Boff Whalley
brought the brilliantly subversive Commoners
Choir to Brierfield Mill for a very special #BannerCulture Sunday. Now this
erstwhile stalwart of Chimp Eats Banana and Chumbawamba joins two collaborators
in a brand new project for #PendleRadicals. Together they
look back to a time of creative ferment around the Pendle Hill area in the
lastest #PendleRadicals blog. We can’t wait…
Sick of Being Normal!
Pendle Punk 40 Years On
Three of us – myself, Sage and Casey
Orr – have spent the last few months talking to various people from all over
England whose lives were changed by being part of the punk community in and
around the Pendle Hill / East Lancashire area in the late 1970s. We’ve set a
date for an exhibition and event in Colne in early February (more details soon)
and it looks like the exhibition, publication and various discussions will
carry on after the opening, over in That 0282 Place in Burnley Central Library.
Here’s the background to the project.
When Sex Pistols burst onto British
national TV in 1977, they set off an explosion of ideas that would, within the
next three years, create a generation of thinkers, do-ers and makers. Taking
the best principles of hippy – do-it-yourself, question authority, find an
alternative – and aligning them with the chaotic spirit of 1968’s legacy of
cultural, political and social revolution, punk reacted against the austere
1970s that ushered in Thatcher and instead created new and vibrant communities
around its music, its literature and its style. Nowhere was this more evident
than in the East Lancs/Pendle punk scene, which became a hotbed of invigorating
cultural activism through its self-produced fanzines, its bands and its
communally-run venues creating a region-wide community of people – many of them
not much more than kids – who were able to seize their moment and, in doing so,
change their own lives forever.
Much of the retrospective literature
of punk, written as history by London-centric music journalists, likes to claim
that by 1979 punk had burned itself out; what they miss is a nationwide blaze
of energy that was ignited from that initial Clash/Pistols spark and took hold
in towns and villages across the land. I grew up in Burnley, where as 14 and 15
year-olds we had secondary modern schools, growing unemployment and a
second-division football team. Older kids at school played prog rock albums and
the youth clubs were run by scout leaders and Methodist groups.
As kids we knew about the hippies and
freaks who lived on the old council rubbish tip near Queen’s Park – we loved
their huge bonfires and mad carnivals and processions. They were the
inspirational Welfare State International, and when they left the town (1978) we
turned back to our TV sets, where Granada’s Tony Wilson gave Sex Pistols their
first airing. Johnny Rotten’s first words on that September early-evening
family show were “Get off your aaaaarrrrsssse!”. In effect, this is
exactly what thousands of young people from all over Granadaland did – we
created our own world of noise and colour, frank and outspoken, and made things
happen. Taking over Welfare State’s vacated building, bands formed and
rehearsed. Mid Pennine Arts, with its photocopier and enthusiastic and
encouraging staff, became a hub of fanzine-making. Local people went from pub
to pub starting up venues, creating gig collectives that shared out performance
dates among all the newly-rehearsed bands. As well as Mid Pennine Arts there
were various local political groups and Colne’s Youth Theatre that actively
supported this outburst of activity, along with the impact of national
organisations like Rock Against Racism, that compounded the progressive ideas
within this growing subculture.
By 1979 this ad-hoc, disorganised
community had established itself not just as part of the local arts community
but as a radical and dissenting voice in the region. Front page headlines in
the local press were commonplace (MP Slams Obscene Punk Magazine!) and
in early 1980, TV presenter Bob Greaves came over from Manchester to make a
30-minute TV documentary about this remarkable regional scene.
Now 40 years on, what is most notable
about that time and place – stretching across from Accrington to Colne and from
Pendle down to Rossendale – is that so many of the people who were part of that
community of modern-day dissenters didn’t disappear into middle-aged anonymity
but instead took the core values of punk and applied them to their everyday
lives. Core values not of dyed, spiked hair and trousers full of straps and
buckles but of fierce individualism, social responsibility, anger at inequality
and a willingness to speak out.
Photographer Daniel Meadows, who
worked extensively in the area in the mid-1970s, is famous for his work where
he revisited the people he photographed decades earlier and let us see how much
people had changed. What ‘Sick Of
Being Normal!’ will look at is how the characters in that East Lancs punk
episode have changed and learned, how much they use that important time as a
yardstick for how they live now, how their lives back then as active, creative,
communal kids informs their decisions today.
Some time late last year – 2018 – we
found out about Mid-Pennine’s ‘Pendle Radicals’ series, looking at the history
of radical ideas in the East Lancs area, from Chartists to Suffragettes to
Union organisers. It seemed like the punks of the late 1970s fit into this
great history of mavericks and campaigners, both by challenging the cultural
norms of the day and by creating a powerful and progressive community that
sprang from the people, not from above. Mid Pennine Arts agreed, and invited us
to gather ideas, stories and images that celebrate that particular time and
place.
To this end we’re planning a
publication and exhibition based on interviews with those characters and
illustrated by present-day large-scale photographic portraits set alongside
sourced photographs of them from around 1979/80. The photographs will inform
the text and vice versa. It won’t just be a record of a particular time, but a
way of looking at how that cultural hotspot changed people’s lives forever –
looking at what exactly the ex-punks are doing now that is still informed by
the local and national events of 1979/80.
We will gather artefacts and
memorabilia, fanzines and posters, play the music of the time, show films taken
at the time in the area (there’s a lot of fascinating but little-seen footage
of bands and audiences at Colne’s Union Hotel and Rossendale’s Deeply Vale
Festival). There’ll be a newspaper/fanzine styled publication with an extensive
essay (how that gathering of nonconformists fits in with the area’s history of
radicalism, from suffragettes, socialists and Clarion Clubs to Welfare State
and Theatremobile) alongside the photographic portraits. The paper will be
free. We will host a talk on the impact of those years on its local players.
The opening of the exhibition will be a night of varied and diverse music and
film. We want to echo the unconventional creativity of those times by creating
something unexpected, an East Lancs celebration of how culture can change
people and in turn how people can change culture.
‘Sick of Being Normal!’ was the name of one of local band
Notsensibles’ songs, a song that resonated in this region-wide community of
disaffected teenagers. The answer to that cry of nonconformity wasn’t
inward-looking nihilism or cynicism but a flowering of creativity and energy.
For many of the people involved, that energy never went away, and that’s what
this exhibition / publication will explore and celebrate.
Boff Whalley, Casey Orr, Stephen
Hartley, November 2019
With thanks to Nick Hunt at MPA and
Jamie Cunningham at That 0282 Place
