Patti Smith – Pissing in a River (1976)
Chosen by Phoebe Lunny, singer/guitarist of Brighton duo Lambrini Girls
This is so beautiful and heartfelt, but the lyricism is uncompromisingly Patti Smith. The expression “pissing in a river” captures the sense of recklessly pouring yourself into something that remains unmoved – maybe it will blow back into your eyes and sting, but you do it anyway. It’s very brazen to use such visceral imagery as “piss” to describe the fundamental need we all have to feel desired, and the imagery shows how gross and disgusting it can feel to be vulnerable, and hating yourself for it. The line “What more can I give to make this thing grow?” is basically saying that the more you try and hold on to something, the more it’s going to slip away.
Smith’s delivery bleeds heartache and anger, but the contrast with the music is genius. It’s a beautiful love-torn ballad, but it’s punk because of that feeling that this is as raw as it gets. She was boldly and unconditionally expressing how she felt about such powerful emotion, in a time when other people weren’t and women weren’t really allowed to.
Harry Pussy – I Don’t Care About Sleep Anymore (1993)
Chosen by Ben Beaumont-Thomas, Guardian music editor
The very shape of the word “punk” is topped and tailed with spikes, and you have to spit to even pronounce it (perhaps that’s why it inspired so much mid-gig gobbing). And yet this angry little word, and the iconography it inspired, has so frequently been calmed, packaged up and resold: post-punk necessarily had to happen soon after punk itself, as the scene wriggled out of a box that was being nailed around it.
For me, punk’s rejection of boundaries is most powerfully embodied by Harry Pussy, the duo of guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Adris Hoyos. Their masterpiece I Don’t Care About Sleep Anymore, from their 1993 self-titled debut album, is a no-fidelity assemblage of blurting guitar and splashing cymbals, moving freely through a field of melodic possibility. Its most powerful moment, though, comes as the pair settle into a funky, repeated, almost dancehall-like rhythmic phrase. Total freedom, this song suggests, is perhaps an indulgence – you need to also cohere and organise.
I’m torn when I see original punks in their spiky finery, so vividly rejecting a normal life and yet wearing a look that is now so hardened and codified. The spirit of punk is instead kept alive with constant, evasive shark-like motion; Harry Pussy are a reminder to never stand still, but also to think about where you’re going.
Iggy and the Stooges – Gimme Danger (1973)
Chosen by Pauline Murray, singer with first-wave UK punk band Penetration
In 1976 I saw the Sex Pistols in Sayers in Northallerton [in North Yorkshire], a row of garages with a nightclub on the end. Seeing them in a place where people usually just sat and drank, and hearing what Johnny Rotten was singing about, was just so powerful. After that I saw them about six more times – at the Fforde Grene in Leeds, where they just tumbled out of a van, and then iconic shows such as the Screen on the Green in London or on the Anarchy tour. Punk was especially liberating for girls: you didn’t want to be marginalised any longer. It absolutely altered the course of my life.
For me Iggy and the Stooges were the prototypes. They embody the spirit of what would become punk with the wildness of Iggy onstage, the guitars, their sound, fearlessness and general attitude of couldn’t care less if people didn’t like them. With Gimme Danger there’s a bit of tenderness and sensitivity there as well. Punk wasn’t just all about noise and ramming it down people’s throats. There were a lot of young thinkers, so much creativity. It was about self expression and doing your own thing.
Bad Brains – I (1982)
Chosen by Dave Baksh, guitarist in Canadian pop-punk band Sum 41
In the tape-trading era I came across Bad Brains on a mixtape, but this was before the internet so I had no idea what they looked like. Then in the year 2000 I’d just watched Death By Stereo blow us off the stage in Santa Cruz and was walking around thinking about life. I went into a record store and came across Bad Brains’ self-titled debut. I put it in my Discman and then gradually found out that they were Rastafarians and very respected in hardcore culture. My background is Indian-Guyanese and I grew up in Ontario; the nearest hardcore scene was eight hours’ drive south and I didn’t – and don’t – see many people like me at our shows. As an all-black hardcore band, it felt like Bad Brains gave me a place.
They went against the grain on so many levels. Racially, they challenged the whole notion of what a punk band should be, what they should look like and where they should come from. Half the songs were reggae: musically and lyrically, they could go anywhere. This song sums all that up. It’s effectively saying: “I’m going to be exactly who I want to be, and you should too.”
Jeff Mills – Phase 4 (1992)
Chosen by Lauren Martin, music writer
Released on Berlin label Tresor, Jeff Mills’ Phase 4 connected Black kids in his native Detroit to young Germans who watched the Berlin Wall crumble, and an older, slower world that went with it. The track stomps out at 149bpm. Every element feels austere and punkish – the martial pace of the snare; the propulsive, roughshod bass; the killer-swarm riff – and yet they combine for a powerful groove.
