All The Young Punks is the 3rd Volume of the series in which famous people and people in bands are gently pushed aside to make way for the voices of the rest of us - Punk Rockers In Their Own Words, the real stories of punk.
From the 70s to the present day and stretching all around the world, this is the the punk rockers - not controlled in the body or in the mind.
"I also remember a group of mates finding an abandoned copy of the Sex Pistols file in a park and reading it like it was a porn mag or something."
"One of my older sisters, Luisa, was a punk punk - bin liner dresses; new wave boyfriend who drove a bubble car and had odd socks; she dyed her hair orange and the bus conductor told her that "that'll be 10p for you and 10 for the parrot."
I felt a sense , as a Gay Outsider, in finally belonging to something that was ours. Punk was inclusive and seemed to offer young Gays a way of self expression that was uniquely theirs.
"punks were starting to appear at the school I attended, too, and following all my previous years of hating music but loving horror/sci-fi films and books, the way punks looked just tapped into a similar sensibility. They resembled the monsters, aliens and creatures I already somehow loved and identified with."
Until punk happened, although I was always sociable and had many good friends, I felt somehow outside of everything.
"Punk was perfect for people like me; people who felt like me. I’d often felt as I was growing up that I was just on the edge of everything, that I didn’t quite fit in somehow. But now I fitted right in, ta very much; it was everyone else who didn’t, and I liked it. A lot."
"Looking back I just can’t see how a shy and naïve teenage boy such as me could have suddenly started dressing in such an anti-social stick-out-like-a-sore-thumb way. It must have been the hormones."
"When I first bought Never Mind the Bollocks, my dad heard it and smashed the record to bits. I went out and bought it again, and only played it when he wasn't around."
"I think the simple truth is that we were all caught up, engulfed and swept along by an unseen, magical current of energy. Some of us floundered, some of us drowned, and some us learned how to surf that wave"
I think I actually 'identified' with punk before I even had any punk records.
After getting to the end of side two, it was like a bomb had gone off in my head
The days in my middle teens with sex, drugs and violence totally suck, but I survived thanks to punk rock.
I still think 'Get up and do it' regardless of age
Every week I’d receive letters and packages of records or tapes from America, Poland, Finland, Brazil
drinking 6 packs in my car behind the Whisky A Go Go night club, and late nights in Barney’s Beanery.
We made DIY amps, recorded rehearsals on a crappy tape recorder and we knocked on doors - just like Jehovah's Witnesses - in the hope someone would be ok to buy it. We sold one. haha!
It did not lead to glorious, life-affirming self-empowerment. To the contrary, a lot of it but made me feel even more separated and freakish from my surroundings
When bad-girl attitude and unhealthiness of punk rock made me uncomfortable, I got to know Crass and I thought this was the punk I had been looking for. Then, Throbbing Gristle made me feel positive about my own kinkiness and express it through music and art. Since then, I’ve always been a feminist and an anarchist.
It made me realise that pissing people off was really, really good fun.
Punk celebrated the outsider, the ostracised and the disconnected, as well as embracing the absurd, the extreme, being independent, and notions of trying to be honest and true to one’s self as much as possible.
The revolution didn’t start in Oxford Street so instead I’d walk to the train station with everybody else
