Just over a week ago, British punk’s defining single went up in smoke. Joe Corré, the son of punk royal couple Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, set fire to an original acetate of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” and shared a video of its demise with the world. Two days later, at a public event on November 26, he threw live recordings, posters, some of Johnny Rotten’s clothing, and his own custom-made kiddie bondage pants on the pyre. All tolled, Corré burned £5 million (about $6.25 million) worth of punk artifacts.
The symbolic gesture was intended as a protest against Punk London, the city’s year-long event commemorating the movement’s 40th anniversary, which Corré viewed as a betrayal of punk’s anti-establishment ethos. “The Queen giving 2016, the Year of Punk, her official blessing is the most frightening thing I’ve ever heard,” Corré snarled back in March. Curiously, that didn’t stop his performance—dubbed “Burn Punk London”—from appearing among the events listed on Punk London’s website.
While some are celebrating what they see as a quintessentially punk move, others spent months urging Corré—who’s the co-founder of lingerie brand Agent Provocateur—to donate the memorabilia or sell it for charity. (His reply: “Bollocks! It’s my stuff, I can burn it if I want to.”) Among the most credible critics of the stunt is Danny Fields.
An ingenious music publicist, manager, de facto A&R rep, and sometimes journalist who discovered the Stooges, the MC5, and the Ramones, Fields may be the most important non-musician figure in the history of punk. As the filmmaker Brendan Toller reaffirmed in the recent documentary Danny Says, Fields has lived a life every bit as rich and unique as that of any artist he championed. He reached adulthood just in time to become a central character in New York’s Warhol ’60s, signed the two bands that practically invented punk during a quick trip to Michigan, and was still forward-thinking enough by the mid-’70s to recognize genius in the form of four Queens guys singing about sniffing glue. When he has something to say about punk’s legacy, we should all be listening.
Pitchfork spoke to Fields (who donated his own archives to Yale's Beinecke Library and participated in a Punk London event over the summer) in October about why he thinks burning artifacts is a terrible idea, and how preserving punk can help keep it vital for generations to come.
We’re seeing resistance to commemorating punk, now that it’s the 40th anniversary of something that's supposed to be evanescent. That awful brassiere designer said exactly that.
But you can't blame a city of 20 million people, and a lot of creative ones, and a lot of ones looking to get enough money so they can be further creative or future creative for capitalizing on a four-letter word that ends in “K.” It goes on architecture and plumbing and socks and toilet paper. You can use “punk” as an adjective. It's a noun, it's a verb, it's very handy. No one owns it. No one owns the idea of it. People say, “It's viable. Let's have a year of punk. Let's have women in punk. Let's have a night of punk piano players. A night of punk poetry. A night of punk toenail polish.”
You can't say no to any of these. And each new meaning punk acquires expands what it is. Whoever claims to have the fix on it is full of shit. Are people really saying, “Punk can only have been, it cannot be”? Why don't you say that about Jesus Christ while you're at it? “I'm sorry, I wasn't there, I didn't see him make a miracle, give me someone else to worship.” People don't say that. They say he's forever.
But Corré is saying, “Oh, harrumph. I was there, real punk. My father was Malcolm McLaren, my mother was Vivienne Westwood. I have all [the original memorabilia] and posters, and it's worth £5 million, and I'm going to burn it. They are desecrating the very idea of it by setting it in stone, or commemorating it, or ascribing to it an existence in time.” How dare you say it's not OK? “It can't be recreated or memorialized or put behind glass. You can't put it in a vitrine.” Some of it you can. These things that this kid wants to burn, you could put in a box. You could save them, like they did at the British Library. But you want to burn it? Fuck you. Donate it to a museum.
I was in Hamburg a year ago. It's where the Beatles were punky, where they wore leather jackets—in the Reeperbahn, the neighborhood that is now like a Disneyland of sex. I took pictures of posters saying what act is coming to what club, what concerts there are going to be. There was a wall of club flyers. I swear, four out of five of them had “neopunk,” “crypto-punk,” “proto-punk,” “Hispano-punk,” “Czech-punk,” “commie-punk.” They had “real punk,” “super-real punk,” “authentic punk,” “pure punk.”
This is one of the most modern cities in the world, in Germany, one of the most modern countries in the world. Forget New York. These are the most modern kids in the world. And there they are, each claiming a little piece of punk. I thought that was so sweet: “We know it happened then, but it's still happening.”
There was a kid from northern UK in the lobby of the Ramones Museum [in Berlin]. Someone said, “Is punk dead?” He got all excited. In this fierce, northern accent, he said: “It hasn't even got started yet.”