It is now about 35 years since punk burst on the British music scene, and, since the people who were young then and went into journalism have now risen to the top of their profession, no more obvious anniversary is required to prompt yet another series on the phenomenon, the most recent trailed on 6 Music with gritty voiceovers and cameo John Lydon appearance.
If it's like every other programme on punk it won't be worth listening to.
Quite a lot of shows of this kind appear on BBC4; there was one about Bowie the other day which mainly consisted of clips from ancient times when the old boy was writing really good songs; then again in the spring the channel had an evening devoted to Tom Petty, all four hours of it. Now Petty wrote some decent stuff, and was about as beautiful as a man could be (how I wished I could look like that) without actually being a girl, but four hours? BBC4 is a great channel - the old BBC2 de nos jours - but sometimes it looks worryingly like MTV for baby-boomers.
But back to punk. As someone who was there (no, I didn't go to see the Pistols at the Free Trade Hall, but I did see the Buzzcocks and the Clash many times, plus the Stranglers, the Slits, the Fall and so on ad nauseam from 1976 onwards), I am in a position to point out what the analysts get wrong.
Firstly, the idea that punk was new. It wasn't. When I first heard Anarchy in the UK in 1976 what was immediately striking was how familiar and comforting it was. The Pistols were a trad rock'n'roll band. They even trashed hotel rooms. The Pistols were merely Dr Feelgood with a fatter guitar sound. And the Feelgoods were doing it two years earlier.
Second, the idea that punk changed the music business: I don't think so. Previously the big record companies ran it; apart from independents like Island. Who did the Pistols sign with? EMI; then one or two others. Did they show any sign of being any less capitalist than their predecessors, the fat cats like Led Zep or Genesis? No. They didn't give away their advances to women's refuges or fund turnip-growing co-operatives in Northamptonshire. They spent it on themselves. The Clash signed to CBS pretty much right at the outset, the Buzzcocks to United Artists. These are awkward facts for true believers.
Third, the idea that punk was political. Now pretty much everything that takes place in a political context can be classified as political, but punk never had a manifesto. The nearest it got, Sid Vicious's condemnation of sex as just "two and a half minutes of squelching noises", was readily undermined by the experience of the average teenager. The movement's most overtly "political" band, The Clash, eulogised dodgy regimes like Castro's Cuba and the Islamist guerilla movements like the Peshmerga, while being signed to a big US corporation ("We can change it from the inside!") and overcharging for merchandise at their gigs. Joe Strummer was a public schoolboy who ended up reading the Torygraph.
No, punk was great, but it was a fashion, just like any other in pop. And in three years it was swept away by The New Romantics with their frilly shirts. Programmes about punk don't tell us much about music or politics, but they speak with inadvertant eloquence about journalism, ageing and the process by which people render their personal experiences into history.
