A few years ago I attended a John Lydon concert inside a Somerset covered market. The music was good and the mood was cheerful, with the crowd liberally studded with infirm, ageing punks. There were punks clutching walking frames and punks in wheelchairs. There was even a dead punk in an urn who had requested that the ex-Pistol scatter his ashes on stage. Lydon obliged and pretended to gag. He said, “No offence, mate, but you taste like Gauloises.”
Forget the tired adage about policemen getting young. It’s punks getting old that’s the real measure of age, at least for those of us who were raised in the afterglow of new wave music and grindhouse cinema. It’s seeing the upstarts and berserkers who once electrified the Eighties and Nighties being quietly steered into retirement homes or laid to rest and memorialised. In life these people embodied something wild, dark and delicious. In death they are reduced to a set of smiling memes and inspirational quotes. I’m not sure which is more alarming.
