CRANKED UP REALLY HIGH: GENRE THEORY & PUNK ROCK by Stewart Home

CHAPTER IV: RELICS FROM THE PAST
British PUNK ROCK circa 1977

Before getting to grips with the dialectical transformations of Punk Rock, I want to deal with a particular moment in the history of PUNK ROCK that was a time of both fusion and division. This is the period when the legacy of sixties garage rock became completely entangled with the ideology of Punk Rock passed down to a subsequent generation by the likes of the MC5. Indeed, quite a number of intellectually unsophisticated writers would lead you to believe that the genesis of PUNK ROCK is to be found in this period. However, as I've already pointed out, as an evolving musical genre, PUNK ROCK has no fixed boundaries. 1977 is only one of many points at which we could begin to investigate this phenomenon. Those pseudo-intellectuals who believe that it is possible to discover the 'origins' of Punk Rock at this particular juncture in the development of the discourse have quite simply failed to grasp the dynamics of culture and their 'work' should be subjected to merciless criticism.

1977, at least in the way it was mythologised by the Clash on the flip-side of their first single White Riot, was a time of apocalypse. However, this was not the only vision of what that year was about, according to the brief sleeve notes on the back of a Beggars Banquet compilation album entitled Streets: Select Highlights from Independent British Labels:

1977 was the year that the music came out of the concert halls and onto the streets; when independent labels sprang out of the woodwork to feed new tastes; when rock music once again became about energy and fun; when the majors' boardrooms lost control. Suddenly we could do anything.

Clearly, while the Clash were projecting themselves as the epitome of Punk Rock, Streets is basically about punk rock. However, the distinction is somewhat opaque because a handful of the tracks on the Streets compilation reflect vague social concerns that could be subsumed under the nebulous ideological posturing of Punk Rock. Cranked Up Really High by Slaughter And The Dogs appears, from what it's possible to decipher of the lyrics, to be an anti-drugs song. Other contributions from Manchester, such as Ain't Bin To No Music School by the Nosebleeds and Lookalikes by the Drones, also give the impression that the bands may be participating in some barely articulated form of social protest. Marginally more impressive in terms of political content is the anti-fascist anthem Fear On The Streets by the Members. Coming from, or possibly going in, the opposite direction is Arabs In 'Arrads by the Art Attacks, with its catchy chorus of "Hungry in the food hall / Staring at the salads / I can't compete with the Arabs in 'arrads'." Likewise, Disastermovie by the Exile could be seen as a Punk Rock stab at populist politics with its plea of "Let's all join together / Give the country a second look!"

Several ditties on Streets, all lacking any consciously articulated ideological dimension, will be found distasteful by the political correctness brigade. College Girls by Cane with its chorus of "Every guy knows how juicy they are / Oh oh college girls clits," is a classic slice of punk rock. The Drive contribute a song about masturbation entitled Jerkin', and the Pork Dukes offer Bend And Flush, the punk rock equivalent of a smutty music hall song. Be My Prisoner by the Lurkers is unlikely to go down well with those reactionary elements within the feminist movement who are opposed to consensual sado-masochism, while isgodaman by Arthur Comics? appears calculated to upset Christians as well as being very funny indeed.

Since PUNK ROCK is all about acne splattered youth having a go at sitting targets, both musically and lyrically, Streets is an excellent example of the genre. If we examine other tracks by the groups featured on the record it becomes obvious that most of them fit more neatly into the punk rock, as opposed to Punk Rock, category. All the songs featured on the record were recorded in 1977, a time at which an explosion of media interest in PUNK ROCK led to a great deal of confusion about substrands within the genre. However, while genre categorisations are necessarily provisional, it's not a difficult task to untangle the current standing of the songs and acts to be found on the Streets compilation.

It seems like a good idea to reiterate here that there are basically three strands to what we are disentangling – music, lyrics and image. Music is probably the least important aspect in terms of drawing a distinction between punk rock and Punk Rock, since both tend towards the harder end of the pop format with a propensity for tuneful two to three minute songs. Music is more useful as an aid to exploring the differences between PUNK ROCK and those strands of the broader pop and rock genre that are sometimes confused with it. For example, by ignoring the PUNK emphasis on tuneful pop melodies, even if these were buried beneath guitar distortions, hardcore and so called anarcho-'punk' bands created new rock subgenres that are completely distinct from PUNK ROCK. Lyrically, the anarcho-pacifist bands were also far too specific and articulate in giving vent to their social concerns, whereas Punk Rock politics are notoriously vague, or if at all specific, so absurd that they indicate those involved have had little qualitative contact with organised ideological groupings. Finally, while Punk Rock groups are more concerned with projecting a 'street level' image than punk rock bands, the way this posturing was taken up within hardcore and anarcho-'punk' became so caricatured and stereo-typed that it was transformed into a mutant brand of bohemianism, something completely alien to PUNK ROCK as a form of popular culture.

