Post-punk will never die. It’ll just get reissued.

Hindsight is a blessing. It must be something that NME hack Cliff White wished he’d had when a tune he infamously described as “a third-rate Who imitation”, back in 1976, revealed itself to be a cultural atom bomb. That panning of The Sex Pistols’ Anarchy In The UK earned him a place in musical history roughly equivalent to Marie Antoinette’s famous phrase, “Let them eat cake.”

But, as bands like The Rapture, The Liars and !!! prove, the fallout from the punk revolution has yet to clear. Those bands display all the mutations that punk’s radioactive power bred in the “post-punk” movement that followed the Year Zero of 1977.

Indeed, it wasn’t just cultural commentators who lacked perspective and thus ended up with egg-splattered faces. Punk’s own clarion call of “No future!” also proved wide of the mark. The ethos of “here’s three chords, now go and form a band” appeared to come with built-in obsolescence.

Bands like The Pop Group and Gang Of Four, unlike more purist punk groups like The Damned, adopted those rudimentary principles merely as a guide rather than gospel. They took the abrasive guitars of punk and cross-pollinated them with other musics and manifestos. The most notable proponents of this being Joy Division who, after Ian Curtis’ suicide, transmogrified into New Order and became a direct link between punk’s DIY ethic, post-punk’s experimental edge and acid house.

The Clash had flirted with reggae but bands like New Age Steppers and PiL – John Lydon’s immediate post-Pistols incarnation – fully incorporated booming dub bass into their sound. Meanwhile, in New York, Blondie were tuning into the nascent hip-hop of Grandmaster Flash (as eulogised on Rapture), while ESG and Liquid Liquid were exchanging punk and disco’s bodily fluids in dirty dancefloor unions.

Unlike London-centric punk, post-punk was a broad church musically, but also geographically and sexually too. Proto-Riot Grrrls like The Slits and Lydia Lunch were at the forefront of the revolution, and the bands came not just from London and New York but from Manchester (Gang Of Four) and Bristol (The Pop Group).

But if there was one place where all these disparate strands became intertwined, it was in the racks of London’s Rough Trade record store, who are releasing Post Punk – a mammoth collection of dispatches from the frontline of the scene. And with post-punk’s fingerprints all over everything from The Rapture and LCD Soundsystem, to Zongamin’s oddball disco and Colder’s skeletal funk, it could hardly be more timely.

“It seems funny selling all these records all over again,” says veteran shop-hand Sean Forbes. “But it’s good that people are rediscovering them through the likes of The Rapture. Music comes in cycles and soon we’ll have bands trying to sound like early 90s Dinosaur Jr. Who knows, in 50 years time someone might discover Splodgenessabounds’ Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps, and be inspired to make the greatest record ever.”

It hardly seems likely. But then that’s what Cliff White thought. Paul Clarke 11 July 03

Post Punk, released 07 July 03 on Mute.

useful links: www.mute.com