I'm not suggesting they were being cynical in the slightest.

For most aspiring bands and musicians they usually have one opportunity at "the big time" and I wouldn't blame anyone for grabbing that opportunity with both hands when it was offered.

If anything it was the major labels at the time who were being cynical by jumping on the punk bandwagon, as a means of making a quick buck, signing up every young band and automatically labeling them as punk.

I think John Lydon is a very clever, highly intelligent man who was happy to play along with McLaren's scheme whilst it suited him as it gave him a profile and allowed him to go on to form PiL. John Lydon himself has often said the work he did with Public Image Limited is the work he is most proud of and would like that to be seen as his legacy.


They were manufactured in that they were brought together by McLaren to exploit the burgeoning Punk scene in 1976 to enable them to get as much money from the record labels as they could before the bubble burst but yes, any similarities to what is happening today ends there!


Siouxsie has always maintained the band were never a punk band but certainly Polydor's marketing, and the media, labeled them as punk.

had a similar convo with another poster last time punk came up... he didnt get the hype the pistols get, refering to the ramones and new york dolls as 'better' and the true creators of punk..

in reality the punk sound has been around since the 60's, the nyd and ramones couldnt connect with me/us and give music any relevance...the pistols did, and ignited the punk explosion.

try watching the rock doc film "the filth and the fury" the sex pistols own version of how punk evolved


dont agree... because the greatest bands to use punk ethos came after 76, including what id suggest were the two great movements to come out of punk..indie and goth (via siouxsie)


.. because thats what they played


Let's not forget The Sex Pistols were as much a manufactured band as any boyband/girlband today, put together and carefully controlled by Malcolm McLaren. He used the career of another band he managed, The New York Dolls, as a template for The Sex Pistols and much of what they did was carefully stage-managed by him for maximum publicity because, of course, there is no such thing as bad publicity and notoriety is even better.[/quote]

nonsense... cook, matlock, jones, were already making music and had been since 71. to suggest they were cynically hand picked and created by macclaren is wrong. he might have played a part in as much that he managed them and introduced some them to eachother, but thats nothing new in the music world.

" nobody manufactured me!" john lydon.


gotta fully agree

siouxsie is a prime example of punk ethos... she did her own thing, created her own style, created her own music and by accident created 'goth', a style of music and fashion that started with her.

Siouxsie & The Banshees were one of the first post-punk bands to emerge, they themselves have always maintained they were never a punk band and they came after punk.


Pretty much every young rock band in the late 1970s were called "punk" by the mainstream media, irrespective of what they played so to say the all played punk isn't true. Iron maiden, for example, were often described as a punk band between 77 - 79 despite the face they have always been a heavy metal band.


I am fully aware that Cook, Matlock, and Jones, were experienced and well respected musicians prior to the formation of the Sex Pistols, but the fact still remains they were brought together by McLaren for the specific purpose of forming a band McLaren named The Sex Pistols. In that respect they are similar to a boyband/girlband of today in that they were individuals brought together by a manager with the specific intent to form a band. Whereas as other bands at the time, such as The Damned, were already building up a reputation by playing live gigs.

I didn't say John Lydon was manufactured, I have already said he used The Sex Pistols to his advantage just as much as McLaren did.

However just because she used the punk ethos of doing her own thing doesn't mean to say she is automatically a punk.

Lady Gaga has said she is greatly influenced by Heavy Metal but I've yet to see anyone classify her musical style as Thrash Metal.....

Great stuff

I can't believe nobody's mentioned Iggy Pop

Known at the time as The Godfather of Punk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWPua...eature=related

Iggy & The Stooges performing live in 1970
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRuN2...eature=related

and again
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y-rM...eature=related

but they werent post punk, punk lasted into the early 80's. i didnt say they were punk either! they emerged courtesy of punk, theyd never have got going pre-76.



eh? ive never ever heard i.m. refered to as punk by anyone.

ok, i didnt mean that everyone LITERALLY were punk, but many new bands came out of the punk explosion, meanwhile rock and disco were thriving too. there was a distinction between rock and punk, ive never heard of the two styles being confused.



many bands were brought together by a manager, and thats where the feeble comparison between the pistols and modern boybands ends. no you didnt say rotton was manufactured, you implied the pistols were by likening them to boybands. true, lydon used mcclaren as much as he used him.


didnt say she was punk...the banshees though were a product of punk, because punk means doing your own thing, expressing yourself, thinking for yourself, questioning, creating, experimenting. thats what siouxsie did and people liked it..... good! so they werent a punk act as such but employed punk ethos in the contemporary style of the time... which was punk! punk was more then a musical sound.