Returning to the Streets compilation, let's look first at Fear On The Streets by the Members, the most obvious candidate for inclusion in the Punk Rock canon. While there is no reason why this song, taken in isolation from the rest of the group's output (or possibly even coupled with the raucous B-side GLC) should not be considered an example of Punk Rock, anyone who views the Members entire career can see that over the course of a few years they transformed themselves from a punk rock group to a moderately successful pop act (they had the odd hit single).

Both live and on record the Members stressed the pop aspect of their brand of punk rock by laying great emphasis on novelty and humour. Apart from anything else, this was a 'natural' course for them to follow because they looked odd; singer Nicky Tesco was short enough to be considered a metaphorical, if not a literal, midget. Song titles such as Soho A Go Go and Love In A Lift reveal the music hall origins of their smutty humour, while other tracks, most explicitly Chelsea Nightclub, contain passages of musical pastiche in homage to sixties pop, in this case self-consciously drawing out the element of youthfulness in both PUNK and Mod by plagiarising the Who's My Generation. However, although the group dubbed their music the Sound Of The Suburbs (they came from Camberley in Surrey, in easy commuting distance of London), they'd absorbed enough of the Punk spirit to record the odd serious song such as Fear On The Streets or the awful white reggae of their hit single Offshore Banking Business.

The other groups featured on Streets who went on to make the British pop charts are the Doll and the Lurkers. The Doll's contribution to the record, Trash, was by far and away the best track they ever recorded, owing as it does – both in terms of music and the sneering lyrics – a huge debt to sixties garage rock. The Lurkers are much more interesting than the Doll, having had a long career full of interruptions and line-up changes. In the late seventies, the group were peddling a souped-up version of pub rock and quickly gained a huge skinhead following, thanks to their no nonsense attitude towards music. Again, song titles such as I'm On Heat reveal the roots of the band's very British humour in music hall traditions. Having broken up and reformed a couple of times, the Lurkers released their classic surf-punk mini-album King Of The Mountain, on Link in 1989. This was followed by the tuneful Powerjive and Non-Stop Nitropop long players on Released Emotions and Weser respectively. The Lurkers more recent recordings demonstrate that punk bands don't necessarily get worse as they get older, although live performances have been marred by Arturo Bassick's seriously sad banter with the audience, which has been known to degenerate to the level of "I'm 37 years old and I still believe in Punk Rock!"

In terms of cult status, Slaughter And The Dogs stand head and shoulders above everyone else featured on Streets as the classic punk rock act. They went on to record the anthem Where Have All The Boot Boys Gone? and the Do It Dog Style album for Decca. The band appeared desperate to make the charts, as well as having one of the most muscular stage acts to be seen on the college, pub and club circuits in the late seventies. Live they were awesome, but singer Wayne Barrett's relationship with a Paris based chick caused the group to break up before they succeeded in reaching a mass audience. The band reformed in 1979 but Barrett was soon replaced by Ed Banger, formerly lead singer with the Nosebleeds, for the competent rock album Bite-Back.

Unfortunately, Bite-Back wasn't quite as much fun as bassist Howard Bates and guitarist Mike Rossi's ill-fated attempt to court the teeny-bopper market as the Studio Sweethearts. Nevertheless, the Dogs' shamelessness in switching image and attempting to tail-end any and every trend, demonstrated they were true punks who paid no heed to the empty rhetoric of their peers, many of whom were prone to wanking on about artistic integrity. Barrett and Rossi reformed the band yet again in 1991 for another stab at the mainstream rock market with the Shocking long player. Not even an abysmal attempt at dealing with the 'serious' subject of ecology, in the shape of the song Stop Playing With Mother Earth, could ruin Slaughter And The Dogs cult status as one of the greatest punk bands of all time. In this particular genre tackiness is greatness, and the Dogs are as cheap and nasty as they come!

