Vinyl Maelstrom

Columnist Paul Burke - "Why punk was fake news"

Ian Forth

Contrariness - we've got it.

"If you were born after 1970 and don’t remember punk, you’ve almost certainly been misled by people who do. You’ve probably been told – through countless paean-to-punk retrospectives, documentaries and newspaper culture pages ­– that it was a glorious, anarchic revolution that swept all before it. I can tell you first-hand that it wasn’t.

Punk was as middle-class as a Labrador in a Volvo. Far from being hugely influential, punk was a passing fad that made little impression on the charts and left the lasting legacy of a spent firework."


So says Paul Burke, novelist and columnist.  He's also put a playlist together of what people like him were actually listening to in 1976-77:-

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37Gk0WBbatuSq6CNHqO6fH?si=8e3a8c336bab435e

Paul has the conch for this episode, then I'll follow up next week with a counter blast on why punk was really rather important, after all.

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