How many punk songs went to number one in the 1970s?
By the mid-1970s, a bitingly new form of rock music rose from down in the gutter that promised edge and tenacity. It was the ultimate force of rebellion, and yet the term itself has come to signal something a little reductive.
When you think of punk, the actual word, it no longer holds the same weight of cool that it once did. Maybe that has something to do with changing vernacular on social media (or Taylor Swift recently using it in one of her aggressively millennial new songs). But the term “punk” seems to have shifted into yesterday’s slang.
It’s also become more broadly associated with accessible pop tendencies, probably due to the explosion brought about in more recent years by bands like Green Day. That’s not a bad thing, but the overarching dilution our society often causes the more that we erase nuance means that some of the work established by our original punk maestros and figureheads is starting to be wiped from history, which just won’t do.
The Ramones, Sex Pistols, The Clash, and the Buzzcocks all bring back punk’s respectability at the mere mention of their names. Even Patti Smith and Blondie, two acts who actively rejected the label, embodied everything it stood for in ways that are easy to forget in today’s flood of polished tropes. Which, put simply, meant embodying going against the grain with such an unrestrained fervour that it changed the game forever.
Did any punk songs achieve number ones in the 1970s?
Even Smith’s answer to why she doesn’t consider herself punk came across as the very thing itself. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s like, what is rock ’n’ roll? You know, these are just labels,” she once said. Debbie Harry shared a similar sentiment, but in brushing off the ultimate badge of cool, they ended up being just that – with an unabashed confidence central to the golden age of the genre itself.
Punk pioneers in the UK might not have been quite as well-rounded as their counterparts across the pond in the New York scene, but they were the first to really make waves with definitive singles. In 1976, The Damned dropped what’s widely considered the UK’s first punk single, ‘New Rose’. From there, the floodgates opened – the Ramones fired back with ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, while the Sex Pistols unleashed ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Anarchy in the UK’. Then came Buzzcocks’ ‘Ever Fallen in Love’ and The Clash’s ‘London Calling’ – all proper anthems in their own right.
But how many of these pioneers actually reached the top charting position? Actually…none of them. Maybe it’s prophetic of punk’s fixation with shunning commercial success and mass profitability, but very few of those beloved punk tunes we all know and love actually climbed high enough for it to count. That was except for one here and there, like Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’, which reached number two on the UK Singles Chart.
That said, their popularity wasn’t exactly a main factor here. Most of the time, it was how much networks, broadcasters, and stations deemed them “unsafe” for public listening, which was the case with ‘God Save the Queen’, a song considered so “gross” that they campaigned to blacklist it from radio play. Not even ‘London Calling’ could change this streak, peaking at number 11. But maybe the answer is easier if we loosen our definitions of punk to include ones already mentioned, like Blondie, whose smash ‘Heart of Glass’ achieved the number one spot in 1979.
But all things considered, it’s easy to commend punk’s insatiable desire to reject any success measurement defined by charting position when looking at the fact that each of these made history without such achievements.
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