During my 2014 journey through various newspaper databases I would occasionally come across reports by writers at The Economist. The quality and insight of these stories piqued my interest and led me to do a separate durational study on The Economist database for stories involving the word 'punk' for the years 1975-1995.
While there were less results than in my wider search, those that I did find tended to be of a marked contrast to the stories I was reading in the Daily Mail and The Times. By contrast to the hysteria, The Economist tended to write about punk in a removed, faux disinterested, frequently droll, always devastatingly incisive way.
As is often the case with that publication, their writers seemed to have a knack, at the height of public and press hysteria over punk, to cut through the bullshit and get to the heart of the matter. This is particularly evident in two stories they published about punk in the summer of 1977.
The first, titled ‘More money than music in nihilism’, concerns punk and the Silver Jubilee. The unnamed writer (The Economist doesn’t use bylines), sets out his or her stall quite early on, with the following:
“Punk, or new-wave rock, gained notoriety when Mr Bill Grundy of Thames Television interviewed the Sex Pistols last year. The group so shocked the public (ie, delighted the press) and scared the record companies with its obscene language that it has already made £125,000 in broken recording contracts alone.”
Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but, while they aren’t revealing anything readers probably didn’t already know here, the tone is striking. It suggests that both writer and publication are not prepared to join in with the moral panic around punk: they will comment on it, but they aren’t fooled by the machinations in the press and music industry that are fuelling it, and they don’t think their readers should be fooled either.
Further on into the piece, the writer muses on what is meant to be shocking about punk, and concludes with the following shrewd observation:
“This can be seen as just a re affirmation of rock music’s anti-establishment roots, which have been somewhat replaced over the past 10 years as the original working-class heroes have learned to enjoy the lifestyles of the rich.”
Again, not imparting any new information here, but putting the point across in a delightfully low key snarky manner. They also aren’t fooled by the working class posturing of some of the punk fraternity either, reporting that while Mick Jones “once claimed that he had never lived below the 17th floor”, his bandmate Joe Strummer “went to a public school.”
The second of their pieces from the summer of 1977 is my personal favourite. It concerns the ongoing pitched battles between Teds and Punks on London’s Kings Road that summer, and is headed up ‘For an unlimited season, in Chelsea’. Full marks for droll understatement there.
In amongst the initial reportage of pitched battles on the Kings Road (or ‘Tribal warfare’ as the writer has it) are some interesting nuggets of information, including the observation that other people outside of the two tribes were being caught up in the violence, simply by virtue of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Last Saturday this meant a group of homosexuals who were protesting against the conviction of the editor of Gay News on a charge of blasphemous libel.”
As well as revealing in one stark sentence the extent to which the past is indeed a different country, I can’t imagine any other publication reporting on the Teds v Punks skirmishes including this particular detail.
The report goes on to describe the pitched battles as being “London’s latest tourist attraction” and points out that, as well as participants travelling from outside of London to be there, there were also some who’d travelled from outside of the country to be there as well, the report mentioning “continental” Teds and Punks.
There then follows a thoughtful section on why the Teds and Punks have more in common than that which divides them, and the report concludes by offering some theories as to why it’s all kicking off in Chelsea in the first place. Their conclusion being that anti-hooligan strategies employed by the Metropolitan Police against Chelsea FC have led to violent elements gathering on or around the Kings Road instead, thus fuelling the violence. Not a popular conclusion, I suspect, when it came to fuelling the moral panic around punk, but I daresay there was something in it.
While The Economist doesn’t report on punk per se in the 1980s, there is a thoughtful piece about the youth of Poland from summer 1982 (‘A lost generation’) that points out that, since the outlawing of Solidarity at the end of 1981, many of the country’s youth have turned away from politics and have embraced punk instead.
Other mentions of punk throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s include referring to Colonel Qaddafi as “the Libyan punk” in 1981, some ruminating on punks fashion legacy in 1988, and a deliciously bitchy piece on Nigel Kennedy from 1991, following his dissing by the controller of Radio 3, John Drummond.
“Mr Kennedy’s carefully cultivated cockney accent and extravagant clothes led Mr Drummond to accuse him of becoming the ‘Liberace of the nineties.’”
Ouch. It’s like reading the 1990s equivalent of Bridgerton’s Lady Whistledown.
Does any of this matter? In some ways yes, in some ways no. What The Economist coverage does, nearly fifty years after it was written, is provide a wider context to press coverage about the UK punk scene in those early years of hysteria and mayhem. The very nature of the coverage suggests that not everyone in the press was prepared to play along with the moral panic around punk, and that some intelligent mainstream press reportage and coverage was happening outside of punk. It’s important that intelligent and important questions were being asked, and that context was being provided. It’s easy to forget this when you look at the cultural narrative around punk, which tends to be written in black and white binary opposites.
Photo of London by Hugo Sousa on Unsplash
