a chaos of quiffs, leather jackets, brothel creepers and winkle pickers

 

pdf (206 pages / 1MB), with thanks to the original sharer

For whatever reason, the inevitable glut of articles gleefully denouncing the latest punk outrage was counterbalanced by an equal number of items devoted to the small details of punk family life. For instance, the 15 October 1977 issue of Woman’s Own carried an article entitled ‘Punks and Mothers’ which stressed the classless, fancy dress aspects of punk. Photographs depicting punks with smiling mothers, reclining next to the family pool, playing with the family dog, were placed above a text which dwelt on the ordinariness of individual punks: ‘It’s not as rocky horror as it appears’ . . . ‘punk can be a family affair’ . . . ‘punks as it happens are non-political’, and, most insidiously, albeit accurately, ‘Johnny Rotten is as big a household name as Hughie Green’. Throughout the summer of 1977, the People and the News of the World ran items on punk babies, punk brothers, and punk-ted weddings. All these articles served to minimize the Otherness so stridently proclaimed in punk style, and defined the subculture in precisely those terms which it sought most vehemently to resist and deny.