Siobhan O’Donnell on the Grand Summer Finale of a punk series tracing roots back to the original British Explosion, and what it’s like watching your own youth walk back into the room
I saw the listing for the Grand Summer Finale of the Vintage Punk Sunday Afternoon Series a few weeks back and didn’t think much of it beyond a mild flicker of recognition, the way you do when a gig poster mentions bands you half remember from decades you’d rather not fully account for. Three bands on the bill this Sunday, all tracing their roots back to the beginning of the actual British Punk Explosion, several members having played the genuinely original circuit back when it still felt dangerous rather than nostalgic. I bought a ticket almost as a joke to myself. I did not expect to end up standing at the back of a sweaty little room in south London crying quietly into a warm cider, but here we are, and I’m genuinely not sorry about it.
What Actually Got Me About Standing In That Room
It wasn’t the music exactly, though the music was genuinely good, tighter and more disciplined than I remembered anything from that era actually sounding live, decades of practice apparently doing something useful even to people who built entire careers on deliberately sounding like they’d never practiced at all. It was the crowd. Grey hair under leather jackets that had clearly been worn continuously since roughly 1979, patches sewn on with the specific, slightly wonky stitching of someone doing it themselves at nineteen rather than buying a pre-distressed replica from a shop that charges eighty quid for the privilege. I stood there watching a woman who must have been pushing seventy pogo with a kind of committed, joyful violence I haven’t managed myself in years, and something in my chest just went. Properly went. I had to step outside for a minute and pretend I had something in my eye.
Why This Particular Show Landed So Much Harder Than Expected
I think it’s because most of what gets marketed as punk nostalgia these days is so thoroughly sanded down, museum pieces behind glass, documentaries with talking heads discussing “the movement” in the past tense like it’s something that happened to other people a long time ago and is now safely over. This wasn’t that. This was actual original members of actual original bands still doing the actual thing, not performing a tribute to their younger selves but simply continuing, uninterrupted, decades later, in a room that smelled exactly like every good punk gig I’ve ever been to, sweat and spilled lager and something faintly electrical. Nobody up there was pretending to be twenty-three. Everybody up there was exactly the age they actually were, and it was somehow more punk than anything I’ve seen from a band a third their age trying desperately to look dangerous.
The Rest Of My Week, For Context
I should say the broader week has been its usual chaotic self, this apparently being our fourth or fifth heatwave of the summer depending on which forecaster you believe, the city doing that thing it does where everyone complains constantly about the heat while also refusing to leave the parks, bank accounts visibly drained by months of relentless outdoor drinking, Time Out running yet another list of gigs I’ll never afford tickets to, Ariana Grande and The Weeknd and various other genuinely enormous stadium acts filling up whatever column inches the actual interesting, small-room stuff doesn’t manage to claim. I went to two other, considerably louder shows earlier in the week, a hardcore bill in Camden that I mostly remember through a haze of tinnitus and a distinctly younger, angrier crowd who reminded me uncomfortably of myself at their age, all elbows and conviction and absolutely no patience whatsoever for anyone telling them to calm down. Good. That’s exactly how it should be. I don’t want them calm.
What This Sunday Actually Taught Me About My Own Relationship With The Scene
I think I’d quietly assumed, without ever really examining the assumption, that punk was something I used to be, past tense, a phase properly completed and filed away alongside my old Docs and a truly regrettable haircut from 2003. Watching that room full of people who simply never stopped, who kept doing the thing continuously rather than treating it as a discrete, closed chapter of their lives, made me realise how much of my own supposed maturity has actually just been quiet cowardice dressed up as growing up. Nobody in that room had grown out of it. They’d just kept going, and it looked considerably more alive than most of what currently passes for edgy in this city.
What I’m Actually Going To Do With This Realisation
Genuinely, I don’t know yet, beyond buying a ticket for whatever the next instalment of this series turns out to be, and possibly, finally, retrieving my own old jacket from wherever it’s been quietly disintegrating in the back of a wardrobe for the better part of a decade. There’s a version of this where I write something appropriately wry and self-deprecating about a woman in her forties having an emotional breakdown over a Sunday afternoon punk bill, and there’s a version where I just tell you honestly that it moved me more than almost anything else has this year, and I think, for once, I’m going to let myself have the second version without immediately undercutting it with a joke. I cried at a punk gig. The band was genuinely brilliant. The crowd was better. I’d do it again next week if they’d let me.
One Last Thing Before I Go
If you’re reading this and you were part of that original wave, wherever you are now, whatever room you’re currently playing in, however small or unglamorous it’s become compared to whatever you might have imagined for yourselves back then: thank you. Genuinely. You looked, on that stage, considerably more alive than most of what I’ve been served up as edgy and exciting this whole overheated summer, and I needed reminding, more than I realised, that the actual thing never really went anywhere. It just got quieter for a while, waiting for someone to come back and listen properly.