When it comes to plumbing the depths, few punk musicians could sink as low as Mike Rossi, who played guitar on the unlistenable Sing It To Me platter, which is co-credited to him and Gary Holton. Rossi also provided accompaniment on Martin Degville's World War Four, a hilarious solo outing by the former Sigue Sigue Sputnik bod. Another 'must have' for fans of punk trash is the Mike Rossi interview disk that was given away free with one pressing of Slaughter And The Dogs Live At The Factory. On this, the hapless guitarist leaves the listener with the impression that he's got nothing but air between his ears and proves conclusively that the average musician has nothing of interest to say about whatever classic tunes s/he happens to have recorded. Mike Rossi is a complete loser, and this makes him a PUNK STAR, the ideal candidate for a 'new wave' version of This Is Your Life!

Among PUNK record collectors, the only other band featured on Streets who come anywhere close to matching the cult status of Slaughter And The Dogs are the Drones. This group were a competent live act whose standout studio recordings are Lookalikes, Just Want To Be Myself and Bone Idol. Their only album, Further Temptations, is a solid example of high octane garage rock although it doesn't really stand up to repeated listenings. The group is heard to best effect on the Short Circuit: Live At The Electric Circus compilation, where their contribution Persecution Complex is considerably better than the studio version of the same song. However, the Drone's real claim to fame is as a skeleton in the closet of media personality Paul Morley, who broke into the music business by acting as the group's manager.

The Art Attacks provide an example of how misleading it can be to judge a band by a single track on the Streets compilation. Led by cartoonist Savage Pencil, the group were an outlet for his comic vision of life. In fact, with the exception of humourless political hacks and 'contemporary cultural critics', it will be obvious to most listeners that Arabs In 'Arrads is a vehicle for Savage Pencil's bleak humour and isn't intended to be racist or offensive. This is apparent not only from the singer/cartoonist's artwork on the sleeve of the Streets album but also from songs such as Rat City with its almost unconscious parody of Lou Reed's Waiting For The Man: "Feeling sick / Feeling bad / Go get yourself a donor kebab". Rat City was recorded in May 1977 and demonstrates that New York and London are worlds apart aesthetically as well as geographically:

"Razor blade in the palm of your hand / A bomb goes off on the underground... Snipers on the Post Office Tower / Just waiting for their final hour / In Rat City, it's so shitty... Going on the tube to work / Just getting out and going into my office and sitting round there / And all I ever do is get a load of crap thrown at me / And the only pleasure I ever get is watching the secretaries legs, you know / And what do I do? / I get out, I put on my coat / I walk out and then I grab myself a drink / And then I find myself getting so pissed, I just don't know what to do / And so I walk out and walk about the street / And I sort of slip into one of those greasy sex cinemas / There's nothing on but a load of shit like a Swedish porn movie / Everything in it / It just doesn't work for me / It isn't real / It's like Rat City, it's so bad / I can't get anything to eat in it / I've got to get home but I'm so pissed I can't / So I go home and the wife says 'Hey where the hell have you been?' / I said 'I I' / And she says 'Well your tea's ready and it's fish fingers again!'... I can't stand fish fingers / So I eat 'em and I have a couple of glasses of beer again and I watch TV / But there's nothing on except Police Woman... Rat City, it's so shitty."

Nothing else the Art Attacks did was able to explode social realism in quite the same way but the whole of their concise output is worth hearing. Apart from the two numbers already discussed, the only other songs to find their way onto vinyl were studio recordings of I Am A Dalek, Neutron Bomb and Punk Rock Stars, plus two tracks – Animal Bondage and Frankenstein's Heartbeat – on the Live At The Vortex compilation album. Although the Art Attacks' aesthetic is unmistakably English, their music is archetypal of late seventies PUNK ROCK from anywhere in the Western world. For example, on Punk Rock Stars Savage Pencil rhymes 'movie' and 'groovy', something Australian band the Saints do on their song Private Affair. Likewise, Neutron Bomb was also used as a song title by West Coast punk acts the Controllers and the Weirdos. Nuclear apocalypse is a common theme in PUNK ROCK, although here Savage Pencil pulls off a neat twist on it by threatening to use advanced technology to annihilate his girlfriend.

