All language subtitles for BBC.Punk.Britannia.3of3.Post-Punk.1978-1981.720p.HDTV.x264.AAC.MVGroup

This programme contains
some strong language

January 14th, 1978. The last Sex
Pistols gig. No fun. This is no fun.

Beset by internal problems,
the Sex Pistols broke up.

For many, the end of punk.

The universe they created around
this mythological Johnny Rotten creature,

is an impossibility.

No-one can be that...

obtusely, permanently,
insanely wonderful, could they?

'Ever get the feeling you've
been cheated? Good night.'

As Britain teetered on the brink
of seismic political upheaval,

the spotlight would shift to a
new cast of punk-inspired idealists.

I suppose the punks were like
the early revolutionaries in Russia,

they did the job of
breaking everything down,

and then in came the next lot, and
kind of, expanded it, really, musically.

What happened after punk was
very much a result of what punk did.

And it didn't sound
like punk rock.

Anything was possible,

so long as you didn't have a great
desire to become rich and famous.

It's like after the Cold War, it's like
the beatnik scene in San Francisco -

you suddenly felt you could
do anything you wanted to do.

They would take up the
challenge left by the Pistols,

and re-imagine Britain
and its rock 'n' roll post-punk.

If the Sex Pistols had
been punk's avant-garde,

in their wake emerged
a second wave

who took the spirit of
punk and made it base.

By 1978, punk was becoming
a parody of yobbish manners

and three-chord thrash.

It had got quite ugly and
tawdry and dark and desperate.

How many fucking tunes can go...

You know what I mean?
How many times, yeah?

I mean, the truth is that
a lot of hardcore punks

actually ended up begging
outside Tube stations

with a dog on a piece of string.
You know, it was such a nihilistic,

self-destructive
thing in a lot of ways.

I mean, Sid Vicious,
kind of, committed suicide

and took his girlfriend with him
for our entertainment, you know?

And it was, kind of, getting very,
very negative and self-destructive.

Punk may have painted
itself into a corner,

but its spirit would
inspire a new generation

of underground musicians
across the country.

These post-punks would throw the
musical rulebook out of the window,

hell-bent on questioning
the nature of society,

capitalism and
rock 'n' roll itself.

The post-punk era
would be kicked off

by one of punk's
founding fathers.

After leaving The Buzzcocks,

Howard Devoto would look
to the future and start again.

I stuck up a sign in the Virgin
record shop in Manchester

looking for other band members.

It certainly said something
about playing fast and slow music,

because, of course, punk had
been a very disciplined thing

where people kind of only did
music in one general direction.

There was an advert up saying
Howard Devoto is looking for musicians

and I remember
at the time thinking,

"Wow, maybe I
should apply for that."

Formed in the white
heat of punk in '77,

Manchester-based Magazine set out
to deconstruct the rules of punk rock.

Magazine was more developed,

more clever musically
than most of punk.

The songs were tightly
arranged. They were well edited.

That was something from punk.

# Time flies

# Time pours

# Like an insect

# Up and down the walls

# The light pours out of me. #

We were offered Top Of The Pops

and I turned it down.

And that was the first
time I saw Virgin Records,

our record company, go, "Argh!"

One of the year's most
talked-about new bands is this one -

they're called Magazine and here's
their debut single, Shot By Both Sides.

Despite Devoto's misgivings,

Magazine became the first
post-punk band on Top Of The Pops.

Punk finished, really, with the Pistols
when they split up in January 1978,

and a week or two later,
Shot By Both Sides came out.

# This and that They
must be the same

# What is legal
Is just what's real

# What I'm given to understand

# Is exactly what I steal. #

I'm afraid Top Of The Pops was a
little bit of an anathema, you know?

# I was shocked to
find What was allowed

# I didn't lose
myself In the crowd. #

You know, most people
mimed - it was fakery,

and I had my problems
with things like that.

# Shot by both sides. #

Magazine were first to market,

but their commercial
success caught them off guard.

Well, you know, the
record was popular,

so, I guess there's a thing
that happens where it charts,

and you go on Top Of The Pops, and given
your performance, it goes up the charts.

I think our record was the first for
a long time that actually went down.

I never really thought
about commercial success.

# They'll have to rewrite
All the books again

# As a matter of course

# I wormed my way Into
the heart of the crowd. #

And yet there was
some unformed ambition.

Well, we weren't really
about entertainment.

We were about this
thing of expression

and getting out our stuff,

and that's what everybody
seemed to be doing within this unit

and under this umbrella.

Post-punk was characterised
by refuseniks and malcontents

who shunned the bright
lights of the big time.

One of its most fitting
bastions was Manchester,

a city traditionally suspicious
of metropolitan glamour.

