A History of Punk: Punk & Pistolry

Explores the raw energy, rebellion, and liberating impact of Britain’s 1976-77 punk explosion.

Punk: the filth and the fury. But it was so much more than that.

In The History of Punk Music, author Stephen Palmer depicts the punk rock explosion of 1976-77 in tired, bored, and socially stratified Britain. Emerging from the litter-strewn streets of London, punk’s music expressed the suppressed anger of young working-class people with nowhere to go and nothing meaningful to do. Its music was raw and shocking. Its fashion mocked staid middle-class values. Its art was expressed in cut-outs and by sprayed graffiti. Yet beneath this sudden explosion, frightening to those of the establishment who witnessed it, incomprehensible to white-collar workers commuting to and from work, lay a philosophy of individual creative expression and an ethic of anti-racism and liberation for women.

Punk in its original form was a movement of human liberation, a Year Zero moment in the history of a nation more used to colonial exploits and a vast empire. It spoke of fury, of hopelessness, of cathartic anger expressed through visceral, exciting, revolutionary music. Its visual images captured the gaze of the nation, and soon the world. And all of its central figures yelled, hammered and smashed the doors of the Establishment.

This book charts the origins, appearance, development and ending of punk. It is a book of passion and vivid description, befitting the individual visions of the original punk musicians.

Punk was filthy and furious, yet it was also a new dawn for the British music scene.