SCOTTISH DEVOLUTION AND THE PUNK REVOLUTION:
30 YEARS IN THE MAKING
Published in The Herald, August 2007
Anniversaries are a convenient excuse for placing the present under a spotlight, gauging the extent to which society has evolved. In discussing the modern face of Scotland, an apt starting point is to consider the potent history leading to today's landscape.
I'm Edinburgh born-and-bred, married with a young family. I've just hit my mid 40s. But the most significant events to have set changes in motion for my country, and myself, occurred almost 3 decades ago.
It is getting towards 30 years since the March 1 1979 referendum on a Scottish assembly, our first real stab at self-determination since the 'Three Estates' Parliament was dissolved in 1707. The 'yes' to 'no' split was 51.6% to 48.4%. However the third of the Scottish electorate who abstained ensured the majority was less than 40% of the total electorate. Not so much a landslide as a gentle trickle of scree, apathy had trounced democracy.
1979 also saw Thatcher's 'greed is good' brand of Conservatism fire the upwardly-mobile imaginations and triumph at the UK General Election. The Scots never forgave her for snubbing the marginal pro-assembly mandate, and the imposition of the Poll Tax topped a long grievance list. Northern British discontent remained as a steady erosion.
It is also 30 years since a small but vocal minority of youth throughout the British Isles embraced punk rock. As well as a musical revolt against corporate supergroups, cheesy disco and execrable novelty records, this was also a sociological phenomenon. Poised to leave school and enter the big bad world of adulthood and work, I embraced punk like a shield.
Like many disaffected teenagers, I could far more readily identify with a cult that appeared to be 'anti' everything: the Union Jack-festooned streets celebrating Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee; the woeful lack of inspiration amongst the programme makers infesting the only 3 available television channels; the predictable lumpen reactions where wearing a Stranglers badge could result in an instant beating from 'trendies' in pudding-bowl haircuts.
My Scotland of the late 70s was routinely referred to as England. London MP's controlled all aspects of Scottish life. I was a 16-year-old youth who enthusiastically got his hair shorn and started buying Clash and Damned records because I wanted to be separate from the pop culture most of my peers were contentedly spoon-fed. Indeed, punk gave rise to the independent label. The first example of its genre to be committed to vinyl was the Sex Pistols' 'Anarchy in the UK'. This 45" vinyl classic was swiftly deleted. (The band were dropped by their record company, EMI, for saying fuck on TV! Vinyl, your Dad will explain). It remains one of the most incendiary examples of published rock and roll and has spawned countless imitations. But while the nihilism of these safety-pinned youngsters goaded the red-top press to boiling point, what punk really wanted to do was set its own agenda, empower those individuals who shared a vision and passion for some honesty after years of bloated, drug-addled supergroups releasing records to off-set tax bills. It was embraced by young people in London, but also the UK provinces. It was particularly popular in Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow, although there was a small but enthusiastic scene in Edinburgh where we adored our home-grown bands, including The Rezillos, The Valves, The Scars, The Deleted and The Freeze.
As a Scottish punk rocker in the late 70s I feverishly attended gigs and cobbled together fanzines with mates. We had previously been denied any role in the corporate music business; any channel to document our own lives. What we were really proclaiming was 'Autonomy in the UK'.
At face value, the hesitant pro-democracy Scottish revolution and the naïve UK punk revolution appear to be at fairly polar extremes. But they shared a surprising amount of common ground. Punk's nemeses were legion but overlapped the devolution 'say yes' camp in many aspects. Both were opposed to the political status quo. Both were against the UK establishment, personified by House of Lords fossils snoozing on the Westminster benches, or Eton schoolboys jeering Right to Work marches. Punk was a reaction to many things, not just the stagnation of rock music at the time, but the hypocrisies of the bourgeois system and the legacy of Empire that treated the Scots, Welsh, Northern Irish - and indeed most English people north of the mythical Watford gap - as inferiors.
Just as the legacy of the punk revolution continues to inspire young bands to seize guitars like weapons to be deployed at a barricade, so the quashed flickering of that over-ruled devolution vote has finally set Holyrood alight.
There are far more parallels. The Clash, one of the most innovative of those late 70's punk bands, championed reggae, a musical style which has suffered more than most at some truly appalling 'non-Jamaican' mugging. Scotland also has a long history of welcoming and assimilating outside cultures.
Punk was determinedly non-racist. It provided a platform for bands to raise political awareness and take a stand against the far-right organisations who often used punk venues as recruiting grounds. But the neo-fascist National Front were all but obliterated in the 1979 UK General Election. This tradition persists with the British National Party inciting derision at the hustings in this year's Scottish Parliamentary Election.
At the heart of any nation lies its democratic parliament, and after 30 years 'on hold' Scotland is learning to live with the experience. The transition hasn't been easy, not least with the PR calamity of the Holyrood build: a gravy train without brakes. But if nothing else our successful struggle for an independent Parliament symbolises hope for a better future. Believe it or not, all those punk rock 45s I used to accumulate in long-vanished record shops like Bruce's or Phoenix were saying exactly the same thing. It's just that most of their vocabularies would've got a reprimand from Presiding Officer Alex Fergusson MSP.