# Entrances uncovered

# The street signs
you never saw... #

It was nice, actually.

I used to like Manchester,
cos you couldn't see a thing.

I mean, it was like...

With the smog and everything,
you couldn't see anything.

# Street signs you never saw

# All entrances delivered... #

It was like gangster films about
New York, you know. You see...

Film noir, sort of
thing, you know?

# Entrances uncovered... #

People would literally
come out of the fog at you.

So it was all very mysterious.

# You got Manny in the library

# Working off his hangover
3.30 Get the spleen... #

Once they got all the
pollution laws passed,

you saw Manchester, it was
like, "What a horrible place!"

Manchester saw a
flowering of truculent bands.

But not a scene.

The subconscious effect
that Manchester had on you

and your personality,
your thoughts, your actions,

it came through in the music.
It was a pretty grim place.

And you felt - I don't
know - dark, I suppose.

Joy Division had originally
formed as a punk bank in 1976,

after witnessing the Sex Pistols
at the Lesser Free Trade Hall.

Once I saw Johnny Rotten,
I realised that the only thing

I wanted to do in the world
was tell everyone to fuck off.

It was literally the next day I
went out and bought a bass guitar,

Bernard had a guitar and
we started our punk band.

As our playing
capabilities got better,

we started writing
better and better songs

and that happened quite quickly.

# To the centre of the city

# Where our roads
meet Waiting for you. #

Literally within the
space of six months,

we'd turned from Warsaw, a
dodgy punk band, to Joy Division.

# Booming through the silence
Without motion waiting for you

# In a room with no window
In the corner, I found truth. #

In a time of three-chord thrash,

Joy Division interpreted
punk's DIY ethos

as permission to be different

Determined only to be truthful,
they combined a brooding sound

with the existential
lyrics of Ian Curtis.

Joy Division.

They took the anger of
punk, the rage of punk,

but that was all
externalised stuff.

What was interesting
about Joy Division

was the rage was internalised.

# In the shadow play
Acting out your own

# But knowing no more

# As the assassins
All grouped in four lines

# Dancing on the floor

# And with cold steel
Odour on their bodies. #

In 1978, post-punk was no
communal scene of kindred spirits.

Rather the opposite.

Then you kind of had a slight
frostiness with everybody.

You know, I can remember
- empty landscape,

bump into somebody
from another band,

"Are you all right?" "Yeah. Are
you all right?" "Yeah." That was it.

Bands are very competitive,

and there's always
a great rivalry,

and there was always a great
rivalry between us and The Fall.

I've never paid much
attention to our competition

or anything like
that, other groups.

I'm a big Fall fan, believe
it or not. HE LAUGHS

Like Joy Division, Mark E Smith
had witnessed the Sex Pistols

at the Lesser Free
Trade Hall in 1976,

and set out on his
own path with The Fall.

# Totally wired Totally wired

# Totally biased... #

The Pistols, when
they started out,

I think they were
quite garage, really.

But in the space of
a couple of singles,

it went almost
heavy metal, didn't it?

# When the going gets weird

# The weird turn pro

# So I'm totally wired

# T-t-t-totally wired

# I'm totally wired
Can't you see?

# T-t-t-totally wired now. #

Taking the band's name
from a novel by Camus,

there was no mistaking Mark E
Smith's existential street poetry

for the initial
agitprop of punk.

The more you didn't dress like
them, the more you got spat at.

# My heart and I agree... #

We would get attacked for
having long hair and all sorts.

You got attacked
for having long hair?

Yeah, cos, you know, if they saw
you and you forgot to cut your hair,

you know what I mean...
Used to come off stage all green.

Back in metropolitan London,

the big question on every
interviewer's lips in 1978 was,

what was Johnny
going to do next?

The Pistols broke up in a really
unclarified and corrupting way,

due to mismanagement,
really, more than anything.

and it left me
completely frustrated

and I wanted to do something,
cos I wanted to continue with music,

so I, kind of, pooled the friends I
had around me, and formed PiL.

The record company, Virgin,
weren't too interested in a new band.

They were really, kind
of, very angry with me

for daring to suggest
complete unknowns to them,

but I had to remind
them that, you know,

up until two years before
that, I was a complete unknown.

John was up to do
something radical.

I was known for
playing a little bit of bass,

I'm not quite sure how people
knew, that, but I love bass -

I was synonymous with playing
bass, I was at one with playing bass.

There's only other thing,
which was clay pigeon shooting,

which I took up once and was
very, very good at from the word go,

and got afraid because it
might displace playing bass.

I love cacophony, I mean, I loved the
Captain Beefheart approach to music.

You know, fill a room full of
amateurs and let's see what happens.

