My introduction to punk came via the seventies revival in the early 1990s. Specifically, it owes a lot to the BBC's Sounds of the Seventies series as well as re-releases of records by the Clash and Sex Pistols in 1991 and 1992.
I could say that when I first heard 'Anarchy in the UK' in 1992 the world changed. But I would be lying.
In the summer of 1992 I was very into Sonic Youth, specifically the song 'Genetic' from their Dirty album: 'Anarchy in the UK' sounded terribly slow when set against 'Genetic'.
I had first heard Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1991 when they appeared on Top of the Pops to promote their new single, 'Kiss them for me'. I was very intrigued by the band, to the extent that I did, in early 1992, buy a copy of the Superstition album from a stall on Stockport Market.
I liked it at the time, but it would be a stretch to think it had anything to do with punk.
Later in 1992, when I was recovering from an aggressive chest infection, I listened to a documentary on Radio 1 about the Peel Sessions. It was on this documentary that I first properly heard songs by punk bands, specifically, the Slits, Damned, Adam and the Ants (the early version of the Ants, when Jordan was managing them) and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Peel Session version of 'Hong Kong Garden' was played, and I was very taken with it.
A few weeks later me and my sister were out second hand record shopping in Double 4 in Stockport when we stumbled across the Banshees 1977-78 Peel Sessions LP.
We took it home and played it non stop for about a week, at which point it was cruelly taken away from me on the orders of my mum on the basis that it was an early Christmas present from my sister, and should be wrapped up and put away until the end of December. In retrospect, mum and dad were probably just sick of hearing it and fancied a break. They weren’t of the punk generation and, while we’d watched Sounds Of The Seventies together on TV as a family, they’d both made their excuses when the punk episode was on, returning to watch us sitting cross legged on the living room floor in front of the TV, singing along to Joy Division’s ‘Transmission’. It was a very long time before I found out that Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album, not to mention the Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls album, had been recorded at Strawberry Studios in Stockport.
In retrospect, it perhaps isn’t surprising that Stockport wasn’t blowing its own trumpet, culturally speaking, in 1991. We still had a hung council (this tends to be Stockport Council’s default setting, politically) and it was probably skint so, the upshot was, even if there had been the political will to celebrate the cultural history of the town, there wouldn’t have been the money to do so. Strawberry, like Staircase Café and the old Stockport workhouse, was so much neglected, rotting history in the early 1990s.
This wasn’t to say that there were no pockets of alternative culture in the town. The area around Underbank and Hillgate (the area of the town centre where Strawberry Studios used to reside) while struggling, did contain Double 4 Records, which sold second hand vinyl and new vinyl at cheap prices, and was wallpapered with billboard posters, meaning it looked like an indie inclined student bedroom. There was also Cobwebs, at that point a one floor alternative clothes emporium with a piercing and tattoo studio out back. It sold tie dyed hippy, patchouli scented stuff alongside PVC and fetish gear and t-shirts with slogans such as ‘When I die, bury me face down so the world can kiss my ass’ and ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me’.
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| Stockport's premier alternative emporium circa 1993 |
The shop had existed, in one form or another, since either 1985 or 1986. In 1996 they moved to bigger premises across the road, meaning the hippy stuff was on the bottom floor, the goth and punk stuff upstairs, and the top floor had biker gear and t-shirts. The tattoo and piercing parlour, which became White Dragon, is still at the old site to this day, but Cobwebs closed in 2000.
There was also The Stage Door, which sold fancy dress stuff alongside dance gear, including face glitter and deeley boppers, which were to come in handy during the Kenickie and bis years. There were also several charity shops and sex shops, including a branch of Harmony, the shop where Linder Sterling purchased the dildo she used in her infamous meat dress attired appearance at the Hacienda in the early 1980s.
With a heavy dose of romanticised imagination, you could stroll up and down the tail end of Underbank and Lower Hillgate in the mid 1990s and imagine you were on the Kings Road in 1976.
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