Yesterday, Karoline and I had a spirited two hour long conversation with a gentleman writing a(nother) book on the heyday of 1980s UK punk. We briefly touched on cassette labels and how seemingly any band with a four song recording could start one. The regional compilations that were little more than mix tapes made by friends with crude hand-drawn covers. And the small towns that became flash pots of honest, earnest, pure and determined punk. Take a one hour minute bus ride and maybe you'd be in another small mining village with another youth center with another crew of a dozen kids making up another four bands and if they didn't all know each other then they all wanted to know each other and support each other with gigs and create an actually community out of a world that seemed overwhelmingly inhospitable in so many ways. Sure, most of those idealistic young adults have grown up or moved on or died, but that doesn't mean that the desperation of "Self Defence" or the pure idealism of "Monarchy Needs Anarchy" will knock you on your ass in 2021 even more than it probably did in 1984....because these kids from Nantyglo (that's in South Wales, population something less than 5,000) were just doing the damn thing. They were a part of something bigger than themselves. And that's what I (still) want to hear.
CLASSIFIED PROTEST
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