Fantastic.

Who could have known that there
would be no more Sex Pistols?

Next thing I knew,
John's saying, "Let's do it,"

and I knew Wobble, and they
said, "We want to use Wobble,"

and I said, "Great,"
and it was on.

Released on October 13th, 1978,

Public Image marked the moment
Johnny Rotten stepped out of costume

to reveal John, the visionary.

# You never listened
To a word that I said

# You only see me For
the clothes that I wear

# Or did the interest
Go so much deeper

# It must have been
The colour of my hair

# The public image. #

You know, everybody was waiting for Rotten's
new record, after leaving the Pistols,

what was it going to be like? When he
came back with the single Public Image Ltd,

it was just like...

# What you wanted
Was never made clear

# Behind the image
Was ignorance and fear. #

Levene's...smacked-out,
Byrds, arpeggio guitar...

# Public image... #

But more than that,
right, it was rock music,

but it wasn't rock music
like the Pistols or The Clash,

it wasn't traditional like
that, it was like a departure.

It was like a way
into the future.

# I'm not the same
as when I began

# I will not be
Treated as property

# Public image. #

Public Image Ltd, very warm
welcome to Check It Out.

Where did you get the
name Public Image Ltd from?

Most people who would interview
me had a negative attitude towards me

and so it was... Again, it was
another battle I had to take on

in order to get my point across.

I don't have to explain myself to
anybody, and I ain't going to bother.

Now, I was asked here, right, to
interview with the band here, PiL,

but now we're facing a
cheapskate, comedy interrogation act

and it just ain't on, pal.

It was relentlessly tedious
to be presumed to be

a thick, ignorant oik,
over and over again.

Well, it sounds like we've
heard this story before.

Really, would you like to tell me
where? Good night. Good night.

They didn't want an
explanation of the songs.

They didn't want to know
that this was an ongoing force

and something to be reckoned with
and all coming from a really nice person!

Cop out. Cop out. BEEP.

Well, I'm pleased I didn't pick
the short straw for THAT interview.

If post-punk was characterised
by darkness and paranoia,

Britain in '78 was
the perfect backdrop.

As the fag-end of Callaghan's
socialist Government played out,

the trade unions
went into overdrive,

creating a "Winter
of Discontent".

Well, I think capitalism was
collapsing rather than fading,

and then was going to be
shored up when Thatcher got in.

You know, the climate at
the time was pretty desperate.

People were on three-day
weeks, no rubbish collections.

# How many dead or alive? #

England was a very, very
miserable, burnt-out oil rig, basically.

# How many dead or alive? #

There was an American
photographer came over,

and we did a promo shoot
with him in Leicester Square,

when Leicester Square was, I
don't know, eight bin bags deep.

It was just like
walls of bin bags,

it was like a rainy,
grey day in London,

with starling shit all
over these black bin bags.

I think it stinks, like all the
other damn strikes in this country,

run by the filthy, socialist,
communist unions.

It is not an exaggeration to say

the country was on
the verge of civil war.

In fact, the most
paranoid voices at that time

believed that the Government
was planning to bring in martial law.

There was a certainly a cabal within
the army and the establishment to do that.

I think there was an
armed wing of the Tory Party

that were trying to organise a coup
at the time of the Labour Government.

There's a book called A Very British
Coup, and there's a film about it.

As Lady Di said, there's dark
forces at heart in British politics.

One of my favourite
films from that era

is called Radio
On, by Chris Petit.

It's filmed in black and white. It
could be, like, the '50s almost.

Everything seemed very
grey and very pessimistic.

What was great about
that film, of course,

was the soundtrack was
Radioactivity by Kraftwerk

which really threw
the whole thing

into a completely
different, weird spin.

One of the key
ingredients of post-punk

would be the fearless assimilation
of a kaleidoscope of musical styles.

Punk had championed DIY,

and post-punk made it
the sound of the future.

# Radioactivity... #

Well, I think punks hated
synthesisers generally,

from a, kind of,
ideological point of view,

because if you looked at the
uses of synthesisers in those days,

it was in prog rock bands to play
very fast, pseudo-classical riffs.

You know, to me, the synthesiser
felt like a punk instrument,

because it was much
easier to play than a guitar,

and you just had to twiddle
a few knobs, play one note.

You get a half-decent sound and a
half-decent idea and you had a song.

Now, if you listen to
people like Human League,

or anybody who were
completely disillusioned

with the music of the
time, felt the synthesiser

was a logical place to go next.

The Human League were so
far removed in look and sound,

that even the king
of punk himself

had trouble spotting
kindred spirits.