30 YEARS IN THE MAKING
Published in The Herald, August 2007
Anniversaries are a convenient excuse for placing the present under a spotlight, gauging the extent to which society has evolved. In discussing the modern face of Scotland, an apt starting point is to consider the potent history leading to today's landscape.
I'm Edinburgh born-and-bred, married with a young family. I've just hit my mid 40s. But the most significant events to have set changes in motion for my country, and myself, occurred almost 3 decades ago.
It is getting towards 30 years since the March 1 1979 referendum on a Scottish assembly, our first real stab at self-determination since the 'Three Estates' Parliament was dissolved in 1707. The 'yes' to 'no' split was 51.6% to 48.4%. However the third of the Scottish electorate who abstained ensured the majority was less than 40% of the total electorate. Not so much a landslide as a gentle trickle of scree, apathy had trounced democracy.
1979 also saw Thatcher's 'greed is good' brand of Conservatism fire the upwardly-mobile imaginations and triumph at the UK General Election. The Scots never forgave her for snubbing the marginal pro-assembly mandate, and the imposition of the Poll Tax topped a long grievance list. Northern British discontent remained as a steady erosion.
It is also 30 years since a small but vocal minority of youth throughout the British Isles embraced punk rock. As well as a musical revolt against corporate supergroups, cheesy disco and execrable novelty records, this was also a sociological phenomenon. Poised to leave school and enter the big bad world of adulthood and work, I embraced punk like a shield.
Like many disaffected teenagers, I could far more readily identify with a cult that appeared to be 'anti' everything: the Union Jack-festooned streets celebrating Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee; the woeful lack of inspiration amongst the programme makers infesting the only 3 available television channels; the predictable lumpen reactions where wearing a Stranglers badge could result in an instant beating from 'trendies' in pudding-bowl haircuts.
My Scotland of the late 70s was routinely referred to as England. London MP's controlled all aspects of Scottish life. I was a 16-year-old youth who enthusiastically got his hair shorn and started buying Clash and Damned records because I wanted to be separate from the pop culture most of my peers were contentedly spoon-fed. Indeed, punk gave rise to the independent label. The first example of its genre to be committed to vinyl was the Sex Pistols' 'Anarchy in the UK'. This 45" vinyl classic was swiftly deleted. (The band were dropped by their record company, EMI, for saying fuck on TV! Vinyl, your Dad will explain). It remains one of the most incendiary examples of published rock and roll and has spawned countless imitations. But while the nihilism of these safety-pinned youngsters goaded the red-top press to boiling point, what punk really wanted to do was set its own agenda, empower those individuals who shared a vision and passion for some honesty after years of bloated, drug-addled supergroups releasing records to off-set tax bills. It was embraced by young people in London, but also the UK provinces. It was particularly popular in Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow, although there was a small but enthusiastic scene in Edinburgh where we adored our home-grown bands, including The Rezillos, The Valves, The Scars, The Deleted and The Freeze.
As a Scottish punk rocker in the late 70s I feverishly attended gigs and cobbled together fanzines with mates. We had previously been denied any role in the corporate music business; any channel to document our own lives. What we were really proclaiming was 'Autonomy in the UK'.
At face value, the hesitant pro-democracy Scottish revolution and the naïve UK punk revolution appear to be at fairly polar extremes. But they shared a surprising amount of common ground. Punk's nemeses were legion but overlapped the devolution 'say yes' camp in many aspects. Both were opposed to the political status quo. Both were against the UK establishment, personified by House of Lords fossils snoozing on the Westminster benches, or Eton schoolboys jeering Right to Work marches. Punk was a reaction to many things, not just the stagnation of rock music at the time, but the hypocrisies of the bourgeois system and the legacy of Empire that treated the Scots, Welsh, Northern Irish - and indeed most English people north of the mythical Watford gap - as inferiors.
Just as the legacy of the punk revolution continues to inspire young bands to seize guitars like weapons to be deployed at a barricade, so the quashed flickering of that over-ruled devolution vote has finally set Holyrood alight.
There are far more parallels. The Clash, one of the most innovative of those late 70's punk bands, championed reggae, a musical style which has suffered more than most at some truly appalling 'non-Jamaican' mugging. Scotland also has a long history of welcoming and assimilating outside cultures.
Punk was determinedly non-racist. It provided a platform for bands to raise political awareness and take a stand against the far-right organisations who often used punk venues as recruiting grounds. But the neo-fascist National Front were all but obliterated in the 1979 UK General Election. This tradition persists with the British National Party inciting derision at the hustings in this year's Scottish Parliamentary Election.
At the heart of any nation lies its democratic parliament, and after 30 years 'on hold' Scotland is learning to live with the experience. The transition hasn't been easy, not least with the PR calamity of the Holyrood build: a gravy train without brakes. But if nothing else our successful struggle for an independent Parliament symbolises hope for a better future. Believe it or not, all those punk rock 45s I used to accumulate in long-vanished record shops like Bruce's or Phoenix were saying exactly the same thing. It's just that most of their vocabularies would've got a reprimand from Presiding Officer Alex Fergusson MSP.