Another act on Streets with a typically English sense of humour were Arthur Comics?, better known as the Snivelling Shits. Led by music journalist Giovanni Dadamo, the group's limited output included I Can't Come: "I guess I really fooled you all I was using my thumb / The truth of the matter is I can't come." The lyric has been described by its author as: "The Shits answer to Satisfaction. Warning: taking drugs can seriously damage your genitals." Other punk classics by the combo include Only 13, in which Dadamo describes how being picked up on the tube by an old lecher led him to discover a new way of earning money, and Terminal Stupid: "Terminal stupid your head's in a mess / I can count your brain cells on one finger or less."

Even more reductively fixated on bodily functions than the Snivelling Shits, and represented on Streets by their first single Bend And Flush, were the Pork Dukes. The group's song titles are indicative of their interests and humour: Dirty Boys, Stuck Up, Sick Of Sex, Down Down Down, Soho Girls, Tight Pussy, Big Tits or Penicillin Princess. Their second single, Making Bacon, provides a typical example of the Dukes' use of rhyming couplets sung in an outrageously camp voice: "Get down baby on your hands and knees / Take my Danish and give it a squeeze." Naturally, this outrage came in a twelve-inch format on yuckie yellow vinyl. The album that followed had a plain white sleeve with a few brightly coloured stickers added to spruce it up, among the messages on these were: "FOR A REAL GOOD TIME WHEN IN LONDON, PHONE THE PORK DUKES FAN CLUB ON 01-203 1750 AND ASK FOR SUZI!"

If I've spent a good deal of time dealing with the Streets compilation that's because it's the best contemporary jumping off point for dealing with the wide expanse of late seventies British punk rock. If I now begin to move away from the acts featured on Streets, this is by no means because I've exhausted what I've got to say about them. Obviously, I could talk about the classic Exile track Fascist DJ from their Don't Tax Me EP, or how Disaster Movie was ultimately issued by Charly Records as a maxi-single alongside The Real People and Tomorrow Today. Likewise, I could compare the merits of Jerkin' by the Drive with its flip-side Push 'N' Shove, which achieves sublimity by rhyming 'loving' and 'shoving'. However, I am not attempting an exhaustive catalogue of my subject precisely because idiotic feats of this type are regularly attempted by anally retentive record collectors who have no understanding of the evolving nature of musical genres, or how the dynamics of the PUNK ROCK discourse makes such an exercise not only impossible but also thoroughly pointless.

In 1977 the compilation Live At The Roxy London WC2 appeared to me to be an archetypal PUNK artefact. These days, I've changed my opinion; despite the clips of audience babble between the tracks the record is too sanitised. The thing kicks off well enough with two songs by Slaughter And The Dogs, Runaway and Boston Babies. Next up are the relatively obscure Unwanted, whose studio recordings (Withdrawal, 1984, Bleak Outlook, Secret Police, These Boots Are Made For Walking, I'm Not Me, Fraulein and The End Is Nigh) achieve moments of 'greatness' without ever scaling the heights they reached with their first ever performance immortalised on the Roxy album. Freedom is the band's masterpiece, a moronic couple of minutes that stands up against all comers within the genre. This is followed by two contributions from Wire, a fine band in their own right but the group's offerings are art rock not PUNK. After this there's the usual lame outing from the Adverts, who were always awful live but somehow managed to lay down a few decent tracks in the studio despite the handicap of singer TV Smith's insane over-estimation of his extremely limited intellect. Things improve with Johnny Moped and Eater, the latter band being a bunch of schoolboys who later took the sneering punk rock attitude to its logical conclusion with their anthem Get Raped. Unfortunately, Eater are followed by X-Ray Spex who give novelty records a bad name. The album closes with two tracks from the Buzzcocks, a great pop group but they ceased playing Punk Rock when they parted company with original singer Howard Devoto.

PUNK ROCK is a receding object; as one approaches, it disappears. In this genre obscurity, despite the fact that it is necessarily relative, is everything. Since PUNK ROCK at the time of its production is initially consumed by a relatively young audience, we should not expect subtlety from those engaged in the discourse. Part of the reason Live At The Roxy now seems so unsatisfactory as a PUNK ROCK artefact is that the majority of the bands featured on it are so well known within the genre. A follow up release, Farewell To The Roxy, is a considerable improvement on its predecessor because it features such lesser known acts as Blitz, Acme Sewage Co., Billy Karloff & The Goats, UK Subs, Tickets, Red Lights, XL5, Jets, Streets, Plastix, Bears, Open Sore and the Crabs.