# Faced with the choice

# What would you say

# The path of least resistance

# It seems the only way. #

When Being Boiled came out, John
Lydon was doing the reviews at NME,

which at that time was like
the emperor going...yeah?

And he's gone into all these reviews
and said, "Oh, it's bloody rubbish,"

and it comes round to Being Boiled,
and he just said, "Bloody hippies."

Two words. I'm going,
"Are you sure, John?"

Because essentially,
this is the difference

between the London scene,
as it is a was at the time,

to them, they were
still in this thing like,

"If I have a quiff, I'm cool."

After that...

..initial classic British
punk rock phase

things went all over the place,
and things weren't homogeneous -

very far from it.

In 1979, the future of
music was up for grabs

amongst the
factions of post-punk.

# Ah

# A-a-a-ow

# Ah

# A-a-a-ow

The term "post-punk" is, I
always thought, quite interesting,

and it is literally true that
what we did was after punk.

# In my arms

# We shall begin

# With none of the rocks
There's no charge. #

I think there was something
else going on, in a sense,

that people were trying out,
I suppose, proto-mash-ups.

We thought we were a mixture
of a funk band and a rock band,

somehow or other.

Post-punk will do, won't it?

I think I prefer
it to punk funk.

I think there was that sense
that anything was possible,

so long as you didn't have a great
desire to become rich and famous.

The dilemma between
integrity and entertainment

was caught perfectly in 1979,

when Gang Of Four were
offered a spot on Top Of The Pops

to perform their expose of
consumerism, At Home He's A Tourist.

We were doing
rehearsals for the show,

and they picked up on the word
"rubbers", cos it's in the song -

it's "the rubbers you hide
in your top-left pocket".

They said, "You can't use the word
'rubbers'," and we said, "Why not?"

And they said, "Because
this is a family show

"and we don't want that disgusting
word used on our family show."

# And the rubbers you hide

# In your top-left pocket. #

We had a long chat about
this, whether censorship

was something that we
were prepared to embrace.

So we changed the word
"rubbers" to "packets".

"The packets you hide in your
top-left pocket". And the producer said,

"You've changed the word to
packets," and we said, "Yes."

He said, "Yes, but it's still got
the same meaning, hasn't it?

"So what we'd like you to
do, we'd like you to re-record it

"with the word
"rubbish" instead."

I told him in quite
short, pithy words,

that I didn't think that was a very
good idea, and we walked off the show.

We gained nothing
by standing our ground.

Except to prove that we
could be really bloody minded.

# We are the sultans

# We are the sultans of swing. #

To my eternal shame, Dire Straits,
whose single, Sultans Of Swing,

had been in the same place in
the charts for two weeks running

and was likely to go out of the
charts, were invited in at the last minute,

having already re-recorded their
track, to come on Top Of The Pops,

and that's why their single went
up the charts and became a hit.

'The much-criticised
Radio 1 playlist committee.'

John Cooper Clarke.
That's weird. It is a weirdy.

Cooper Clarke?

John Cooper Clarke.

It came out and then they
took it back for remixing.

Boring.

Boring. It doesn't mean much.

Same tempo as the last
one. Exactly the same tempo.

The conceptual
nature of post-punk

is no easy shoe-in
for radio playlists.

Two minutes 30, fades, yes!

British radio was really not
open to what we were doing.

We were not considered
a radio-friendly band.

# I remark. #

We had definitely arrived by 1979
as far as the press was concerned,

but we had no radio. There was very
little radio play, outside of John Peel.

# Like a heartbeat

# Like a heartbeat. #

Off air, there was one medium,

which lent itself perfectly
to the new music.

I mean, that was the time when
a lot of people bought the NME,

and a lot of people bought it because there
were really interesting conversations going on.

I mean, you had NME and Sounds,
and, latterly, the Melody Maker,

that were very big supporters
of us. I mean, we got...

There was another one, as
well, wasn't there? Record Mirror?

Record Mirror. They
didn't love us so much.

There was a fascinating - or
what seemed to us fascinating -

debate going on about
what it was all about.

To categorise post-punk as
being purely outside the mainstream

was not the full picture.

There were musicians
who launched stellar careers

on a new wave of
punk-inspired pop.

# I don't want to... #

You know, there's The
Fall, and there's New Wave.

# ..go to Chelsea. #

I think it was very
appropriate, actually.

Elvis Costello
and all that crap.

New Wave, no, no.
You daft h'apporths.

It's really getting it wrong.

It was an instant record company
movement to try and turn punk

into just a fad and
here's the new fad.

# Message in a bottle... #

People like Sting were all part
of that. They definitely were.

# Message in a bottle... #

He's very far removed from
the Buddhist he pretends to be,

when there's a dollar in it.

This is Public Image
Ltd, and Death Disco.

