It wasn't my idea to write about punk at all. It was Toby Swift's. I was far from convinced at first - having already done a film about music (24 Hour Party People) and being always wary of nostalgia. But Toby gave me a copy of John Robb's magisterial oral history, Punk, and I was soon lost in it.
My friend Carl Hunter happens to have a massive punk archive - including every copy ever (there weren't that many) of Sniffing Glue (the fanzine) and the most truly shocking thing about reading this stuff was discovering just how much the world had changed since my youth.
Part of the thrill of punk was the difficulty you had getting hold of some of the music - I remember it took me about a month of exploring a maze of intimidating alleys and back streets before I found the fabled Probe Records, the only shop in Liverpool that sold this stuff.
There's a line in one of the plays where someone says they considered themselves a punk even though they had only heard 1 minute 34 seconds of punk rock. Punk had a kind of furtive, samizdat life. If it happened now you could just download it all in your local library.
The other thing that surprised me was how completely my own memory had erased some of the more uncomfortable aspects of punk. The whole flirtation with the Right, for instance. In my head, punk just gently morphed into the Anti-Nazi League and Two-Tone and so on.
I took my own surprise as the most legitimate starting point. The plays are - all but one - set in the present rather than in the 1970s. And they are mostly about the comedy of growing older, and being forced to look at the person you used to be. They're also, I hope, about the legacy of punk.
I know it's become a cliché, but that iconic cover of Strangled in 1977, which had drawings of three chord shapes and the caption, "this is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band.” really summed it up. It said “make stuff, don't consume stuff”.
And that's a message that's become more urgent and radical as the years go by. It was certainly in my mind when I first got involved in film. Punk gave me a set of values - not chasing the dollar, not caring about your career, being distrustful of prestige and so on. I find it hard to summarise but I know it when I see it.
When I'm talking to my mates, we still try to figure out whether things are punk or not before approving of them. Final Cut Express (a cheap, easy to use editing programme) for instance, is punk, as is growing your own vegetables. We decided years back that mobile phones were not punk (I can't remember why) and I therefore still don't have one.
I've just published Cosmic, a children's novel about a boy from Bootle who ends up in space. The high point of my professional life was when one reviewer said it was a parable that told children that the world really was there for the taking, and called this a "punk fable".
Writing for radio turned out to be really punk. I'm more used to writing for films. Film culture is extremely conservative. Even "indie" films follow a formula and there are executives who are employed to help you stick to that formula.
Toby just let me do what I wanted. Although the characters in the plays overlap, they are all have different tones and different kinds of storytelling. One play is a series of internal monologues, another is a fairly straight situation comedy, another is quite a dark prison drama, and then there's a road comedy that lurches into something surprisingly sad for the last ten minutes.
If I'd been doing it for telly, say, they would have wanted me to settle on a "house style" and stick to it. Also, if you're used to writing for film, you get used to thinking that what you write will most likely never see the light of day. It was a bit of a shock to discover that Toby really meant it, that studios were booked and this was all for real.
I wrote the plays in an atmosphere of panic, fun, adrenalin and hurry that I haven't experienced since my punk days. If you listen to them, I hope you catch some of the rapture I felt at having a producer who could say - like Eddie and the Hot Rods – “Do Anything You Wanna Do”.
It would be great to hear what anyone else thinks is punk, and what isn't: The Wire is. The Sopranos isn't.
|