Undoubtedly, the standout tracks on Farewell To The Roxy are Sniper by the Streets and Fun Fun Fun by the Bears. Sniper consists chiefly of the word 'sniper' chanted over a very Who-ish riff, circa I Can't Explain, classic minimalistic stuff. Fun Fun Fun is heads down, no nonsense, mindless punk rock boogie and that's its joy. The lyrics say it all: "I'm gonna go down to the shop / Buy some flour and some eggs / Then I'll go to the top of the flats / And drop them on your head / Gonna have fun fun fun and we've only just begun..." Any idiot who believes that PUNK ROCK is profound ought to be forced to listen to this track repeatedly for a week – or at least until they cackle madly, get down on their hands and knees, then howl at the moon. This is what rock 'n' roll is about, mindless youthful exuberance.

The main disappointment on Farewell To The Roxy is the Crabs contribution. One expects something a bit better than a punk lullaby from a band whose merchandising operation consisted of a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan 'I CAUGHT THE CRABS'. This compilation should have featured their stage favourite Victim, but then a studio version came out as a single on Lightning who also issued the second Roxy long player. The one other band on the platter who are particularly worthy of note are the UK Subs, who in the course of a long career went on to much greater things than these live renditions of Telephone Numbers and I Live In A Car. Despite being old enough to have fathered the average teenage PUNK ROCKER, lead singer Charlie Harper had a seriously juvenile attitude and became a 'new wave' face. This is the man who authored such classic chorus lines as "dirty girls go yeah yeah yeah" and "all I wanna know, all I wanna know, is does she suck?" A career as a PUNK musician had obvious attractions to a man of Harper's tastes.

However, since the boundaries of any particular genre are constantly being renegotiated, in assessing what constituted British PUNK ROCK in the late seventies it is necessary to look at more than merely contemporary artefacts. A good example of the retrospective PUNK ROCK compilation, unconstrained by the niceties of our insanely restrictive copyright laws, is the 1990 bootleg CD Anarchy In The UK Volume One. It should go without saying that Volume Two never appeared. The CD features Swell Mob, the Users, Menace, Visitors, Drones, Rikki And The Last Days Of Earth, Astronauts, the Exits, Blitzkrieg Bop, Eater, Y Yrwynau Coch, Vice Creams, Wasps, Bleach Boys, Accidents, Le Ritz and the Now. The man behind the bootleg appears to be utterly shameless, since the inclusion of tracks by the Users and the Now alongside an advert for the defunct Spiral Scratch magazine, are obvious clues to his identity. On the other hand, since it would have been virtually impossible to trace some of the copyright holders, few of whom were likely to initiate legal action, this particular impresario probably doesn't have much to worry about.

As an early 'minority' language PUNK ROCK record, the Recordiau Sgwar EP by Y Yrwynau Coch, from which Ail Ddechre is lifted, was a crucial moment in the development of Welsh youth culture. However, to listeners who don't speak the language, it merely sounds like a pleasant punk/pop song. Of more interest from my particular perspective are the two tracks taken from the Exits second release, an EP entitled Yodelling. The first, Apathy, by its very name reveals a classic PUNK ROCK obsession which rose to even greater prominence in England during the late seventies, at a time when the subgenres of punk rock and Punk Rock had become hopelessly entangled. Since the Buzzcocks had already used the title Boredom for a track on their seminal Spiral Scratch EP, other bands were left consulting the thesaurus for synonyms. The Exits bagged one of the better options. Base 3, whose only release was the single Fast Train To China, never got around to committing their song Monotony to vinyl, and in any case they'd been beaten to the punch by the Boys who included a track with this title on their fourth album Boys Only. Somehow synonyms such as 'Indifference', 'Ennui', Doldrums' and 'Listlessness' just didn't sound PUNK enough. This left everyone else scratching around for variations on the key word. Martin And The Brownshirts came up with the not very inspired Boring, which was the flip to their 24 carat punk classic Taxi Driver. Returning to the Exits, the other song that's been bootlegged from their Yodelling EP, Glandular Angela, is also prototypically punk. The chorus line of "I've got a fever for your beaver", exposes us yet again to the ongoing punk rock obsession with smutty music hall traditions and cheap novelty lyrics.