Steve Harris has said on many occasions that the reason it took Iron Maiden so long to get signed is because, pre-1979, every label wanted to market them as a punk band, something he wasn't prepared to accept. EMI were the only label prepared to sign them on their terms, but obviously you know more about their history than the founder of the band......


There was a huge amount of cross-over between the two. Motorhead had a large punk following and many bands at the time wore Motorhead t-shirts on stage. I was a rock fan but I still saw the likes of Siouxsie, The Damned, The Stranglers, etc.

Thrash Metal started very much as a cross-over between Punk and Heavy Metal and even today if you go and see a band like Slayer, Anthrax, or Machine Head, you will see a large number of punks in the audience.



To most Rock fans the definition of a manufactured band is a band formed by a manager compared to bands like The Damned and Iron Maiden were formed by founding members of the band themselves, so in that sense The Sex Pistols were a manufactured band, however feeble you feel the comparison is with modern manufactured bands. The same is also true of The Monkees.

The Sex Pistols were formed by McLaren out of the ashes of The Strand purly to exploit the burgeoning punk scene to make money. He opened SEX with Vivienne Westwood for the same reason, to sell punk clothing to punks.

I went to see the The Great British Music Festival, Wembley Arena, 1978.
On the bill were....The Jam, Generation X, Slade and Bernie Torme.
Generation X were to me more rock than punk. Yet they too had a punk following. I didn't much care for them.
Bernie Torme, another rocker, had a couple of fine singles.

It certainly seemed like an exciting period/scene - I'd have been at the local Discotheque however

In their official biography, The Banshees bassist, Severin interestingly put it, that in terms of cultural legacy, their work is an extension of glam rock, and that they were the next logical progression on from Roxy Music. Although they were initially part of the Bromley contingent (:yawn::sleep, they got themselves out of that small clique and through sheer vision/drive created their own music.

The Banshees were restless pioneers always more than punk/goth. Their musical legacy proves that. Its probably truthful that all the internal band conflicts helped in a bizarre way.

As a Rock fan going back to the mid-70s the only two Punk, or Post-Punk, bands who really made an impression on me then, and they continue to do so today, were Siouxsie & The Banshees and Joy Division.

For example if you take The Banshees first album, The Scream, the artwork and packaging are way ahead of any Punk band of the time. It is more reminiscent of an established major band than a first album and that is before you even get as far as listening to the album itself..

Has no one mentioned The Skids, has to be one of the greatest bands to come out of scotland, and from dunfermline, and stuart adamson, would later go on to form his own band, singer and song writer

Into the valley

I think we should add The New York Dolls to that mix too.

The Banshees were once called The Most Elitist Band On Earth! I loved that title! And theres nowt wrong with abit of pretension! And there always that sense of tension in their music which I love. The Pistols is like listening to a local pub group.

One of my favourites for sure.

Siouxsie & her gay punk friends used to go to gay discos as well as supporting the very early days of the Sex Pistols. She has said a couple of times in interviews that after a punk concert/Grundy interview, they all went down to some gay disco under the YMCA & got down to Diana Ross 'Love Hangover'. That proves she KNEW good disco too!

The Bromley Contingent had a fair few queens in its ranks, the word 'punk' is also an American term to desribe homos/drifters in 20th century slang. Of course, alot of this went right over the nations heads at the time, which is just as well, as there wouldnt have been a 'punk' movement in the mainstream music if that got out!

One of Siouxsies fav disco artistes was Sylvester!

no need to get arsey

i accept that new bands of that era were encouraged to indulge in the fashion of the time...thats nothing new. i accept that they may well have been encouraged to be punk... i didnt disput that.

i said that id never heard of any confusion regarding im's generic box. to me and everyone i knew (3 sisters into the biker/rock scene, youth club i helped at had punks and rockers, no confusion.) knew the difference between rock and punk rock.

rock was big, deep purple, black sabbath, in particular had been big since 1970, so i dont know why im shouldnt have been promoted as such.



true, i dont dispute that, but imh experience there was a disctinction between punk and rock, even if on some occassions they courted the same market.


