The punk band Richard Hell crowned “the cream of the crop”
The whole point of punk is to be provocative. It’s a genre built to be rule-breaking and defiant, lending itself nicely to musical pioneering. Whether it be daring lyrics or loud sonic experimentation, punk is meant to push boundaries, meaning that it’s pretty hard to compare or rank acts when so many people are doing groundbreaking work. It’s tough to separate the shock from the skill, but according to Richard Hell, one band raced ahead as the best of the best.
As a singer, songwriter and bassist, Hell contributed to several deeply influential groups. Growing up alongside Tom Verlaine, the pair developed their musical style together as they ran away from school and got up to all kinds of antisocial chaos. First, they started the band Neon Boys, but soon after, with some lineup changes and a name change, that became Television, one of New York’s finest creations and an essential act in punk history.
The band started in 1974, meaning that Hell, Verlaine and Co were riding the first wave of punk. They were a key part of the CBGB crowd alongside Patti Smith, the Ramones, Blondie and more. It was a scene that some would credit for pioneering the punk sound. But really, everyone knows that punk, as we know it today with its uniform and attitude, was born in the UK.
“I thought the Sex Pistols were the cream of the crop,” Hell told GQ, crediting Johnny Rotten and his London lot as being the best of the best. The argument about who the first punk band were is an ongoing one, with acts like the Ramones and Stooges pre-dating the Sex Pistols. However, it often feels like the UK band crafted punk into the image we remember it as.
Alongside their friend Vivienne Westwood, it was the Pistols that set the uniform with all its tartan and safety pins. Songs like ‘Anarchy In the UK’ and ‘God Save The Queen’ and the scale of uproar they caused also set the language, making it clear that punk would not only be musically rebellious but socially too.
Hell says that even though other bands had been around longer, there was a shift when the Sex Pistols came onto the scene in 1978. “They came in and topped everybody, for sure,” he said.
“They took all the existing strands and made a perfect package out of them,” he added. To him, the band took everything that was already defined about punk and made it better. They took the attitude of the Ramones, the wild on-stage antics of the Stooges, the gloomy musicality of Television, but the anthemic nature of the New York Dolls. They did all of it at once, forming themselves into one unstoppable unit that bettered all their competition, according to Hell.
