boosting bands like the stranglers the established record companies were at

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first slow to respond die davis one of the managers of the stranglers had to wait six months before united artists executive andrew lauder finally reacted just didn't particularly appeal to when i first heard it because it didn't sound like anything else and it wasn't anything i thought i was looking for all the time a year later you're managing a ban called 999 now what's the reaction of the music industry to them oh you can't keep them away you can't give them away

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i mean within within a week we took the band on as they did about three gigs and within a week of that we had about eight record companies ringing us up half of them hadn't even seen the band offering sort of preposterous deals or if not proposed to be offering lunch so by the summer of 77 punk had become a success it had its own hit parade in the music press punk discs had scaled the conventional top 20 tipping out middle of the road bands like abba in june alone virgin records who had signed the

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sex pistols after emi and a m had dropped them sold 200 000 copies of sex pistols records and from all over the country hopeful bands were driving down to the capital bands like dead fingers talked from hull a giggier for a fiver than a gigging county durham for a hundred pound because you get a lot more out of it right and like we're in this business to make it we want to be successful right we don't do anything else and so london's where it's at without a doubt yeah playing up there even though you're

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getting great responses and fairly good money he's not further in the career knows about it i today are you happy to come down to london yeah i'm glad to be in london what sort of things have happened since you've come to london i mean where have you played for a star do we do the roxy we've done a lot of gigs that have been doing for a fair amount a fair bit like the greyhound rochester castle and where are you all living this is my house do you like our house that's my kitchen over there

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this is my bed here yeah so what do you think how long will you be prepared to carry on plugging away in london to get what though to get a record deal yeah we want a record deal we want the press to uh come and see us we want the roxy in covent garden clubs like this were the starting point for aspiring punk bands a year ago it was turned from a fading gay disco the shagarama into the 70s punk equivalent of the liverpool cavern club every wednesday at the roxy is audition night when punk bands like nothing from

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caterham in surrey hopefully queue up to perform in front of record company scouts it's a place to play you see it's it's not a bad place me and him are doing three i'm doing a english british constitution in geography he's doing mass physics and chemistry meanwhile to the sumptuous offices of the major record companies like cbs in soho square the success of punk rock has brought both a promise and a problem the promise for uk managing director maurice oberstein is of a boom in the

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pot business and the problem i had a problem with the new wave for punk bands in terms of trying to separate my experience which told me you had to be uh a professional in the musician sense that you could play your instrument particularly well that every lead guitarist i looked at had to play as well as you know fill in the blank whether it's beck or hendricks that i looked at a drummer on the basis of his technical virtuosity that suddenly you came up with bands who seemed to be unschooled in what was your

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normal touchstone of decision making did they play well could you hear the lyrics did you get a feeling that this was something that moved in the stream of another band it was all new in the sense of suddenly being a revival of high energy music played with low energy intensity in terms of these huge 10 000 watt pas i mean that was really the distinction that suddenly you're getting an awful lot of energy that you might get from a led zeppelin or from a heavy metal band that was coming across the footlights from this

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little stage tucked away in the roxy so no question we had a we had to rethink whether we were capable as uh as people to judge what the uh what our audience who buy our records wanted do you think you should employ people at cvs to look for brands who are the same generation if you like as the people that's that's a horrible question that's like saying should we choose singles by having a teenage panel or should we choose the next donny osmond single by having a group of 12 year old

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girls decide no it's our business to be able to make these decisions right or wrong