Its creator had kicked off the 90s by co-founding Detroit techno crew Underground Resistance with Robert Hood and Mike Banks, merging Black funk histories with cheap electronics at thundering speeds, rhythms sparking as if off red-hot midwestern steel. Playing live, in all black and balaclavas, they drew from Afrofuturism and hip-hop to push Black power and anti-capitalism.
They pulled people into their mission with bracingly frank rhetoric: 1992’s Fuck The Majors is tagged with: “Message to all murderers on the Detroit Police Force – we’ll see you in hell!”, and UR’s written manifesto called for “a movement that wants change by sonic revolution”, opposed to music that was “stagnating the minds of the people; building a wall between races and preventing world peace”. It’s in this spirit that Phase 4 landed, inspiring a generation who were desperate for something new to call their own.
Bikini Kill – Double Dare Ya (1992)
Chosen by singer Kat Moss of California hardcore band Scowl
When I was 18 my best friend, Grace, introduced me to Bikini Kill, and I’d never heard a woman scream or growl like that before. There was also this innocent, fun, feminine quality to the music that I really connected with as well. Double Dare stood out because the lyrics are so empowering. The first line lays it out: “We’re Bikini Kill and we want revolution girl style now.” It felt like Kathleen Hanna was telling me: “You’re a girl, you’re great. Break out of the cycle that the world, capitalism, the patriarchy and general bigotry really wants you to be in, where you aren’t allowed to be emotional and you can’t stand up for yourself.”
I was born in 1997, so I wasn’t alive when the song came out. But it felt like a call to arms, to think: “I am a woman and I’m not just sexy and sweet and respectful. In fact I’m also ugly and mean and sweaty and masculine and hairy.” I love a beautiful, highly feminine pop star, but the idea of women in positions of power not conforming with conventional norms was very potent for me.
Plasmatics – Sometimes I (1980)
Chosen by Eugene Robinson, singer with post-hardcore band Buñuel and formerly of California experimental outfit Oxbow
I was a depressive teen so my stepfather gave me Eddie and the Hot Rods’ album Teenage Depression as a gag. The cover depicted a kid with a gun to his head: I was in. The first punk band I saw were the Plasmatics when I was 15. What I saw subverted a paradigm of a “sexy chick”: there was a naked woman – singer Wendy O Williams – onstage, with electrical tape over her nipples, high-heeled shoes and some kind of lingerie, but it wasn’t sexy. It was threatening. There was an icy savagery to her where you weren’t going to laugh, and when she fired a shotgun at the stage, elements of it were hitting me in the face. It was out of control, but the sense of “I am woman, I am powerful” oozed from her pores – they were the only punk band to deal with sexuality in such an unconventional way.
The song Sometimes I cuts on so many different ways. On the face of it, it’s something for the cheap seats about a sexual encounter, but it’s actually about identity or persona. It’s different from their other stuff and has a real yearning power: “Sometimes I feel it / When you’re down on your knees / But then I wonder sometimes if you really care.” It’s got romantic, sexual and philosophical elements and, musically, if you listen to it without the vocals, it’s a tango. Years later I came to realise that the 40 minutes they were onstage changed my life.
The Slits – So Tough (live Peel Session, 1978)
Chosen by Alexis Petridis, Guardian chief rock and pop critic
By the time the Slits actually released a record, their sound had been honed considerably. The sharp reggae infusions of debut album Cut have a lot to recommend them, but there’s something revelatory about hearing the band as they originally sounded, on the two Peel Sessions they taped before signing a deal, because the way the Slits originally sounded was unlike anyone else.
A combustible, untutored thunder of drums, churning guitar and chanted vocals, May 1978’s So Tough (a wry account of the Sex Pistols’ messy collapse that managed to slip a surprising amount of Grundy-interview-grade language past the BBC censor) feels like a rare moment when punk’s questionable anyone-can-do-it ethos bore extraordinary fruit. Their playing sounds completely intuitive, divorced both from rock cliche and any traditional notion of how their instruments are “supposed” to sound. You’re evidently listening to a band not so much playing a song as clinging on to it by their fingernails, but it never degenerates into chaos. Instead, it’s unbound and viscerally thrilling: punk not as a style, a set of strict rules to be obeyed, but as an idea, the accepted order of things being overturned, a headlong charge into fresh territory.
Kim Gordon – Air BnB (2019)
Chosen by Laura Snapes, Guardian deputy music editor
The promise of an Airbnb is frictionlessness. Perhaps you don’t even need to meet another human for check-in; the creeping “airspace” aesthetic – soft pinks, generic artworks – is designed to make you feel right at home, from Paris to Peru.
Trust Kim Gordon to find the malignancy in the proposition, which destroys neighbourhoods in the pursuit of convenience. “How do you fit your reality into something that looks idealised?” she has said of a company that pitches itself as “a community built for belonging”. Her voice rasping over stalking bass and distorted guitar, her malevolently glittering song is an eroticised, absurdist answer to her question, embodying both the appeal and the horror.
