50 Years of Punk

Mark Sloper has assembled quite an impressive list of talking heads here to guide us through the evolution of the punk culture from anarchic, provocative and rebellious to borderline acceptability and chart success. Motivated by that mid-1970s sense of hopelessness amongst everyone from the squatter to the well-to-do art student, bands like "The Clash" and "The Stranglers" and the "Sex Pistols" start to gain traction with their raw sound and lyrics whilst Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood craft an image within an image to suit the wide range of people who adopt an entire way of life and an identity inspired by what they hear and see. Therein lay the snag for me with this. The interviews are informative - even if it is now difficult to imagine Hugh Cornwell or Terry Chimes doing anything so radical, and the images of people gathering together like latter-day tribes does show us something of the sense of community punk engendered, but there is a real paucity of music. Sure, there is some actuality and I suppose that the very nature of their underground activities and their fans meant that there probably weren't too many folks at their gigs with an 8mm camera, but we just don't hear enough to get an understanding of just how wide-ranging this was or why it really resonated. There's plenty of chatter, but just not enough meat on the bones of this disappointingly dry documentary. It has certain similarities with this year's "Northern Soul: Still Burning" film in that it showcases just how something eclectic and spontaneous, celebrated by a small but dedicated group of fans, became a victim of a more populist appeal - one that suffocated the originality and rebelliousness of the movement and replaced it with something that appeared on the hitherto sceptical front pages of the music press - and even on "Top of the Pops" - something previously derided by many who saw their creativity as a direct response to that very banality. There is some archive, but for the most part it's limited to stock shots (and is often reused), but when Siouxie Sioux; Joe Strummer and "The Slits" do get their moment on the stage, this does show us just how visceral these performances were in their acoustic graveyards where you and to wear sunglasses to avoid the spit going in your eyes. It's really more of a "Storyville" type of retrospective and would probably have had more punch had it been condensed into fifty minutes with less reminiscing from gents in polo necks and lounge jackets and more visuals of the racket they made at the time.