Punk lasted in the UK for little more than 14 months, between 1976 and the Jubilee Summer of 1977. Thirty-five years later, in another Jubilee year, how might we regard the intense, chaotic, moody, surreal, futuristic-yet-Victorian aesthetics of the movement? In answer to this question, photographs taken at the time by Simon Barker, also known as Six, go a long way to articulating the ways in which a phase of youth culture attained the impact of a manifesto – while never quite losing the cool allure and faintly slapstick temperament of its confrontational amateurism.
Despite or perhaps because of its brief springtime of largely
pantomime anarchy, punk can be seen in retrospect to have held a
mirror up to the expectations of many whom it touched. To some,
punk was primarily political in its energy, carrying class war or a
reclamation of the Situationist desire to 'wreck culture' to the
brutalist Britain of the pre-Thatcher 1970s.
To others, it was an avant-garde fashion parade: a damply
British reclamation of the Zurich Dada or the Ballets Russes. And
to yet others it was the gleeful desecration of rock music's Church
of Authenticity, in which had been worshipped the sanctity of the
Blues. Speaking with Malcolm McLaren – arguably punk's architect –
shortly before his death in 2010, the case was put more simply: if
punk could lay any claim on historic status, he said, it would best
be remembered as "like doing the Twist in a ruin".
All of these definitions have iconoclasm and confrontation at
their heart, and also the causes of youth and newness. And from
this, punk acquires a further definition: that in its games with
acceleration and deceleration, in its perverse fusions of
tradition, English quaintness and science-fictional strangeness, it
appeared to confront the stagnation of cultural consumerism – by
describing, in a language of self-parody, the notion of modernity
itself reaching critical mass and unsurprisingly imploding. Hence,
perhaps, the slogan above the door of the SEX boutique at 430
King's Road in Chelsea: 'Modernity Killed Every Night'.
For Howard Devoto – co-founder of Mancunian punk pioneers,
Buzzcocks – the question was more emotional: the movement had been
a device for "trouble-shooting modern forms of unhappiness". While
for the artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, in his uneasy punk
fantasy Jubilee (a non-punk film that included some punk people)
the violence of punk was artistically related to both the lineage
of Leftist cinema and the neo-Romantic 'Englishness' conjured up in
the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.
Simon Barker was a key witness and participant within the
immediate pre-history and originating energy of punk. His
photographs share with Nan Goldin's early studies of the New York
and Boston sub-cultures of the 1970s, a profound and joyously
audacious sense of youth going out on its own into new freedoms and
new possibilities.
In this, Barker's photographs from this period capture a moment
when the tipping point between innocence and experience has yet to
be reached. The model and sub-cultural celebrity Jordan, for
example, is photographed as a self-created work of art – her
features resembling a Picasso mask, her clothes more post-war
English county librarian. The provocation of her image remains
untamed and unassimilated, nearly 40 years later; and within her
surrealist pose there is the triumph of art made in the medium of
sub-cultural lifestyle.
Barker/Six was a member of the so-called 'Bromley Contingent' of
very early followers of The Sex Pistols and the retail and fashion
work of McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Other members would include
the musicians Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin, and the writer
Bertie Marshall, then known as 'Berlin' in homage to the perceived
glamour and decadence of the Weimar republic. Originating from
suburbia, but all determined to leave its security as soon as
possible, the Bromley Contingent became the British sub-cultural
equivalent, in many ways, of Andy Warhol's notorious 'superstars' –
volatile, at times self-destructive or cruelly elitist, but
dedicated to a creed of self-reinvention and personal
creativity.
It is this creed, as opposed to the swiftly commercialised music
of punk, that Barker's photographs from the period anatomise so
well. At once intimate and forensic, austere and camp, documentary
and touchingly elegiac, these photographs capture a milieu
experiencing a heroic sense of being outsiders – a condition that
has always been the privilege of youth, and which has long claimed
many victims in its enticing contract with the thrill of taking an
oppositional stance.
It is difficult to understand, in 2012, quite how outrageous the
first generation of punks appeared to be; their clothes and
hairstyles provoked not simply shock and disapproval, but genuine
hatred and even violence. Jordan, famously, would commute up to her
job in McLaren's shop on the train, in full make-up and customised
bondage outfits – her demeanour more prim than neighbourhood
threat. The collision between a rather archaic, comedic English
quaintness, and the front line of a sub-cultural avant-garde, was
typical of the internal contradictions upon which early British
punk appeared to thrive.
The sites of punk's war with the world are now well trodden, and
histories proliferate – most particularly in an oral and anecdotal
form. There is the sense that punk was a moment of raised
consciousness for those who were caught in its cyclone, and as such
the movement has become both a rallying point for a generation and
a subject of historical fascination. How might the image-satiated
consciousness of our late post-modern lifestyle rediscover the cold
bright sparseness, dereliction and decay that comprised both the
inspiration and the host environment of punk's aggressive
modernity? Simon Barker's photographs from this period are a rare
and intimate account of punk's ability to mint newness. They are
also, in their way, classic portraits of youth – adventures close
to home, and the cool stillness of seeming to live beyond the end
of history.
'Punk's Dead' by Simon Barker is published by Divus. An
exhibition of Barker's punk photographs will open for a month
from 7 June, at Divus Temporary, 4 Wilkes Street, London E1. For
more information, visit punksdead.com
'Michael Bracewell: The Space Between – Collected Writings on
Art' is published by Ridinghouse
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