There’s a direct line between Air BnB and Poly Styrene’s consumerist subversions on X-Ray Spex’s 1978 debut, Germfree Adolescents. What makes Gordon’s song so remarkable isn’t just her wink at the latest iteration of capitalist hell – kind of punk’s raison d’être – but the fact that she released it aged 66, in the first wave of a solo career begun nearly 40 years after her band Sonic Youth debuted, following the breakdown of her marriage. She used a bracing new sound that tied together her background in noise and contemporary trap, and a second solo album proved just as incisive, raging and funny. As ever, Gordon remains a thrillingly abrasive antidote to a culture increasingly designed to go down easy.
Thee Headcoats – I’m Hurting (1996)
Chosen by Laurie Vincent, guitarist/bassist/vocalist of UK punk-metal duo Soft Play
To me, punk’s not a sound. It’s an ethos and an ideology. When Isaac (Holman, Soft Play’s vocals and drums) and I were growing up in Kent, Isaac’s dad was a big garage-punk fan and introduced us to Billy Childish and his bands, Thee Headcoats and the Buff Medways. The Medway garage scene was really big there, so seeing someone from a similar place who had made a mark on the scene was a big inspiration when we started [as Slaves]. This song’s rawness and authenticity is the absolute epitome of punk. Sometimes it feels as if punk’s been weaponised and has to be political, but I think it’s about your own personal values – and here he is, baring his soul. The song’s about his father and Billy’s alcoholism, and it’s raw as fuck. It’s a record I’ll pass on to my kids if they want to know where we came from.
Trapped Under Ice – Pleased To Meet You (2011)
Chosen by Huw Baines, music writer
Few artists in recent memory have embodied punk’s ideals quite like Justice Tripp, a beautiful eccentric whose belief in disruptive creativity has led him to reshape modern hardcore more than once. Of late, that has meant showing off its malleability with the adventurous Angel Du$t, but while fronting Trapped Under Ice he was all about restating the importance of bone-cracking intensity.
On Pleased to Meet You, a standout from the Baltimore band’s 2011 album Big Kiss Goodnight, he tapped into foundational punk sentiments while abrasively illustrating how much the genre had mutated. “I have no interest in leading the blind / But walking among those people with open minds,” he roars, reflecting the thoughts of any number of musicians wandering the streets of 70s New York while serving up musclebound, pit-centric riffage well beyond the imaginations of the first wave.
Pinwheeling from barked refrain to breakdown and back again, Tripp also has time to throw his weight behind one of punk’s most important contradictions: the idea that self-expression and individuality can lead to community. Having hammered home the fact that you, a normie, might never get on his wavelength, he screams: “I’m TUI, as long as I’m still alive.”
Micachu and the Shapes – Turn Me Well (2009)
Chosen by Safi Bugel, music writer
Three decades after punk’s rowdy heyday, along came Micachu and the Shapes. Dressed in hoodies and matching T-shirts and fresh out of Guildhall School of Music and Drama, they appeared worlds away from the likes of Johnny Rotten or the Slits, and in many ways they were. But by subverting their classical training into short, wonky pop songs made from homemade and found instruments (lighters, glass bottles and household appliances), they drew on the same blueprint of DIY and dissonance that was central to the late 70s and 80s subculture. As a teenager who missed the first round, I was sold.
Turn Me Well, from their 2009 debut album, Jewellery, embodies this punkish spirit best. It’s a scrappy collage of clunky acoustic guitars, glitching electronics and gravelly vocals, bookended by the hiss of a vacuum cleaner, which is sampled and chopped up throughout. Like most of Jewellery – and most punk songs – this all takes place in under three minutes, with production so lo-fi it could be mistaken for a dodgy aux cord connection. But it’s catchy, and even now when I hear a Hoover whiz into action, it’s hard not to get a rush of nostalgia for this strange, sentimental song.
Bad Brains – Banned in DC (1982)
Chosen by Josh Clayton, guitarist with Australian hardcore band Speed
As a 14-year-old getting into hardcore, Bad Brains were one of the foundational big three bands along with Minor Threat and Black Flag. They were all very different from my conception of punk as this dirty edgy thing from the UK, but Bad Brains were this crazy all-Black high-school band from DC that were all Rastafarian and played hardcore and reggae. It felt like a unique story that set a blueprint for decades, where you can throw as many curveballs as you want into a hardcore record.
Banned in DC is a universal experience for anybody that dealt with being blacklisted from venues or just struggling to find places to play. If you watch the old CBGBs videos, Bad Brains shows were certainly high energy and chaotic, but they were a positive band with a spiritual meaning. I love the fact that in this song they basically say that if we can’t play here, we’ll go as far as we need to. They will spread the message as far and wide as they can. It just shows the spirit that’s ingrained in punk: you’re not going to stop us.
• Lambrini Girls’ debut album, Who Let the Dogs Out, is released 10 January. Penetration tour their classic album Moving Targets starting at G2 the Garage, in Glasgow, on 13 November. Scowl’s single Special, Buñuel’s album Mansuetude, Soft Play’s album Heavy Jelly, and Speed’s album Only One Mode are all out now.
