Punk rock

“The Sex Pistols were still rock'n'roll ... like the craziest version of Chuck Berry. Hardcore was a radical departure from that. It wasn't verse-chorus rock. It dispelled any notion of what songwriting is supposed to be. It's its own form.”

“It would be possible to write the whole history of punk music without mentioning any male bands at all – and I think a lot of [people] would find that very surprising.”

“Hippies were rainbow extremists; punks are romantics of black-and-white. Hippies forced warmth; punks cultivate cool. Hippies kidded themselves about free love; punks pretend that s&m is our condition. As symbols of protest, swastikas are no less fatuous than flowers.”

“Rap music is the only vital form of music introduced since punk rock.”

“Girls invented punk rock, not England.”

“That was the beauty of the punk thing: [sexual] discrimination didn't exist in that scene.”

“[punk] was the first musical genre to spawn fanzines in any significant numbers.”

“On TV, if you watched cop shows, Kojak, Baretta, when the cops finally catch the mass murderer, they'd say, 'you dirty Punk.' It was what your teachers would call you. It meant that you were the lowest.”

“In its initial form, a lot of [1960s] stuff was innovative and exciting. Unfortunately, what happens is that people who could not hold a candle to the likes of Hendrix started noodling away. Soon you had endless solos that went nowhere. By 1973, I knew that what was needed was some pure, stripped down, no bullshit rock 'n' roll.”

“Punk was meant to be of the voice of the dole queue, and in reality most of them were not. But Oi was the reality of the punk mythology. In the places where [these bands] came from, it was harder and more aggressive and it produced just as much quality music."”

“Punk was a total cultural revolt. It was a hardcore confrontation with the black side of history and culture, right-wing imagery, sexual taboos, a delving into it that had never been done before by any generation in such a thorough way.”

“During the Pistols era, women were out there playing with the men, taking us on in equal terms ... It wasn’t combative, but compatible.”

“Punk rock is meant to be our freedom. We're meant to be able to do what we want to do.”