Days of Punk | BOOK GALLERY
PUNK ROCK PRESS

Photographer Michael Grecco sums up what the period meant to him at the end of his latest book Punk, Post Punk, New Wave, a collection of photographs he took in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

“Looking back forty years,”Looking back forty years,”you have to think, ‘Wow, what an amazing life.’ Of course, growing up with a repressive, old-fashioned Italian mother, I sometimes felt guilty. You slept with someone else every night, you took drugs all the time, you always drank too much. I wasn’t just having fun, I was having debauched fun – sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll.”you have to think,’ Wow, what a wonderful life.’ Of course, I sometimes felt guilty growing up with a repressive, old-fashioned Italian mother. Every night you slept with someone else, you took drugs all the time, you always drank too much. I wasn’t just having fun, I was having debauched fun – sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll.

Drugs and sex and rock ‘n’ roll. We can disagree about what punk rock meant then, what it might still mean in the 21st century, more than four decades after the events mentioned in the book by Grecco. We should look back at her nihilism, her otherness, her politics, her attitude to pop culture in the year-zero, and how it burst out into the world.

But in a way, it was still just another story about having fun in the most chaotic way for young people. Grecco was one of them.

And so there is less discussion about politics and values and manifestos in the pages of Punk, Post Punk, New Wave, more pictures of Wendy O Williams, of the Plasmatics punk band, topless, and a more or less nude Lux Interior of the Cramps (both on stage and off). And page after page of guitar-posing guys and ladies.

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