Before I begin to explain my life as a rural ‘punk’ in the 1970s. it is important to point out that I considered myself more of an ‘outsider’ than a ‘punk’ and the ‘punk’ label was one I was given because of the music I listened to, the clothes I wore and the haircut that I sported, rather than a club I joined.
As a young teen in a small rural Norfolk town in the mid-seventies I listened to rock ‘n’ roll, all the cool kids did. It was very popular and still is in many rural communities. This would have been around the time that Malcolm McLaren had his teddy boy shop Let It Rock on the Kings Road. Elvis was still in the charts and bands such as Showaddywaddy and the far superior Darts were producing their own form of rock ‘n’ roll covers. I first became aware of punk in 1976 via the release of ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ by the Sex Pistols but God Save The Queen was the first punk single I bought in 1977. It is important to note that living in the ‘sticks’ meant that things just reached you later. Of course there was TV and radio and the music press, but cultural spread took time. God Save the Queen piqued my interest due to its ability to piss off a whole bunch of people (including my foster parents). This was during the Queen’s silver jubilee year and back then there were far more royalists and street parties. When I brought the single home, my foster father broke it in half and threw it in the bin he was so enraged.
My punk music tastes got more political very quickly after I heard The Clash’s first album, Stiff Little Fingers and Tom Robinson on the night-time John Peel show on Radio 1. You can never underestimate the importance of the John Peel show to youth subculture of the mid to late 20th century. Back in 1977 I was still heavily influenced by rock ‘n’ roll fashions and after saving a lot of birthday, Christmas, and paper round money, I got a bus into Norwich (our nearest big city) and went to a Teddy Boy shop where I had already bought a selection of bootlace ties, but this time I was going to buy a pair of blue suede brothel creepers with a huge solid soul. I’m not trying to brag, but I’ve always had particularly large feet for such a short chap and even then, I was a size 9, so these shoes looked enormous on me, I looked like some sort of weird rock ‘n’ roll clown. It wasn’t until I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window whilst I was walking back to the bus station that I saw how preposterous these shoes actually looked on me. I didn’t realise it at the time, but this was actually my first Punk act. A short time afterwards I bought myself a Crombie from a charity shop to go with my creepers and found a beret from an army surplus shop and (with various accessories) this became my look.
In his book Subculture: A Meaning of Style (1979), Dick Hebdige discusses the ideas of bricolage and appropriation, being core to the punk aesthetic and to me these were the corner stones of punk as a music and as a fashion. I know this is a contentious subject area, but I have always had a problem with the idea that to be a ‘real’ or ‘genuine’ punk, you were expected to buy clothes from Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren, Boy, or anywhere else on the Kings Rd, but so what, that I wasn’t the first and didn’t go to the 100 club or see the Sex Pistols at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. In my small rural town, you could count the number of punks on your two hands, and we took our lives in our hands every time we went out. We went to Friday night discos in the church hall and hoped that we could jump up and down to an occasional punk track that was played by the DJ and if he didn’t play anything punk, we would just jump up and down to something else. We got the train into Norwich on Saturdays and hung out with other punks from other towns that did the same thing on a green outside a pub called The Brown Derby. We could buy records on our visits to Norwich but otherwise had to special order them from a small electrical shop in the town.
One of the things we did have was good gig venues in Norwich and a fantastic local (ish) seaside venue called West Runton Pavilion where everyone from The Clash to the U.K. Subs, Slaughter and the Dogs, Gang of Four, Siouxsie and The Banshees and The Damned played. The only problem with the venue was it was on the coast and if you went to a gig there you would often have to break into a beach hut to spend the night afterwards, unless you could get a lift home from someone old enough and rich enough to have a car.
The small rural town I lived in always struggled to keep up with fashions, trends or ideas, but suddenly there was a bunch of us who had always felt like outsiders, that never really fitted in anywhere, a bit geeky, a bit oddball and now we had a name. There were three or four older punks (only by a couple of years but this is a lot when you are a teen) that us young ‘uns looked up to and I remember one of them told me that punk "wasn’t about what you are, it was about what you’re not", this has always stayed with me (thanks Pat!).
To me punk was about charity shops, army surplus and your parent’s old and oversize clothes, put together with anything that came from that cupboard under the sink, padlocks, dog collars, a piece of old chain. punk was about fighting old people at jumble sales for the best clothes, it was about turning your tie the other way around at school and tucking the thick, wide bit in your shirt and it was about getting an old woman who lived in the town to knit angora and loose knit jumpers for you. I have this theory that most things you find in charity shops are around 20-30 years old and punks had the luxury of finding things from the 1950s and 60s in charity shops. Today those shops are full of clothes from the 80s and 90s and 2000’s and who really wants to wear them? I was not a King’s Road punk, I wasn’t even a face in my nearest city. Today punk history continually revolves around the Kings Rd or Manchester, but there were plenty of us out in the small towns and in the countryside and our rebellion was just as authentic and as heartfelt as any other rebellious teenager in the world. Sadly by 1979, 1980 most punks were wearing a black leather biker jacket ( I still have two of mine) and jeans, but I’m sure they were and still feel as rebellious as those who had gone previously.
By 1980 I had discovered Industrial music, New Romantic, and Goth. In my heart I’ve always been a punk, but maybe I just always loved dressing up?
Main image: Martin Devenney is far right (not politically!)