The four bands who helped to set up punk, according to Pete Townshend
John Lydon‘s start in music came from a T-shirt with the words ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ scrawled across it. He has since confirmed that he didn’t even mind the classic rock pioneers after all, which, if anything, elucidates the anarchist liberation of the punk movement he soon became king of even more clearly. The point was that he was making a point. It was as simple as that.
He snarled to prominence at a time of cultural discontent, when music had turned to virtuosos who lost the youth’s vote, the peace and love of the 1960s had died, and the only thing that the streets were awash with that money couldn’t buy was poverty. So, somebody had to make a point on the part of the people, and Lydon and his punk cohorts figure, ‘It may as well be us’.
In his view, his point was Promethean, too. Though it might be claimed by academics that punk began in the US with bands like the Stooges, The Ramones and Patti Smith, which, in fairness, does to some extent check out, Lydon argues his inspirations came from elsewhere. He dismisses the narrative that punk was born in New York as a bald-faced lie. “Now, an awful lot of American journalism is saying that New York punk is where it all comes from,” he told Far Out.
“Oh, go fuck yourselves; it is talking shit,” he comically continued. “I was brought up in Britain!” Lydon expressed, leering towards the screen as though he was going to headbutt his webcam. He then rattled off an array of the artists that truly did inspire the Sex Pistols: “Mud, The Sweet, T. Rex, Mott the Hoople, Dave Bowie, Led Zeppelin, Alex Harvey Band, Status Quo, Traffic, a vast extending universe of music. That’s what influenced me”.
Ironically, Pete Townshend would agree that punk was hinted at and then born in Britain, but he cites a different string of bands as the foursome who first foisted the flat-out liberation that would soon follow. “The Stones really affected me very, very deeply, their wildness on the stage, the fact that they didn’t wear uniforms. This kind of thing was very just outrageous,” he reflected in a 1979 radio interview.
For him, The Rolling Stones led the way, leaving the movement that followed forever indebted to their jiving rebellion. “Jagger’s stage performance and Keith Richards’ stage performance, which is just very, very wild and unkempt. They were the first, I think, the closest to a sort of latter-day punk image.” And, just to rub it in the faces of any American listeners screaming, ‘What about MC5, Iggy Pop, and all the CBGB bands’ at The Who guitarist, he claimed, “I don’t know how many American kids really know what happened in London with the punk bands”.
In some ways, you could argue that he is correct. Punk, by very definition, was a movement as opposed to a work of art. The discreet difference between The Ramones and Blondie is testimony to the fact that the CBGB scene was a golden art explosion, but it had not yet coherently been cobbled together as a cohesive political/culture ‘movement’. When you think of punk, you think of a pink mohawk, oversized boots, and three shoddy chords, not the intricacies of Marquee Moon, regardless of what came first or what holds most artistic merit.
So, more so than the London bands, it was the London movement that Townshend thinks made punk a special cultural force. “I mean it was unbelievable. It was absolutely unbelievable,” he says. “Because the punks were just really total anarchy, the audience and the bands,” he adds, notably bringing the fans into the picture on an equal pedestal. “It was completely anarchistic, not destructive, just completely outrageously free and of course, The Who’s music was never like that.”
Nevertheless, he does feel that The Who at least hinted at the potential of this explosion. Alongside his own group and The Rolling Stones, he also places another couple of British stalwarts as leading lights for the revelry that soon erupted in their wake. “The early Kinks were pretty raucous outfit,” he adds. “And the band that Eric [Clapton] used to play with, The Yardbirds, they were pretty outrageous outfit as well, sound-wise.”
Ironically, it was when this rawness disappeared that punk blazed into view as if to fill the void of the working-class liberation that counterculture rock ‘n’ roll had reared but failed to sustain.
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