true, but... they unwittingly released a huge movement that within months gathered its own pace and left behind whatever mcclaren thought he was doing. the pistols were the catalyst, the spark that set the whole thing off and it soon evolved to be much bigger then anyone could have forseen.


i dont disagree! lol


i sense some resentment in your posts... you try to belittle punk , questioning its true worth. you discribe yourself as a rock fan, as opposed to a music fan.

the facts are though that punk was culturally bigger then rock, punk created the freedom to express yourself, punk championed equality of sex, sexual orientation and race like no other style has before or since. punk might have been a noisy little brother to rock, but its impact was huge.


love into the valley! my fav track of '79.... followed quite closely by the angelic upstarts 'im an upstart'..

But the seeds for that success was set by bands such as The Damned and not The Sex Pistols. After all The Damned were the first punk band to get a record deal, release a single and to have a hit single, although their huge contribution at the time is largely over-looked.


There is no resentment at all, however I prefer to look back at how things were rather than through misty-eyed, rose-tinted, spectacles. I have well over 2,000 albums and CDs and, as I was a teenager when punk started, so as well as the usual rock suspects of the 1970s I have many albums by the likes of Siouxsie, The Damned, the Sex Pistols, etc, that were brought on vinyl at the time and not retrospectively on CD.

There is no doubt punk changed many things and at the time it is what this country desperately needed. However I would contend punk itself was the catalyst rather than the actual explosion. I grew up, and still live, in rural Gloucestershire and punk had a minimal impact for me and my friends, bearing in mind I was @ 15 at the time so the prime age for Punk. It was what followed, the likes of Siouxsie & The Banshees, Joy Division, Ian Dury & The Blockheads, The Buzzcocks, The Jam, Elvis Costello, etc, that had the real impact on myself and my peers out in the Shires at the time and their impact continues to be felt today.

I like Rock Music, therefore why shouldn't I describe myself as a Rock Fan? After all Rock Music is arguably the most diverse music genre there has ever been in popular music. Heave Metal alone has several hundred, if not thousands, of sub-genres but from that extreme Rock music also covers Punk, Goth, Industrial, Indie, Electronica, Progressive Rock, Folk Rock, Art Rock, Blues Rock, etc... and on and on and on...

It was for people with little to no talent then?

Peter Hook, the bass player with Joy Division summed it up perfectly I think.

He said that as an aspiring musician he used to go and watch bands like Hawkwind awestruck believing he would never be able to play be good enough to play in a band. However he said that when he saw The Sex Pistols he realised if they could get up on stage and do it anyone could and that seeing them gave him the encouraged to start Joy Division.

So to some extent what you say is true!

I think the point they're trying to make is you didn't have to be a virtuoso on a guitar to pick it up, write a song and have something to say.

i wont knock the damned... but it wasnt the damned that kicked it off. it was seeing the sex pistols that got various others to 'have a go'.. were the damned better?.. hell yes! butit was the pistols role to spearhead the movement...well kick it off, like i said lol.


rose coloured spectacles? not me.. however i do think the true cultural impact of punk was and is being misunderstood. if anything i think we under estimate its true impact.

lol..i know you! (not personally, just your type). the people punk meant little to were people who had their own music and frankly didnt 'get' punk. (you obviously do get it..but generally) prog rockers in particular were guilty of utter snobbishness towards punk. disco goers hated it.. of course people werent all affected... my argument with jacko fans is that he didnt influence my life at all. similarly punk didnt directly affect many others... but for huge amounts of people it did, in a larger way then id suggest any other genre has. it was certainly in evidence in my family, friends and 'da kidz' at the youth club. ... maybe you were from a 'well off' home, with a career planned ahead. punk spoke loudest to the kids who didnt.

those artists you list became successful on the back of punk.. (except ian dury, he did his own thing anyway)

but if youre a 'rock fan' you see things from a rock bias...im a music fan, always have been, i like contemporary pop from the 60's to today.. that includes the many variants of rock. i have no agenda...i like the music i like no matter what genre.


that is precisely what punk was about.

punk rock was a display of anger because there was little future for 'ordinary' young people. musicianship wasnt nessecary, passion was.

Punk was originally a backlash to the up their own backsides mainstream artists who had an 'ivory tower' mentality and didn't live in the real world, were overprotected by an entourage matched only by their ego and cared more for the money than the music.

Now the wheel has turned a full circle and that's what the music scene has returned to.