I f***ing hate the Clash now,” were the first words Chris Sullivan ever said to me, in the refectory at the Ralph West Hall of Residence in Albert Bridge Road, opposite Battersea Park, in August 1978. This was where art students stayed when they first arrived in London, and Sullivan had recently started at St Martin’s School of Art.
Sullivan was from south Wales and had been one of the original punks in 1976, regularly coming up to town to buy clothes from Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop in the King’s Road and traipsing along to Sex Pistols gigs in the Nashville, the 100 Club and the Screen On The Green.
He had been a soul boy and was wearing PVC and drainpipe trousers while most so-called punks were still sporting flares and carrying around Edgar Broughton LPs under their arms. Which means he has just as much of a right to pontificate on punk as any other journalist who was around at the time.
Sullivan really was there at the beginning
If all the people who claim to have seen the Pistols in 1976 were telling the truth, McLaren’s brood would have been playing the O2 rather than the Nag’s Head in High Wycombe, but Sullivan really was there at the beginning.
If you track him down on Instagram, you’ll discover a man who was actually where he was when he said he was. His interest in punk also reinforces the incontrovertible truth that punk was a fashion thing as much as it was a music thing (something which a lot of hoary old music hacks still deny).
Socrates to the Sex Pistols
But by 1978, he was done with it (he was certainly fed up with the Clash going “all American”), which he soon proved by becoming one of the original Blitz Kids, ditching his safety pins and torn T-shirts for zoot suits, hair grease and large felt fedoras.
This book, which he has written with the assistance of Stephen Colegrave from Byline Times, is not the first time Sullivan has written about the period, and it joins a seemingly never-ending litany of books about punk. However, Sullivan’s book is less of a memoir and more of an encyclopaedia, tracing punk’s roots back to Socrates, Rimbaud, Baudelaire and Marcel Duchamp.
It also moves through the Andy Warhol and Velvet Underground years, New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1970s, and other narrative incidentals.
The book’s conceit is expanding punk’s chronological orthodoxy by widening its brief and going right back to 19th-century bohemia, framing the genre as a way of life rather than a countercultural explosion in the mid-1970s. This already makes it different from any other punk book you’ve read.
Sullivan says punk’s core values feel more urgent than ever
By way of explanation, Sullivan says punk’s core values — authenticity, resistance and creative freedom — feel more urgent than ever. “Punk isn’t just music,” he writes. “It’s a way of life.” I know Sullivan had a lot of fun writing this book, and there is a lot of fun to be had from reading some of the more outlandish profiles. There is also the added attraction of more than 150 original interviews with punk’s most iconic figures such as Iggy Pop, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Siouxsie Sioux, Vivienne Westwood and many others.
Punk will continue to be pored over forever, and with good reason: it remains the definitive youth movement of the late 20th century.
Sticky-floor testimonies
Essentially the book is an oral biography and the meat of the matter is the testimonies from people who — like Sullivan — were actually there at the time amid the stale beer, the sticky floors, the gobbing, the fighting, the bad sex and the torn bondage trousers.
Sullivan has had such an extraordinarily busy life that I hope his next book leaves the past behind and instead focuses on a subject he has so far ignored: himself.
Dylan Jones is an editor and writer
Punk: The Last Word by Chris Sullivan and Stephen Colegrave is out now (Omnibus Press, £30)
