Mark Jordan enjoys walking around his Welsh home town “got up like a Christmas tree” in vintage Vivienne Westwood bondage shirts and bright blue brothel creepers. “The other day, I was stopped by this young guy walking the dog, he was wide-eyed and said, ‘What is that you’re wearing?’” Jordan says. “His eyes were on sticks when I told him that some of this old punk gear is worth thousands.”
A teen of the late 1970s, punk was Jordan’s escape from growing up on a drab Merseyside council estate through an economic recession. It was a wild time, Jordan, now 61, recalls, though nothing like the handed-down caricatures of punk anarchy today. “It wasn’t all sitting in doorways drinking lager with a dog on a string,” he explains. “Johnny Rotten said, ‘Get off your arse!’ – don’t sit on it. Punk was always more about outrageousness and embracing life.”
Coming of age in the late-1970s – an era of power cuts, refuse strikes and a prevailing mood of social disquiet – the punk generation was defined by DIY fun and a rejection of authority. This was a sub-generation distinct from the 1940s and 50s baby boomers who came of age in a shiny new postwar social contract, complete with the promise of full employment.
But for many of this generation, the punk ethos never died and it’s as relevant today as it was 45 years ago and now, as they approach the traditional age of retirement in a climate that recalls their formative years, the sense of rebellion and the DIY ethos is just as much of a guiding principle as it ever was.
Some are railing against working the wageless “granny shift”, plugging the social and childcare gaps as sandwich carers; some are packing up their homes and taking to the road as later-life nomads; others are seeking, after the boot up the arse of the pandemic, to (in the new parlance) “self-actualise” as butterfly later-life creatives emerging from their chrysallises after decades of toeing the 9-to-5 line.
Comedian Jenny Eclair’s standup show Sixty Plus! (FFS!) XXL Show! tours across the UK from 2 September. It explores what being 60 means for today’s 1960s-born “babes”. “Being part of the punk generation affected how I think and it’s probably why I still have a problem with being told what to do – and it’s why I swear so much,” Eclair, 63, says. “In some respects, punk was a licence for the middle classes to rebel, and that sense of rebellion continues in our later years.”
In February, 67-year-old former Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon competed to represent Ireland in the Eurovision song contest with his hit, Hawaii, a love letter to his wife of 44 years, Nora Forster, who was living with Alzheimer’s disease (sadly she died on 6 April). Lydon lost out to shiny man-band Wild Youth, but his bid was a watershed for the generation for whom he was a standard-bearer, says David Amigoni, who researches later-life creativity at Keele University. “The new 60-somethings are finding that the field of creative possibilities for their later years are broader than ever – from theatre to music and art.”
Another cultural marker is the book Retirement Rebel. The memoir documents media worker Siobhan Daniels’s decision to hand in her notice, sell her house and possessions and take to life on the road in her Auto-Trail Tribute motorhome, Dora the Explorer. It’s become a cult hit and today Daniels, 61, encourages older Britons to embrace the self-actualising possibilities of later-life nomadism. She’s often approached by tearful 60-somethings who want to unburden themselves about their desire for a more fulfilling life (“I’m a travel agony aunt”). Anecdotally, she says, a growing number of 60-plus women are leaving “husbands at home in front of the telly” and travelling solo. “We have less money as a generation, especially single-parent empty nesters like me, so that means we have to be more creative,” Daniels says. “Though I still find it strange that I’ve become a later-life influencer, as I used to hate the word.”
Karen Arthur, who runs the podcast Menopause Whilst Black and has authored the “happy fashion” ebook Eight Ways to Wear Your Happy, also sees a trend of 60-something women rejecting the capitalist patriarchy and refusing to fade away. She says that the punk spirit and ethos they embraced in their youth is the perfect expression of this.
“I spent years worrying what other people thought and now I just want to be loud and take up space and be totally myself,” she says. She sees a similar sentiment in many women in her age group, for whom the confidence of later life is combining with a desire to set boundaries around one’s time and efforts, whether that’s rejecting grandparental childcare or being the go-to event caterer out of a materfamilias sense of duty. “We’re exiting relationships that no longer serve us, we’re saying no to things we don’t want to do; we’re cutting people out of our lives who don’t make us feel good,” she adds. “There’s a new mood and that mood is about grabbing life by the wotsits.”
The granny shift is a tender point for the over-60s with a yearning to self-actualise through travel, says Anne Hardy, a sociologist who studies later-life “snowbirds” (sun-seeking van and motorhome nomads). “Women who choose this lifestyle are often judged harshly by their own children and by society,” she says. “They are construed as being somehow selfish for leaving their grandchildren.”
In 2012 the late queen of punk Vivienne Westwood bemoaned the conformism of younger dressers, arguing that ersatz fast fashion meant that only older Britons dressed with any gesture of individuality. This idea is striking to Melanie Smith, 63, a social services support worker in Manchester who moonlights as a gig photographer. Smith is child-free and sees herself as a member of the first generation who made an identity through the independence this lifestyle afforded. “Not having kids meant that I could carry on with my nightlife and that really kept me going in my day job,” she says.