While the Police were happy to
court fame, Johnny still didn't care.

On July 12th, 1979, PiL
appeared live on Top Of The Pops

performing a fusion of
dub, disco and Tchaikovsky,

with lyrics about the recent
death of Lydon's mother.

# Words can never
can say the way

# You told me in your eyes. #

Death Disco was
on Top Of The Pops,

that is subversive

because it was being beamed
into millions of people's living rooms.

# Never no more hope away

# Final in a fade. #

It's actually not subversive,

because I see the shit-stem
as being morally bankrupt,

and anyway around, out or through
is actually to the benefit of mankind,

so...it's inverted
subversiveness.

Is there such a concept?
There probably is.

# Never really know

# 'Til it's gone away... #

I mean, who wouldn't go
on Top Of The Pops, yeah?

I mean, there's no point saying,
"I'm not going on Top Of The Pops,

"cos we're so
punk and different."

It wasn't like that, it was
like, "Wow, this is great."

All I cared about when we did
Death Disco on Top Of The Pops,

was getting to the make-up department
and getting my teeth blacked out.

Death Disco featured on Second
Edition, "the" post-punk album.

It was presented in a metal box,

like a time capsule
for a bygone era.

To me, that record sounds...

It's pure art because
it sounds like Britain

felt like to live
in back in 1979.

It's dank record.

It's dark, it's damp

and it's slightly depressed.

# Drive to the forest
in a Japanese car

# The smell of rubber
on country tar... #

It just feels like
Britain, you know.

It's kind of like a
greyness and a kind of...

Not rain but after the rain.

# ..the cassette played

# Poptones... #

I paint pictures with
words and sounds.

And I want those pictures
to be as accurate as possible

and to tell a
complete true story,

and it's all part of the progression
of earth, life, death, all of it.

# You left a hole in
the back of my head

# I don't like hiding
in this foliage and peat

# It's wet and I'm
losing my body heat

# The cassette played

# Poptones. #

The Metal Box
record was, I think,

one of the albums that
changed things for a lot of people.

You know, rather than the
restricted sort of chord thrash,

there was, like, soundscapes, and
Wobble doing this other thing altogether,

which no-one had sort of
heard outside of reggae, really.

HE PLAYS THE BASS
RIFF TO "POPTONES"

MUSIC: "Poptones" by PiL

Poptones musically and lyrically
deconstructed all notions of rock.

The tribes of post-punk were
challenging the retro orthodoxy

that punk rock had become.

The interesting thing is that
bands like the Pistols and The Clash

were seen as so
experimental and so different,

but actually they
were rock 'n' roll bands.

They acted and dressed
like rock stars, really,

and had the whole pose on stage.

Whereas I think The
Slits were utterly different.

We challenged all that. We made
sure we even stood differently.

We didn't fall into all
the sort of, I don't know,

the cliches of rock 'n' roll.

In 1979, The Slits' fusion of punk and
reggae was a soundtrack for a new Britain.

MUSIC: "Newtown" by The Slits

It's talking about the new towns

appearing all over England,
which were just these soulless

little mini-cities.

It's quite ominous. The
bass line is quite ominous.

It's talking about people's
addictions, basically, in the city.

What's that one they built?
Oh, Milton Keynes, yeah.

It just somehow caught
the whole ordinariness

and desolation of
living in a new town.

Post-punk was a flowering
of creativity and idealism

that proved rock 'n' roll
didn't have to be a swindle.

There was this whole idea of somehow
controlling the means of production.

Again, through questioning things,
we were questioning contracts,

we were realising things were
being corrupted and taken away

and polished up and made
into, like, Showaddywaddy punk,

or children's TV punk, right?

So we wanted to have control
over what we were doing.

Formed by Geoff Travis in 1978,

Rough Trade was an indie
label with a Marxist heart

that took its cue from punk.

Rough Trade was very important

because they were so
open to different styles.

If you get, like, the first five
records they did, for instance,

you'll find synthesiser music,

guitar music, women, men, mixed.

You know, they were distributing reggae
as well. It just felt very, very open.

If you walked into Rough Trade,

they had a catalogue
of scores of artists,

doing maybe two
or three records,

most of which wouldn't
sell very much at all.

That was their business
model. It was wonderful.

Prior to Margaret Thatcher
coming to power, you know,

the whole idea of money and
commerciality was not an issue.

It was kind of almost
a bad thing, you know,

the idea of seeking fame,
success and money, was...

You know, we weren't about that
at all. In fact almost the opposite.

What Rough Trade was to London,
Factory Records was to Manchester.

Fronted by colourful TV
personality Tony Wilson,

Factory signed Joy Division.

They didn't care about
making pots of money.

