The band that defined punk, according to Richard Hell
When it comes to defining the genre, punk can mean a lot of things, depending on who you ask. While it’s often associated with brash and snotty attitudes with guitars turned up to eleven and played in an almost rudimentary fashion, it can often refer more to a rejection of popular culture and the desire to make something that directly opposes embracing the norm.
The UK and US were both known for having their own takes on this that revealed themselves in a variety of ways, from the grittiness of The Stooges in the motor city of Detroit providing an alternative to the pop and soul records produced in the city, to the gothic stylings of Bauhaus in Northampton that simply sought to create something exciting in a town that had little going on artistically at the time.
One notable and much-celebrated icon of US punk is Richard Hell, a poster boy for the movement in the States, having been involved with Neon Boys and Television in the early 1970s and being a co-founder of The Heartbreakers alongside former members of fellow punk provocateurs New York Dolls. He later went on to form Richard Hell and the Voidoids, whose debut album Blank Generation in 1977 caused a shift in the landscape and saw the term punk become much more widely used.
Despite being such a preeminent figure in the scene, Hell doesn’t appear to recognise himself as really being ‘punk’ and cites one of his British counterparts as being the quintessential punk act, having laid out the foundations for all that followed.
Emerging from London around the same time were the Sex Pistols, a band whose brattiness and general disregard for conformity made them notorious in the British press. They achieved infamy for interviews and television performances that either invoked a sense of disgust or drastically altered the minds of impressionable and disenfranchised youngsters. They, in the eyes of Richard Hell and countless others, were the complete embodiment of punk.
While they gained their initial reputation at home in the UK, word soon spread over to America and caused just as much of a stir there as it did in their home nation. Hell explained in a talk on the origins of his career that the impact of the Sex Pistols’ stateside arrival led to them being regarded in a way that made them synonymous with the ‘punk’ label.
“Because the Sex Pistols were such a powerful phenomenon,” says Hell, “The model of ‘punk’ [and] the definition of it, became the Sex Pistols.”
While Hell does go on to acknowledge how his work was a direct influence on the music and image of the Sex Pistols, he notes that “their behaviour was the public face and mass media origin of it.” The image that the band and Svengali manager Malcolm McClaren created for themselves was copied for years after, and members Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious are still heralded as symbols of the punk movement today for the way they dressed, behaved and spat in the face of music industry orthodoxy.
“That’s part of the reason that the inner part of me doesn’t think of myself as ‘punk’,” Hell expresses. “Punk is the Sex Pistols. I’m not the Sex Pistols.”
