The punk songs that scared “the shit out of” Pete Townshend
Punk feels like a weak term now. It’s thrown around everywhere, used to describe any music with a bit of a rough edge. Or, with the mounting overuse of ‘post-punk’, it seems to be becoming a word used as a stand-in when people aren’t quite sure how to define something. But back in the day, punk meant something. To Pete Townshend, ‘punk’ meant something scary.
In 1980, The Who’s wild guitarist sat down with Rolling Stone to analyse the scene. It was an odd moment. Punk as a movement seemed to come to an end just as quickly as it started, burning bright and fast as a fiery ball of social fury. In the UK especially, bands like Sex Pistols and The Clash felt like a direct response to the social and political climate of the country, with bands taking direct hits at authority in their lyrics.
“When you listen to the Sex Pistols, to ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’ and ‘Bodies’ and tracks like that, what immediately strikes you is that this is actually happening,” Townshend said. Similarly, the band’s breakout hit ‘God Save The Queen’ was a specific attack, released to coincide with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. In short, these were protest songs rooted in very real anger and aiming to get across a very real meaning. Within the lyrics, there were contemplations on poverty, austerity, fascism, access to health care or the lack thereof. The characters in the songs were portraits of real people who were being let down by the world the band and their early listeners were living in at that very moment.
“This is a bloke, with a brain on his shoulders, who is actually saying something he sincerely believes is happening in the world, saying it with real venom, and real passion,” Townshend said of Johnny Rotten. It was that fact that made punk so scary as the energy of the song burst to life, motivated by genuine anger.
“It touches you, and it scares you—it makes you feel uncomfortable,” he said about the genre. In its earliest and most genuine form, that’s what punk was all about. Sure, there was the subculture with the aesthetic and clothing styles, but at its core, punk was about saying things how they were, staring right at injustice and pointing it out with all the anger it deserved.
Punk wasn’t there to appease or make things easier to swallow, all for the sake of a big singalong chorus. “That’s one of the reasons: a lot of new music is harder to listen to,” Townshend explained. It wasn’t just Sex Pistols that he considered as part of this bold and terrifying wave.
He credited two other acts for this wave of punk’s very real messaging infiltrating the radio waves. “You get a band like the Clash, and they come out with a nifty little song like ‘Clampdown’, and you can’t hear the words, and they’ll play it on the radio in L.A,” he said, but added, “you read the fucking words, they scare the shit out of you.”
He thought the same of another face that once buzzed around the Sex Pistols’ early punk scene, clearly staying true to the original motivation of saying it how it is, no matter how uncomfortable. “The Pretenders—Chrissie Hynde’s got a sweet voice, but she writes in double-speak: she’s talking about getting laid by Hell’s Angels on her latest record! And raped,” he said. To him, that’s what makes Hynde so vital. “The words are full of the most brutal head-on feminism that has ever come out of any band, anywhere!” he declared, as high praise for the writer.
But, to Townshend, the success of the music relied on a specific audience who “felt the same way, felt as abandoned, felt as anarchistic, and felt as I-don’t-give-a-shit as they did.” As punk seemed to come and go, the terror of bands like Sex Pistols and the new wave of angry artists dissipated into a kind of apathy. “We’ve very much dropped our idealistic stance in terms of our weight of responsibility to rock’s evolution,” the Who guitarist said, reflecting on a moment in history as it was over.
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