Rikki And The Last Days Of Earth actually made an album for DJM, the lame 4 Minute Warning. Their public school background is obvious to the attentive listener in the lyrical content of songs such as Aleister Crowley:

"I'm Aleister Crowley – Aleister Crowley / You know my number – you know my name / The chains of lust round my picture frame / I'm Aleister Crowley – tolling the bell / I'm Aleister Crowley – at the gates of hell / The mark of the Beast – you can plainly see / The powers of darkness – all work for me."

Sad, very sad, the boys had no street credibility, and come across like the novelistic nonentities Martin Amis and Will Self with guitars and keyboards. Nevertheless, City Of The Damned, the group's first single which is bootlegged here, does the business, which is a lot more than can be said for anything else they recorded. Fortunately, Eater and the Drones, the only other acts on the Anarchy In The UK CD to record albums, acquitted themselves with dignity, producing long players that could be listened to without ruining their two or three minutes of glory.

Menace sit least easily on the compilation, despite being represented by their best single GLC, because their hardheaded brand of Punk Rock was a very important tributary feeding into that substrand of the genre which went on to transform itself into Oi! whereas everyone else can be subsumed under the heading of punk rock. Of course, the bootleg also features the obligatory band led by a music journalist, in this case the Vice Creams, featuring Kris Needs of Zig Zag. The Vice Creams' Danger Love is an acceptable slice of poppy punk but lacks the punch of Swell Mob's Violence, which not only features a punked up Matthew And Son riff (courtesy of Mott The Hopple who 'composed' the song), it also boasts the chorus line: "violence, violence, it's the only thing that makes sense!" Just as good is Chloroform by the Bleach Boys, who suggest that abusing the substance featured in the title of their song is a lot more fun than sniffing glue. Nothing less than a punk novelty classic! Despite singing in American accents, the Users from Cambridge achieved cult status with their first single Sick Of You backed with (I'm In Love With) Today. Their second release Kicks In Style is bootlegged on Anarchy In The UK.

The CD also features both sides of the Wasps first single Teenage Treats coupled with She Made Magic, which aren't bad but don't hold a light against the first of their two tracks on the Live At The Vortex compilation. Can't Wait 'Til 78 was a great way to up the stakes in the game of PUNK brinkmanship, while everyone else was still attempting to show how 'with it' they were by singing about 1977, the Wasps were looking forward to the following year. It's just a shame that their other contribution to the Vortex album was a cover of Lou Reed's Waiting For The Man. Equally disappointing was the single Rubber Cars, backed with This Time, on the major RCA label.

There's a great deal more that could be written about the PUNK ROCK genre in Britain in 1977 but it would be counterproductive to adopt the list as an organising principle and insist on reproducing the titles of all my favourite PUNK ROCK songs from this geographical location and period. All I wanted to do by discussing various compilations of late seventies British PUNK ROCK was indicate both the broad range of material being discussed, and simultaneously reiterate that the boundaries of the genre are anything but fixed. The choice of period and geographical location was to an extent arbitrary, although the fact that I possess a detailed first hand knowledge of the material reviewed above obviously biases me towards this particular segment of the genre.

In the past it has been all too easy for individuals writing about PUNK ROCK to avoid any attempt at defining the subject by adopting a 'common sense' approach. The line generally taken by 'contemporary cultural critics' and other idiots is that everyone 'knows' the Sex Pistols and the Clash played 'PUNK ROCK'. By dealing with groups whose output isn't found in the average high street record shop, we not only get to grips with material that is more typical of the genre, we begin to see 'common sense' notions of PUNK ROCK falling apart. Indeed, it becomes clear that contrary to 'common sense', the Sex Pistols did not, in fact, make PUNK ROCK records.

Having said this, I do not want to deny the importance of the Sex Pistols as an inspiration to many of the groups discussed in this text. A mythic notion of the activities engaged in by Malcolm McLaren and his protégés provided an important organising principle for many of the groups mentioned in previous pages. However, this does not mean that the Sex Pistols, or other figures such as Chuck Berry (who also occupies an important place in the ongoing development of pop music), played PUNK ROCK. Likewise, the importance of the Sex Pistols as an inspiration to those working within the PUNK ROCK genre diminishes as we move away from this particular time and geographical location (i.e. London in 1977). Similarly, there are many groups who've worked within the genre who were never influenced or inspired by the Sex Pistols, most obviously those that were active prior to 1976.

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