They focused on the
presentation of new music.

Tony Wilson in particular,
I loved his attitude.

When he did the first Durutti
Column LP and he and Pete Saville

came up with the idea of
putting sandpaper on the sleeve,

so that when you put it in you
destroyed all your other records.

I thought that was
absolute genius.

That was from the Situationist
Manifesto. The Situationists

were going to bring a book
out which destroyed the sleeves

of all the other books.

Tony appropriated
the idea and said,

"Let's put it on this album."
I thought it was great.

We got paid 50p per 100
sheets for sticking it on the LPs,

which was
double-bubble. It was great.

It was somewhat diffused
by people shrink wrapping it.

Just when the theory was
getting interesting, reality bit.

There was a little period where
there was this exciting time,

things were really
happening at that point,

and then, of course,
you have this, you know...

You can't really explain how
ugly the Thatcher thing kind of was.

It was kind of like

the sort of really horrible, ugly,
accountant types had come in,

and they were kind of
going, "Fun time's over."

MUSIC: "By The Rivers
Of Babylon" by Boney M

On May 4th, 1979,
Margaret Thatcher took office,

A Prime Minister who the
post-punks instinctively hated.

To be a punk, you had to keep
on changing and questioning.

We thought we were questioning
the very structure of society

and the very structure of
the music you were playing,

so we ended up wandering
into this nether land.

We came out with this demented,
you know, God knows what!

Avant-guard jazz meets King
Tubby at the roots of hell or something!

# We are prostitutes

# Everyone has their price

# We are prostitutes

# Everyone has their price. #

The ironically-named Pop Group

caught something of the rising monetary zeitgeist in
October 1979, with a stinging take on consumerism.

# And you too will
learn to live the lie

# You will learn to live the lie

# Everyone has their price. #

It's not negative to think about
politics and the way the world runs.

Since the 1900s, they've been
trying to tell us that working people

shouldn't think about how
their lives are controlled,

but it's good to feel
a bit empowered.

# Ambition

# Consumer fascism... #

That's when Thatcher
and all this stuff comes in.

So suddenly your brain's
going, "Oh, my God.

"I'm not what they
call an adult, am I?"

Of course we weren't
until we were about 48!

# We are prostitutes... #

And some of us still aren't!
We won't mention names.

Do you know what I mean?
Punk isn't standing playing four...

Punk is experimenting, in
fashion, in clothes and politics.

That's what punk is, you know?

Not some old fat fart lecturing you
about punk on fucking BBC Four.

In 1979, the anger
and radicalism of punk

hadn't just dissipated into the
realms of musical aestheticism.

There were also now
real anarchists involved.

# I am an Antichrist

# I am an anarchist

# Don't know what I want... #

Crass promoted anarchy

as a political ideology,
and advocated direct action.

# I...

# I just wanna be He wants to be

# Anarchy. #

We were intervening on something
which we saw as just a hedonistic wank.

And although it's a
slight misrepresentation

of Lydon's "no future",

we, as the people we were, absolutely
would not accept there was no future.

The future is ours to make.
That's what we went out to say.

The future is not ours to
make by "get pissed destroy".

The future was a positive one and
we were going to create a positive one.

# Fuck the politically minded
Here's something I want to say

# About the state of nation
The way it treats us... #

Punk, to Crass, was all about dogma
rather than musical experimentation.

# Then you're a prime
example of how they must not be

# This is just a sample of
what they've done to you and me

# Do they owe us a living? Of
course they do, of course they do

# Owe us a living?
Of course they do... #

What I needed was to offer

a substantial
concept of freedom,

which I think was best expressed
in there is no authority but yourself,

which became our
major catchphrase.

NEWSREEL: Crass and what they represent
are attacked politically from all sides.

The right see them simply as criminals out to
destroy the existing structures of society.

The left see them as hopeless utopians,
deviationists, nearer to a bunch of vandals.

As for the authorities, they don't like anarchists
in general because they're unpredictable.

You can never tell how they'll
react to a given political situation.

MUSIC: "Do They Owe
Us A Living" by Crass

# Do they owe us a living?
Course they do, course they do

# Owe us a living? Course
they do, course they do

# Owe us a living?
Course they fucking do. #

One of the worst confrontations
I ever experienced,

and we certainly
experienced plenty,

with attacks from the British
Movement and all that sort of shit,

but one of the most unpleasant ones
was when the vegetarians and vegans

decided to have a go at each
other. That was just ludicrous.

Anarcho-punks weren't the
only ones to reclaim punk.

The Oi! Movement,
led by Cockney Rejects,

were the bastard
offspring of Sham 69.

They wanted to take punk from
the King's Road back to the East End.

