Punk

: Previously on Punk...

Bonk!

I just wanted to shock people out of their normalcy.

: I mean, come on,

the greatest fuckin' lyrics in the...

Well, besides the Ramones.

Hello.

"Kick out the jams, motherfuckers."

The grown-ups were fucking this up big time.

: I've learned that telling the truth

is a very good way of life...

...but there's this mediocrity that journalists create

that still want you to believe

that this is something of a sham and a joke.

: When all this first started,

there was no word "punk."

As soon as the word "punk" went up in Britain,

it was something to be disdained, you know,

it was something terrible,

and the press just made it worse.

The cult is called punk, the music, punk rock.

Basic rock music, raw, outrageous, and crude.

I mean, they just looked at us

as though we were kind of weird,

like, why were we doing this?

And we were very, very aware of a few bands

across the sea in New York

who were sort of in the same mindset.

: And we weren't trying to be like them,

and they weren't trying to be like us.

It was just two parallel things.

: We are the real McCoy.

We're not going to just fold up,

and in a few weeks,

you'll wonder what all that was about.

We're going to be here,

and continuing to get harder, and rougher, and tough.

That's what music is supposed to be teaching us.

Have you been taught?

: Finsbury Park was the area I grew up in.

We'll call it North London.

At seven, I contracted meningitis.

I went into a coma.

When I came out of that,

which was something like three months later,

I had no memory at all.

I remembered nothing of anything.

Not a knife, a fork,

no physical co-ordination,

and I'd be having intense, nasty visions

and nightmares.

Well, I went through that.

Four years it took to fully recover my memories,

but all the way through, still, music was there,

because my mum and dad,

they were really avid record collectors,

so I grew up with reggae

just as well as I did with The Kinks,

just as well as I did with Irish folk dancing,

and the traditional Irish singers,

and everything,

everything and anything,

and classical music too,

and somehow Iggy Pop's in there.

I loved that growly voice.

Oh, my God, I'd never heard that in rock music.

That "rawr"--

just rippin' it up,

and there was this, like, hardcore, in your face,

violent sound

that absolutely upset everything inside your head.

Loved it.

I thought it was the essence of pure, hardcore rock.

Not rock 'n' roll. Rock.

: Iggy Pop was very revered,

and he embodied the whole punk spirit for me,

and when he came across to London,

it was so exciting.

But if you trace everything back, man,

all roads stop with Iggy Pop.

He struck a chord with the UK punk movement

like no other American band.

At the time that punk was starting to re-emerge

through The Damned and the Sex Pistols in London,

I was on the continent

thinking in a whole other direction.

: There was something with Jimmy

that I hadn't seen in rock and roll,

an unleashing of the animalistic kinds of rock

that you never really see.

It's always usually safeguarded,

and very, very safe.

Do you feel you've influenced anybody?

I think I helped wipe out the '60s.

: And so everybody was having a good time,

but in England,

the whole subject was taken much more seriously,

and it wasn't until

they actually had to deal with the Sex Pistols

that all of a sudden the cat was out of the bag.

: We weren't liked,

but then again,

all of our early gigs, we weren't liked.

I never heard myself,

just like in rehearsals,

because we had no monitors, you know?

Our genius of a manager never thought that, you know,

a lead singer might like to hear himself.

So for me, it was just a puzzle in that band, really,

right up to the first time we actually had monitors,

of why they were telling me I was awful.

I was imagining I was, oh, my god,

Roy Orbison, you know?

That ain't what was going on at all.

The first time I did hear myself with monitors

was at the 100 Club,

supporting a band called Eddie and the Hot Rods.

They had monitors,

and they were very, very, very kind to loan them to us,

and that backfired really badly,

because the second I heard

what I really, really sounded like,

it made me furious.

So rather than blame myself,

I blamed the monitors...

and the mic stand went through,

and I caused some damage to their personal property,

and I still feel very bad about that,

but not really.

Malcolm.

It's not complicated, really.

There was a man

who wanted to grab all the attention for himself

and be seen as a genius.

: The Clash, The Damned,

and the Sex Pistols

all had people working for them,

or managers,

who were maybe 10 years older, and had been in the rag trade,

so they were all very similar,

but they understood that something good

and interesting was happening,

and they wanted to get a piece of it, basically.

: We did all the work,

us, the band.

We wrote the songs.

We went out and endured the audiences,

and he would sit in an office

and plan on buying a new lampshade,

or things like that,

but never really interested

in what the runnings of all of this was,

until, of course, good reviews started coming in.

I played the part of being a manager.

I didn't do much managing.

I did a lot of mismanaging.

: Malcolm.

We used to call him "Malcolm What-Can-I-Do-You-For,"

basically, because he was a...

he was a very Fagin-type character to us,

I thought, you know.

He's not the kind of guy

I would want to have as my manager at the time,

or anything.

He was just the guy who ran the clothes shop,

as far as I knew.

The only reason I think I ever went to his shop

was that I had a girlfriend at the time

that wanted to buy a pair of high-heeled shoes.

I suppose I was no different than any young guy back then.

You know, it wasn't so much an angry time,

but a hell of a lot of frustration.

The worst thing, I think, was

you've come out of school, you're...

and there's no work,

and I hadn't signed on the dole

because I thought I'd like to work and make some money,

but it came to a point where I had to,

and I was walking down this hill,

and there was an old cemetery,

Heath Lane Cemetery,

and there was a guy in it,

and he was digging a grave whilst whistling to himself,

but very happy...

...and I thought if I did that job temporarily,

it wasn't a job where I'd have to think about anything.