Matthew Worley

Like I say, the politics of punk are really bound up in the fact that it gave people a sense of agency, a belief that they could do something, that they weren't actually worthless and useless, that they'd had something to say, they could say it.

I think it's a mistake to think punk had a definite politics.

I think the politics of punk are always contested and you can read different types of politics into it.

We're talking ideology or anything like that.

I think over time, punk then manifests quite a lot of different types of political responses to the extent that you've got Bazike crass, really taking anarchy seriously and creating a narco-punk thing.

But you've also, unfortunately, got a load of kind of right-wing bands who created a whole, let's face it, bands like Screwdriver played punk rock and did it in a way that generated Nazi politics and racist politics.

I always think, for me, the way in which McLaren and Westford used a swastika, it was always in juxtaposition with other things.

So the famous Destroy T-shirt is a swastika with an upside-down crucifix and a picture of a postage stamp with the Queen's head being decapitated and Destroy above it.

And so you're destroying the three pillars of authority, religion, politics, and monarchy.

You can read that in a more sophisticated way, but people just wearing a swastika just shock people, and it's more problematic.

One way of thinking about the Sex Pistols was almost like a kind of kamikaze mission into the heart of the music industry to blow it all up and just get rid of all the rules and the expectations that people had about pop music and rock and roll.

And then it was up to people to then put the pieces back together in a way that they wanted to.

Of course you can mix punk with a bit of free jazz and a bit of funk and become the pop group.

Of course you can take a punk attitude to things and put really harsh electronics on it and think about paranoia and deindustrialization and become Cabaret Voltaire.

And of course punk doesn't have to be four boys in a band.

It can be the Slits or it can be the Raincoats or something like that.

And of course punk rock doesn't just have to be three chords played quick.

You can bring reggae in there.

Reggae are singing about what's happening to the black community, so we're going to sing about what's happening to our community, and then it's our community's black and white, so we sing about what's happening to both of us.

And it just breaks everything down and gets re-put into place.