Beware poshos cosplaying as punks

A funny snippet could be seen in Private Eye last month:

‘“Punk: The Last Word is a powerful reimagining of punk – not just as a sound or style, but as a radical, DIY philosophy rooted in defiance, truth and individuality”, declares Omnibus Press’s blurb for Chris Sullivan and Stephen Colegrave’s presumptuously titled history, which will be published next month.

‘And that spirit of defiance and individuality is still alive and spitting. The Spectator requested that a copy of the book be dispatched for review to Julie Burchill, who famously chronicled the gory days of punk as one of the “hip young gunslingers” on the NME in the late 1970s. They were informed that the authors and publisher were “not comfortable” with the idea of Burchill reviewing their tome, and refused to send it. How very punk!’

What is and isn’t punk these days is very much in dispute. In its purest, most puerile form, this has led to statements on X whereby public-school boys and girls in their twenties claim that ‘John Lydon’s not punk’ when he says something complimentary about Brexit, Trump or Israel. Is charging £30 for a book celebrating the 50th anniversary of punk really punk?

Punk: The Last Word is certainly a handsome beast, fit to grace the costliest of coffee tables – which in itself is very un-punk. There’s a back-jacket blurb from Glen Matlock, who was famously thrown out of the Sex Pistols for being not punk enough, I seem to recall, showing us that these squabbles about who is and isn’t the p-word have always been with us.

To be fair, one of the most talented songwriters of the trend, Joe Strummer, was a public-schoolboy himself. Still, though there was no love lost between them, he certainly wouldn’t have gone around saying that J Rotten Esq ‘wasn’t a true punk’ because they disagreed about the EU or something. We weren’t such big jessies back then. It’s the mood of self-righteousness, and of class contempt of the educated for the proletariat, which is a fetid recent addition to the barneys.

There are quite a few books like this around, mostly aimed at lazy bourgeois kids doing Mickey Mouse media degrees. The rotter who started it – making punk respectable for well-bred readers – was Jon Savage, the ex Sounds journalist (real name Jonathan Sage, which speaks volumes) and his book, England’s Dreaming, published way back in 1991. (He’s been banging them out with predictable regularity since; a regular little sausage machine, but gourmet outdoor-reared sausages, not nasty common ones.)

Writing in the London Review of Books, Jenny Turner pointed out that England’s Dreaming is ‘surprisingly badly written, full of ill thought-out and tiresome Horrible England, Rotten England, Pusillanimous England, Fuck England bits’. It gives one a cosy feeling to remember that Savage’s parents and grandmother get thanked for ‘living through this with me’ (bless – but not very punk). And that Savage would sometimes write about himself in the third-person, referring to ‘the writer’, or ‘the critic’. In short, he was a supreme tit, who wheeled out the corpse of youth culture and rouged its nipples in an attempt to eke out his specialty sausage until his pension came through. Naturally, Savage shows up in the clown show that is Punk: The Last Word, quoted several times. (The book is mostly quotes, what we used to call a ‘cut-and-paste’. Which is just as well, as Chris Sullivan writes English as if it’s his fourth language.)

The X squabbles about punk often centre on trans and whether it’s punk to be a Transmaid or a TERF. The ghastly Lambrini Girls are the mouthiest representatives of the take-the-knee-and-suck-the-ladydick viewpoint. ‘Unfortunately, Riot Grrrl [crowds] can be very TERFy’, said one of them in Rolling Stone recently. ‘If you look at bands 30 years ago, they were putting on festivals where you had to be an assigned-female-at-birth person to go to them.’ Meanwhile, the excellent working-class artist, Birdy Rose, created her gorgeous ‘TERF is the new punk’ t-shirt (bearing the face of Emmeline Pankhurst) in response to such appropriation of punk by the posh.

Even when it’s not transing itself, what passes for self-proclaimed punk these days is a sad, sickly beast. It’s Bob Vylan pandering to a bunch of gap-yah inbreds at Glastonbury, who cheer happily at the call for the murder of uppity Jewish soldiers, by the most un-punk named singer ever, one Pascal Robinson-Foster. It’s the BBC television show, Riot Women, having to have a bloke in a frock involved in their all-female punk band at the risk of crossdressers getting crosser.

Perhaps most pathetically, it’s the Lambrini Girls receiving just under £15,000 of taxpayers’ money from this year’s Music Export Growth Scheme to pay for a European tour. One of the dozy bints has talked in interviews about how embarrassed she is to be English, due to our apparently unique level of racism. (I must have been imagining that we have the highest level of mixed-race offspring in Europe, and that it’s been this way for well on half a century.) Imagine the Sex Pistols ever accepting money from a state-sponsored organisation! Now that’s definitely not punk.

Punk was many things, but it could not have caught fire without the presence, intelligence, beauty and rage of the young John Lydon. I would thereby be inclined to take his word on anything to do with the subject – and his words are bracingly populist these days – far more so than the wretched Chris Sullivan, who in the introduction to his ghastly excuse for a book tells us all we need to know about the prissy, prescriptive, pinky-wagging conformity of it. We are told that being against Israel and Trump is punk, following a religion or fighting a war is not punk, and that when ‘a friend’s 16-year-old daughter’ remarked that her mother’s criticism of Liz Truss and her obscene mishandling of the country’s finances was ‘Very punk rock, mum’, we should all slobber ourselves silly in a mindless orgy of youth-worship. Personally, I feel that this child – if indeed she exists – needs a dry slap and an Outward Bound course, the unspeakable little know-all.

In the intro to Punk: The Last Word, we have Vivienne Westwood held up as an example of a great punk life – ‘maybe the greatest example’. Would that be the same Vivienne Westwood who was a tax-avoiding, tax-haven user, the greenwasher who used cheap Chinese labour and unpaid interns, who despite her comments that consumers should ‘buy less’ regularly produced nine collections a year compared to the average designer’s two, and who took an OBE from the late queen? Let’s hear it for anarchy! To add insult to injury, Sullivan scribbles straight-faced that: ‘Vivienne epitomised our ethic until her last breath and has now spurred her son Joe and granddaughter Cora to follow suit.’ It’s official: nepo-baby bra-designers and nepo-baby models are punk!

By the time I got to the bit in which the punk ethic apparently includes ‘If you want to be a doctor, lawyer or architect, just work hard, study, do all you can to attend university and become one’, I wondered if Sullivan had recently suffered a severe bang to the head.

As a handbook for hypocrites, this book is invaluable. To those of us who hate hypocrisy, it’s almost viscerally vile. So I can well understand why the publishers wouldn’t be ‘comfortable’ with me reviewing it – and I hope this little mention doesn’t make them too uncomfortable. But, you know what, diddums? If it does, punk’s not dead!

Julie Burchill is a spiked columnist. Follow her Substack, Notes from the Naughty Step, here.