They were dragging
punk from the art schools

back to the reality of what
the mythology of punk was.

They were the reality
of punk mythology.

# Gotta break out Find
something else to do

# I can't stand being
stuck in here with you

# Gonna have a
laugh Break into a store

# You know I'm bored I
don't care any more... #

Like The Angels With Dirty Faces, they
came from places you don't want to go.

That's why there was not a lot
written by the middle-class media

about these new bands.

# I'm not so ignorant

# I'm not a fool

# So keep your intelligence

# I'm not a fool

# I'm not a fool... #

The music press had a
built-in resistance to punk.

They hated punk in the
first place, the normal punk.

They were much happier
when New Wave happened.

New Wave was more
intellectual, more middle-class,

people who had been to
university who were Marxists,

like the Gang Of Four. They loved bands like
that because they were more up their street.

The turn of the decade was beset
by all sorts of dread and tension.

But by far the most terrifying
was the crescendoing Cold War.

Enormous military build-ups in
both Russia and Reagan's America,

underscored by the
Soviet war in Afghanistan,

had led to a renewed round
of political brinkmanship.

There was an office on top
of the shop of Rough Trade.

I was walking around in full
army gear with a helmet on,

because I thought World War III
was about to break out. Honestly.

'If we are attacked
by nuclear weapons,

'these are the warning
sounds you must recognise.'

You may find some
of this film disturbing,

but as long as we remain
a likely target for attack,

we must think about
the unthinkable.

UK alarm level
one. Missile attack.

Would you know what to
do if you heard sirens sound?

Waste of time, innit, going
anywhere. You've had it, in't ya?

You've had it, in't ya? Will
you take any preparations at all?

What preparations? You've had
it, in't ya? You've had it, in't ya?

No messing about, is
it? You've had it, in't ya?

No point crying over
spilt milk, is there?

AIR-RAID SIREN WAILS

Resourceful Brits that we were, we
knew that carefully-placed cushions

would deliver us and our pets
from mutually assured destruction.

Nuclear war was a
huge threat, you know.

It was a great paranoia that
I think a lot of people held,

even if they weren't
talking about it all the time.

There was the underlying
fear of this great force out there

that could be so destructive.

If post-punk was
characterised by gloom,

its darkest masterpiece was
Young Marble Giants' Final Day,

a 1 minute 40 minimalist
painting of Armageddon,

released on Rough Trade.

# When the rich die last

# Like the rabbits
running from a lucky past

# Full of shadow cunning

# And the world lights
up for the final day

# We will all be poor
having had our say... #

I wrote the song for
the plight of humanity.

When the rich die last, like the
rabbits running from a lucky past,

full of shallow cunning, I
was getting my dig in there.

I quite like digging at the
rich. It's just pure jealousy!

HE LAUGHS

# Put a blanket up
on the window pane

# When the baby
cries lullaby again

# As the night goes
out on the final day

# For the people who
never had a say. #

Even now when I listen to that
track, it's got a very strong energy to it,

in terms of its bleakness and
the fear that's in it, really, as well.

# There is so much noise
There is too much heat

# And the living floor
throws you off your feet

# As the final day
falls into the night

# There is peace outside
in the narrow light. #

Just when it seemed things
couldn't get any darker,

in 1980, post-punk's
poster boy took his own life.

Ian Curtis's suicide both
canonised and ended Joy Division.

Atmosphere was re-released
as a posthumous requiem,

replete with iconic video, which
helped create a post-punk legend.

When Ian died, we just cut
Joy Division off, cut it adrift.

The group literally was
professional for about nine months.

It was such a small,
short time, you know.

To look back now and
think of the effect you've had,

and the effect that you're having
on music now, 30-odd years later,

is ridiculous. It's a great
compliment to the songwriters.

He was an incredible poet,
more than anything else.

Just amazing. A
one-off, a one-off.

MUSIC: "Geno" by
Dexys Midnight Runners

In the new decade, there would
be a noticeable change of mood.

The term "post-punk" is
generally applied to a lot of bands

who couldn't really play
but had been at university

and were applying either art
theory or Marxist theory to music

that was kind of amateurish but
maybe feeling towards something new.

What about Dexys Midnight Runners?
What about The Specials, The Pogues?

All bands who took
traditional musical forms

and then brought it screaming
and kicking right up-to-date,

by writing about life in
contemporary Britain.

MUSIC: "You're Wondering
Now" by The Specials

2Tone marked the moment
when post-punk went positive.

Fusing black ska with the energy
of punk, 2Tone was wildly popular.

It was spearheaded by The
Specials' Jerry Dammers,

whose ambition was to
rescue punk from the darkness.