Last year, Smith’s Bengal cat, Rococo, died at 16, and Smith decided to throw caution to the wind and have the green-eyed tabby tattooed on her forearm to memorialise her feline fellow traveller. She also dyed her long white hair a fetching shade of cerise. “They say you can’t have long hair when you’re older. They say you shouldn’t dress in bright colours and have tattoos, particularly as a civil servant, but I just thought: ‘I’m 63, I’ll do what I want. I’ll wear my hair pink and long and I’ll wear band T-shirts and skinny jeans and great big platform shoes.’”
Back in the punk days, Smith sneaked a cheap Kodak plastic camera into gigs and would take candid shots of Blondie and Siouxsie Sioux. But it’s important, Smith says, not to get stuck in the past. In 2008, she set up Mudkiss, a fanzine and photography project, and today she photographs bands influenced by punk’s great youth roar as well as being house photographer at Manchester gig venues O2 Victoria Warehouse and O2 Ritz. “It’s following all the new bands that keeps you engaged,” she says, “you can’t get dragged down by the day-to-day and stuck in the soundtracks of your youth”.
Chris Freeman, 61, appreciates that he’s one of the luckier members of his age cohort. Retired after 40 years as an operations manager and based in Bracknell, he is materially comfortable. The problem, until a few years ago, was the porridgy beigeness of his corporate life. Although he had dabbled in punk and new romanticism, he had little choice, he says, but to knuckle down to get on in a culture in which the old eccentrics with their bright silk ties and bowler hats were giving way to a sea of sartorial and attitudinal conformity.
In 2019, a chance encounter changed his life. Freeman was browsing London’s Spitalfields market and stumbled upon the Colour Walkers: a social group of bright dressers who congregate once a month to promenade around streets of east London. In February 2020, Freeman joined a Colour Walk event dressed in a bright green satin blouse, dungarees, face paint and a leather beret and felt, he says, “like I had at long last found my tribe”. Today, Freeman is a regular at Colour Walk events and in 2022 made his stage debut at the pansexual beauty pageant, Alternative Miss World. He wore head-to-toe gold satin with a black leather corset and felt “marvellous, although a bit of an impostor. I revelled in it.” The real tragedy, Freeman feels, is when older Britons “just sit there and wait for permission to express themselves”. This is something he’d like to see change as the old punks step on to the stage as Britain’s elders. “Who will give you that permission?” he asks. “No one. You just have to go for it.”
Describing herself as a “punk pagan”, Fran Cutter, 56, hopes her generation will rewrite what it means to segue into later life, if partly out of financial necessity. A private tutor and singer with the post-punk band Anarchistwood, Cutter dresses in stage attire that combines colourful clown makeup with Medusa-like hair ribbons and costumes, such as a dramatic Harlequin-inspired jumpsuit with a large embroidered vagina on the front “which is also a pocket, quite practically”.
“I don’t really know anyone my age who thinks that they will be able to fully retire any time soon,” Cutter says. Having spent her youth in squats across west London, Cutter and some of her old punk friends often talk about returning to communal living. “It’s not for everyone as you have to be flexible and sociable and God knows loads of us get fixed in our ways as we age,” she laughs. But living an uptight, ever-decreasing later life is everything Cutter wants to avoid.
For Cutter, punk was all about “peace and anarchy and doing what you want as long as it isn’t about harming people”. It was also about sexual freedom. Cutter is bisexual, and the scene was a sanctuary in the 80s.
Today, she has nine children and stepkids, aged between from 18 and 31, she also has two grandchildren, aged seven and two, and a younger female partner. She is, for her part, very happy to be a punk grandma. But Cutter dislikes it when people tell her they “used to be” a punk. “It’s not about the hair colour and the piercings you once had, it’s about an attitude: thinking for yourself and not accepting authority.” It’s an inward rebellion, Cutter says, that surely applies at any age.
After four decades as a media studies teacher in Manchester and a health scare, Mark Jordan is rediscovering the old punk ethos in his autumn years, working part-time as a creative filmmaker and buying back replicas of the clothes he donated to museums decades ago, bringing a dash of the old sartorial outrageousness to his adoptive town of Mold in Flintshire.
“I don’t think the punk generation thought we would live to 30, let alone 60,” he says. “But those who made it are doing interesting things, working as filmmakers and photographers and musicians and artists. It’s bloody brilliant to see.”
The coming-of-age 60s are highly individual, creatively frustrated and making their mark in an economic landscape that calls to mind their formative years. They’re also kicking back against the facile expectation that they’ll plug the gap where the state has failed: providing elder care for partners, or on-tap grandparental childcare. Expect more natty dressers, late-blooming artists, novel living arrangements and silver am-dram in coming years, Amigoni predicts.
“Old punk rockers never die/They just decompose/They yell and kick and smell like shit/And punch you in the nose,” runs a lyric of US novelty band 60 Year Old Punk. Jordan puts it this way: “We may not be able to retire on a final salary pension, but we are going to make a hell of a lot of noise and not go out with a whimper.”
Jenny Eclair’s Sixty Plus! (FFS!) XXL Show! is on tour from 2 September. For tickets, visit jennyeclair.com
