The Year Punk Broke

Names you thought you'd never see or hear again: The Lurkers, The Nosebleeds, Penetration, The Members and oh-my-god is that really Spizzenergi with Where's Captain Kirk? This is such a blast. Pressing the random play button on the pretty-nigh indispensable new five-CD box set, tersely called Punk and New Wave 1976-1979 is more than a pogo down memory lane, even if images of Regine Moylett's No Romance shop, the Black Catholics and McGonagles intrude every two minutes and 59 seconds. No siree, this is more a document, a design for life.

And to any scream-agers out there who were wondering why the Manic Street Preachers dedicated their Brit awards last February to "Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simenon and Topper Headon", you'd best start here and take it from the top. Most of these 100 tracks are on CD for the first time and thankfully not all were singles; some EP tracks and live favourites are included as well. Equally commendable is that this is no purist trawl through the archives - the clever use of the catch-all term "New Wave" in the collection's title means that such unlikely "punks" as The Radiators From Space, Rich Kids, Jonathan Richman, Pere Ubu, Blondie, The Boomtown Rats, Squeeze, Joe Jackson (the real one), John Cooper Clarke, XTC and Television are all present and correct. One to get the anoraks going, though, is the choice of cut-off dates. 1976 may have been the year that the term "punk rock" was first used to describe this music - but only in Britain.

And why draw the line at 1979 when, for many people, the genre was only coming into its own - but then an argument could be made that that was the year when punk's first-born (Teardrop Explodes, The Cure, U2 and Echo and the Bunnymen) released their first material. Such is the potency and import of the punk era that there are now revisionists working in the field, the more hardcore of which would find this compilation an historical travesty. The argument goes something like this: Patti Smith's guitarist, Lenny Kaye, first used the term as a genre-identifier on his 1972 compilation album Nuggets, although in truth the Americans invariably favoured the term "garage" (not to be confused with the dance music sub-genre of the same name) as a more accurate identifier. As far as I'm concerned (and this is a minority view), punk was born in Detroit in the late 1960s thanks to the efforts of MC5 and The Stooges, when power chords were set over a brutish rhythm section and topped by short, sharp and shocking vocals.

Admittedly though, a similar case could be made for The New York Dolls/Richard Hell axis at CBGB's. Other schools of thought date it back to 1964 in New York, when The Velvet Underground were formed - and there are even a few fringe groups around who point to the early British R'n'B efforts of The Stones and The Kinks. Then again, if you read Greil Marcus, he can trace punk back to the Roman Empire. And where does all this leave The Ramones? The one constant in the dialectic (if you will) is that punk rock arrived so that the world might be freed from Barclay James Harvest albums (try playing one and you'll understand).

And just don't get me started on Yes or Genesis. Allowing for the American end of it, the other oft-underestimated influence on punk as we know it on this side of the Atlantic is that of pub rock. Joe Strummer's 101'ers, Ducks Deluxe and Brinsley Schwarz all opened up the live circuit and stole it back from Wakeman-esque Tales of The Arthurian Legend (On Ice) mock operas. Dr Feelgood and Eddie and The Hot Rods also helped play their part, but arguably the main impetus - Malcom McLaren and Bernie Rhodes excepted - came from Nick Lowe and Elvis Costello via Stiff and the way they encouraged new artists.

While much is made of the fact that the only old-skool punks still around today and still selling records are Paul Weller and The Cure's Robert Smith, punk's real legacy is more multi-layered. It rehabilitated reggae which, when it collided with new wave, morphed into ska (Jerry Dammers, Two-Tone etc) - the fact that latter-day American ska bands like No Doubt and The Mighty Mighty Bosstones exist is merely an example of the adage that an idea cannot be responsible for the people who believe in it.

Certainly while Britain gave up the ghost in the 1980s and turned to Simon Le Bon and the New Romantics, in the US punk was refined upon by The Replacements, Husker Du and Black Flag which in turn begat Nirvana and the whole Seattle Sub-Pop sound. Most notably, though, punk still lives on in today's DIY dance culture - small independent labels, underground clubs, "unlistenable" music, regular harassment by the authorities, pirate radio stations, mouthy and iconoclastic spokespeople. It's history repeating itself, but without the tragedy or the farce.

Punk and New Wave 1976-1979 is released next week on the Universal label.