Michele at
A Small Victory has a number of good posts up about Punk and New Wave music. I was interested enough to get involved in the comments. Lileks was there too. In fact, he started Michelle off on the whole thing.
I’ve heard people say that Punk and New Wave were terms invented after the fact, by record companies and the media, to describe phenomena they weren’t part of and didn’t understand.
KFX makes the same point in a comment to one of Michele's posts.
It's a view that's surprisingly widespread, but it's certainly not the way I remember it.
From what I've heard, the New York Dolls were Punk in ‘74; the people who went to see them knew that. They didn’t think it because the New Yorker told them to. Malcolm McLaren knew the Sex Pistols were going to be a Punk band when he put them together. He’d worked with the New York Dolls and had seen the possibilities.
In England in late ’76, “punk rockers” seemed to be everywhere. Most of them were following fashion, but the bands they followed knew they were playing Punk Rock. They didn’t find the word in the Sunday Times; they knew it already. They could occasionally be quite provocative on the subject, as I remember it.
In England in ’76, the Listener magazine was talking about “a new wave” of “punk-rock groups” and those who weren’t close to the music might use the terms interchangeably. But by 1977, there was a lot of other new music around apart from Punk. On the home front, not all the kids who’d picked up guitars had stuck to three chords. And, more and more, American bands playing new music where coming over to England and getting a warm reception. New Wave became anything that was new music but wasn’t Punk. Or at least, that’s how I used the term back then.
Not that people didn’t argue about it. In Liverpool, discussions about which bands were “real” punks and which weren’t could get heated. Lileks hit the nail on the head (as usual) when he commented.
Punk and New Wave have been folded together. It's inevitable; what once were Great Schisms that wrecked friendships become, after a quarter-century, subtle stylistic differences. It's wrong, but history is lazy, and music historians even lazier.
By 1980, the Washington Post was using the term more narrowly, when it referred to British bands like the Police and Elvis Costello as part of the English “New Wave”.
I managed to catch a slice of Punk and early New Wave, though my perspective is a little parochial: a couple of years in Liverpool in the late 1970s. Whatever you want to call it, the distinctive thing about the UK scene at the time was that it seemed as much a social movement as a music genre.
It was a do-it-yourself revolution.
Kids who’d been learning to play guitar, jacked in the lessons and started to gig instead. You didn’t have to be good (or, in my case, even competent), you just had to play. You can categorize the resulting noise any way you want, but the energy that went into making the music was new and it had attitude.
The influence of Punk and the New Wave music of the late seventies and early eighties is far-reaching and well attested. What’s often overlooked, is the revolution the music created in the UK distribution industry.
The same just-do-it approach and disdain for conventionality that went into the new music was carried over into its production and distribution. In response to the wave of new bands and new sounds, small independent labels sprang up (usually started by the band or friends of the band) to try and get the music out. The small record shops that sold the product (the big stores wouldn’t touch it) became meeting places for devotees of the new music. Probe Records was the place to go in Liverpool, but the pattern was pretty much the same all over.
Staffed by enthusiasts and seeing the demand, some of these record shops started to move into distribution. It was a backroom operation at first, small scale and simple, but in some cases it quickly grew to swamp the retail side of the business. This happened with
Rough Trade in London and Revolver Records in Bristol. And when it did, UK independent music distribution was born.
Today, according to
AIM, “the UK independent record sector accounts for a quarter of the UK market and leads the world in terms of music innovation.”
When I worked in the industry in the early nineties, Revolver Distribution had a multi-million pound turnover but was still owned and managed by a music enthusiast who’d started out distributing records from the back room of a small record shop in Bristol.
Restructured and renamed in 1993, Revolver (now called
Vital) has been associated with a string of successes.
In 1996, Vital became the first independent distributor to have both the number one and two records in the national album charts in the same week with The Bluetones "Expecting To Fly" and Oasis "(What's The Story) Morning Glory".
In 2000, Vital became the largest independent music distributor in the UK.
Twenty-five years on, I couldn’t tell you what happened to most of the bands, but one of the New Wave businesses just made it big.
