3 Quotes Tagged: punk-rock

"My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history.

I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad,
which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list.

But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk.

The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born

Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and excepting anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As long as it's good and it has passion.

And so you go out with a girl and you’re driving…

“So what are you reading right now?”

“Well, I’m not much of a reader…”

*screeching car brakes*

“I’M NOT MUCH OF A DINNER BUYER! GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT!”

“But we’re lost in the stucco sprawl of L.A.”

“I DON’T CARE!”

But every once in a while you meet the one who reads…

“So what are you reading?” he asked (you know, the date killer question)…“So what are you reading?”

“Well I’m right in the middle of a book right now — ”

Oh my god, she’s in the middle of a book. Be still my beating heart.

“So what are you reading?” he asked expectantly, nerves tingling, body aquiver

“Well, I’m in the middle of this Harry Potter b — ”

*screeching car brakes*

“DON’T BE AN ADULT WOMAN WHO READS A FUCKING CHILDREN’S BOOK IN MY CAR, GET THE FUCK OUT!