we oppose all rock and roll

Subway Sect - Ambition (Rough Trade 1977). Design: unknown.

New exhibition now on in London's second smallest exhibition space - the L Gallery in W+K's reception desk. It's a selection of Neil Christie's collection of old punk singles.

'We oppose all rock and roll'

In 1977 I was fifteen. I was a kid living, it seemed to me, on the edge of everything, up in the frozen wastes of northern Scotland, waiting for something to happen. The first wave of punk was what I’d been waiting for: a movement to join, a cultural call to arms, a teenage rampage, a riot of our own. It’s hard now to imagine the scarcity of media in those days. There was no internet, only three TV channels, you could buy chart records in Woolworths or Boots.  And they cost so much you could afford to buy maybe a single a month. There was only the NME and the John Peel show – and in Aberdeen these were like bulletins from another world. 

 

Sex Pistols - God Save the Queen (Virgin 1977). Design: Jamie Reid.

The 45 rpm 3 minute (or less) single was the key artefact of the era. Songs on singles weren’t generally included on albums, many of the bands never even made albums and things were changing very fast. (Some purists would insist that anything recorded after 1977 isn’t really punk.) The singles were the thing. Old school, Old Grey Whistle Test rock was LP music – records with sleeves big enough to roll your joint on… you hippy. Punk was 45s.  

 

Generation X - Your Generation (Chrysalis 1977). Design: Barney Bubbles.

These singles were totems, talismans and badges of allegiance. Not widely available, hunted, hoarded, swapped, carried to school, played again and again and again. The graphics on the covers were themselves codes to live by that we wore on our sleeves and pinned to our blazers.   The work of artists and designers like Malcolm Garrett (Buzzcocks), Jamie Reid (Sex Pistols) and Barney Bubbles (Stiff Records) helped to shape the iconography of punk and were as different from the sci-fi/whimsy of Hipgnosis/Roger Dean album sleeve imagery of the old guard as the raw sound of the Pistols was from the neo-classical pomp shite of Emerson Lake & Palmer.   Punk maybe didn’t overthrow royalty and the government in the way it aimed to. But it changed me. And its influence – the sound, the look, the attitude - is still to be felt today in the indie scene, the DIY aesthetic, design, art, the fashion world and society at large.

In the words of Subway Sect (from A Different Story, B-side of Ambition):

"We oppose all rock and roll as going down the chute. We oppose the rock'n'roll that's held you down for so long you can`t refuse."

 

  Sex Pistols - Holidays in the Sun (Virgin 1977). Design: Jamie Reid.

 

The Clash - Complete Control (CBS, 1977). Design: CBS in-house.