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The no future

June 01 2026

Celebrating 50 years of punk music: the songs, the lifestyle and the struggle. By Chris Sampson 

Filthy, disgusting, obscene. A disgrace. Nasty, outrageous, offensive. And, in the words of the Greater London Council’s Conservative Party Councillor, Bernard Brooke Partridge, the Sex Pistols and their ilk would have been “vastly improved by sudden death.”

You see, the Pistols couldn’t play, they couldn’t sing; they were scruffy, obnoxious and frightfully dim-witted. They were, supposedly, the invention of their manager, Malcolm McLaren; a figment of his middle-class art student imagination brought to life. Their sickening antics were contemptible, shameful and dismal compared to the upstanding citizens of the day: Jimmy Saville, Jonathan King, Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter, etc.

Worse than murderous Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, murderous Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, the West German Baader-Meinhof terrorists or the racist National Front, just about the only thing the Sex Pistols had going for them was that they were a bloody good rock band. So why all the negging? Because this was 1970s Britain, a failed state after the apparent glories of swinging London and the 1960s. By 1976, The Beatles had done a bunk, full employment had waved cheerio forever, and the memory of England’s 1966 World Cup victory now seemed as though it were a fable, some comforting myth about a Golden Age, now lost forever.

Now, there was no future in England’s dreaming; no future, no future for yooooouuu!

Punk group the Adverts were attacked and, on being taken to A&E, were told by NHS staff: “What do you expect if you go around dressed like that?”

‘That’ consisted of short hair and un-flared trousers, basically. A good enough reason to attack someone? Some thought so in 1976, ’77 and well into the ‘80s. Pistols drummer Paul Cook was set about by Teddy boys with iron bars. Not, he divined, because they knew he was a Sex Pistol, but simply because he was dressed as a punk and, as such, to their minds fair game.

J. Rotten Esquire was also attacked, by knife-wielding “patriots”, apparently unhappy about the lyrics to the Pistols’ alternative national anthem, God Save The Queen. Decades before his bizarre – apparent – support for Donald Trump, the young Rotten asked reporters: “How does free speech offend people? Are we living in democratic England or Communist Russia?”

Years later, in 1986, the democratically elected Greater London Council was done away with by Thatcher’s Conservative government; possibly due to its habit of reminding them of the unemployment figures – a common punk trope – on huge banners outside County Hall, just across the river from the Houses of Parliament.

I served my time as a loveable spikey-top during the grim, bleak Thatcherite early 1980s. At that time, it felt like you were doing something to oppose Mrs T and her cronies’ dismantling of British society, simply by being a scruffy anarcho type. We supported and wore the badges of (but never joined) CND, went to benefit gigs, wore ripped-up T-shirts, had our hair spiked up by drunken girls with peanut butter, stood up to various neo-fascist groups, the police, the government and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

Everywhere you went you were given dirty looks, assumed to be up to no good, untrustworthy, foul-mouthed and, well, just not British. Ah, but punk rock was peculiarly British; where else in the world would being impolite or not tugging your forelock to the Powers That Be lead to such castigation? Giving a V-sign to authority, or having frightful manners could get you in trouble in the UK in a way that seemed impossible elsewhere in the world. And God forbid you should turn up to a job interview with spiked or dyed-green hair or wearing a Peter and the Test Tube Babies t-shirt! With high unemployment “a price well worth paying for low inflation”, as Thatcher claimed, employers could pick and choose who would be their wage-slaves in the pre-Minimum Wage era.

But what of the other youth tribes of the era? Surely we were all united against the old farts who had enjoyed the good times and “beautiful vibes” of the 1960s, but flushed away The Age of Aquarius in ’79 by voting Thatcher into power?

Nope. You could get your head kicked in for having the wrong haircut and, naturally, I always managed to have that wrong barnet. You’d get on a bus or train on your own, and there might be three mods, or skinheads, or casuals or heavy metallers on there, any of whom might have a go at you. In the pre-CCTV-is-everywhere world, there was no one to hear you scream, and if you got “done over” as it was known, who could you turn to? The police?!

We lived in the moment back then because – quite possibly – the wrong ‘uns in charge of the hydrogen bombs that could destroy the entire world might easily do so at any instant. The fear of nuclear annihilation ticked away in the background of our lives the whole time, like tinnitus or the now-ubiquitous shite-verts on everyone’s phone.

So, what drove punks on; what kept us going? There was a sort of naïf romanticism, I guess; we saw ourselves akin to the French Resistance, disrupting our fascist rulers as and when we could, trying to evade capture – but in our case wearing distinctive, identifying clothes, making us obvious targets, of course. Duh!

There was a lot of lip service about aN@rChY in the punk world, but very few actual anarchists. The heavy politics required just didn’t look much fun, but we wallowed in the authorities’ dread and horror of the supposed insurrection that punk represented to them.

MI5 even had files on the Pistols, apparently. Just in case punks graduated from graffitiing circled A’s on bus stops to actually seizing control of the state.

‘Smash the system!’ was a much quoted slogan back then. But as time passed, I realised that the system – which vouchsafed us the NHS, dole money, housing benefit, legal aid, disabled benefits and so on – was being smashed. Not by unkempt youths with sledge hammers and utopian dreams of equality, but by creeping privatisation, cuts to vital services and lightly regulated corporate greed.

Those people have got most of society wrapped up now. The arch-capitalist expansionist Donald Trumps in the White House, the Elon Musks giving Nazi salutes, the once for-the-poor Labour party now pandering to similar powerful elites as the Tories. And, it seems, even that isn’t right-wing enough for some: hence Brexit, UKIP and now Farage and Reform UK. This is the No Future prophesied by John-Rot Lydon on God Save the Queen. And even he now backs Trump… apparently.


Punk Rock mixtape

Some punk essentials in no particular order, compiled by Chris:

  • The Violators – Summer of ‘81
  • Dead Kennedys – Moon Over Marin
  • X-Ray Spex – The Day The World Turned Dayglo
  • Taylor Swift – Smash the System! [Ho, ho! only joking]
  • The Clash – Straight To Hell
  • The Partisans – No U Turns
  • The Ruts – Babylon’s Burning
  • Buzzcocks – Boredom
  • The Slits – Typical Girls
  • Crass – You’re Already Dead
  • The Adicts – Straight Jacket


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