2Tone revolutionised the pop
scene. It revolutionised everything in it,

cos it had a philosophy, it had a person
whose vision it was who was driving it,

and it would never have happened without
Jerry Dammers. He made that happen.

2Tone was actually more
popular than punk ever was.

Punk was quite an extreme thing.

It was quite a
minority interest, really.

There was a lot of
negative sides to it,

and it was in danger of
degenerating into out-and-out fascism.

That's what we felt, with the
Sham Army and everything.

That's where we came in, to try and get in
there and change the way people thought.

MUSIC: "Ghost
Town" by The Specials

Released in 1981, Ghost Town was
post-punk's God Save The Queen moment.

Not since the Pistols' searing
release of four years prior,

had such social comment
caught the imagination of a nation.

We went and did
a gig in Glasgow,

and there were a lot of people on the streets
selling their household items, just in the street.

It was just really strange.

Little old ladies
selling their tea cups.

I'd never seen that
in this country before.

That's where I really
got the idea for that song.

It wasn't just about Glasgow.
It was about the whole country.

It was about Coventry as well.

Factories were closing down.

All the big industries were being
closed down, you know, by Thatcher.

# This town is coming
like a ghost town

# No jobs to be
found in this country

# Can't go on no more

# People getting angry... #

Ghost Town reached
number one in July 1981.

It marked a parting of
the waves for post-punk.

After years of being
wilfully uncommercial,

the most radical thing left for
some was to reinvigorate the charts.

MUSIC: "The Sound Of The
Crowd" by The Human League

# Don't put your
hand in a party wave

# Make a shroud pulling combs
through a backwash frame... #

You couldn't get any
more avant-garde than

the early Human League.

But by 1982, they were the
biggest pop band in the world.

# Stroke a pocket with a
print of a laughing sound... #

Something came along in
1982, where suddenly it was cool

to be on the cover of the
NME, as it always was,

but even more cool if you could somehow
also be on the cover of Smash Hits.

People like Martin Fry, ABC
coming along, Billy Mackenzie...

Mavericks.

# I'm standing still

# And you say I
dress too well... #

Post Punk's reinvigoration of pop
was the apex of this generation's story.

There still remained those for whom
there was no success like failure,

and failure was
no success at all.

# Have I done something wrong?

# What's wrong? The wrong
that's always in wrong...#

It was an explosion and it was very
short lived, maybe two or three years,

and then it branched off
into these different things.

Then the whole music scene got squeaky
clean with groups like Duran Duran and Wham!

Duran Duran were like Wire with
nice-looking boys and cheerful tunes.

People talk about the early
'80s as being this amazing...

A whole post-punk scene.

Most people didn't even
know about that stuff.

What they knew about was pop.
Pop suddenly supplanted everything.

The whole thing became unrecognisably glossy
and kind of royal blue and shoulder pads.

What happened next?
The New Romantics.

It was, like, "Oh!"
Tragic, really, you know?

We're the eternal underground.
We're the eternal influence.

We're the grumpy granddads who
were there before you've been anywhere.

No way. No, no.
I'm not having that in.

Perhaps the song that best
summed up the post-punk era

was Rip It Up And Start Again.

Edwyn Collins had borne witness
to The Clash's White Riot tour in '77,

before forming his own
band, Orange Juice.

# Rip it up and start again

# I hope to God you're not
as dumb as you make out

# I hope to God... #

I wanted to try something
different, something new,

jangly guitars.

# I hope to God.. #

Spencer Davis Group, Stevie
Winwood and all that shit.

Raw but interesting.
It's a time for a change.

# You know the sea is very... #

The song contained a canny reference
to punk originals The Buzzcocks.

Stories of London.

Public Image Ltd 2012.

John Lydon is back with the
first new PiL album in 20 years.

From The Sex Pistols to PiL,

Johnny Rotten to John Lydon,

King Johnny remains the
ever-contrarian spirit of punk.

MUSIC: "Reggie Song" by PiL

# You see a Reginald

# He is a reasonable man

# And being comfortable

# With a bit of a better plan

# He don't see... #

Over the years there's been
some 49 different members of PiL.

It's almost like a
working-class university.

I suppose the one thing
you learn in PiL the most

is the punk ethos is do it yourself
because nobody will do it for you.

# I've been dreaming... #

Don't sit back and try
to learn the set formats.

# I'm still living... #

If you do that you
become institutionalised

and you become as tedious
as everything else in the top 30.

# Back in the garden

# I'm still living... #

I love being on top of the ocean
and I love being underneath it too.

I love that.

The colours down there, the
life that goes on, it's fantastic.

It's both sides of the
picture, the yin and the yang.

# We're all still living

# Back in the garden

# I'll be there. #

Welcome to our world.