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The International and Definitive Best Punk Awards

Speaking from a traditional point of view, Crass and Minor Threat. On the other hand there are some pretty mental people who could be argued to be pushing the boundaries of punk, doing for punk music what was once done by Crass (eg. World/Inferno Friendship Society)
 
Says the John Robb fanboi... :D

I will admit John Robb's tastes are as varied and sometimes way off the mark as they come...but he has oodles of punk attitude (I don't know the other members so maybe you could fill me in...)
 
Yeah i never got wierd shit either...

that's the thing. I never really liked the Clash or The Ramones as they just sounded too close to traditional rock and roll for me.

I remember when i first heard 'Bodies' thinking THAT was what punk bands should sound like and it wasn't really till Feeding of The 5000 came out that i heard something i thought the same of. In that sense i always thought Feeding 'drew a line in the sand' between bands rehashing old speeded up pub rock chuck berry riffs and those rejecting the whole rock & roll shebang. Which is what i always took punk to be about, both musically and thematically.

just a matter of personal taste really. :)
 
I will admit John Robb's tastes are as varied and sometimes way off the mark as they come...but he has oodles of punk attitude (I don't know the other members so maybe you could fill me in...)

you COMPLETELY missed the point of iam's post :D
 
UK: The Damned (I saw all the main ones except the Pistols, in their heyday and the Damned were the best live act IMO.)
US: Ramones (Again, I saw them at Erics in '77 and they were the business)
 
UK: toss-up for me between X-Ray Spex and The Slits. Neither of them are exactly what you think of as straightforward punk. But the first 4 or 5 tracks on the Slits' Peel Sessions pretty much encapsulate what I always thought punk was supposed to be about.

US: kind of has to be Dead Kennedys. "Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables"... classic. Minor Threat are a kind of close second.

Don't really know about any contemporary punk bands. Closest thing for me, in terms of snottiness and fuck youishness and being deliberately objectionable, would be The Country Teasers/The Rebel, I guess.
 
UK: The Damned (I saw all the main ones except the Pistols, in their heyday and the Damned were the best live act IMO.)
US: Ramones (Again, I saw them at Erics in '77 and they were the business)



Likewise , there wasn`t a better live band than the Damned at the time , did you go to any of the Bridgehouse gigs ? I regret not seeing The Pistols but at the time they just didnt play many gigs after the intial anti-punk backlash . The Adverts ran them close .

Damned
Ramones
 
UK: The Damned (I saw all the main ones except the Pistols, in their heyday and the Damned were the best live act IMO.)
US: Ramones (Again, I saw them at Erics in '77 and they were the business)


Absolutely. The Damned are one of the best live bands I've ever seen. You're probably about my age Bernie - I saw all the punk bands worth mentioning from 1976 thru to the early 80's.
 
Don't really know about any contemporary punk bands. Closest thing for me, in terms of snottiness and fuck youishness and being deliberately objectionable, would be The Country Teasers/The Rebel, I guess.

fuck! are they/he still around? knew all that art school crowd from Edinburgh. Utterly unlistenable in my opinion, can't stand his silly put-on voice, and not exactly something i would have ever though of as 'punk' - unless you'd consider Tiny Tim 'punk' - but, again, perhaps that is exactly what punk SHOULD be about? It really is an unforgivably horrible racket.
 
fuck! are they/he still around? knew all that art school crowd from Edinburgh. Utterly unlistenable in my opinion, can't stand his silly put-on voice, and not exactly something i would have ever though of as 'punk' - unless you'd consider Tiny Tim 'punk' - but, again, perhaps that is exactly what punk SHOULD be about? It really is an unforgivably horrible racket.

yeah, well, that kind of sums it up really! I'm not actually sure it's possible to shock people with art any more; but it's still certainly possible to annoy and irritate people with it. I only thought of the CTs because they're the last band I've heard that genuinely got an audience quite angry. (Well come to think of it gigs by both Radioactive Sparrow and Mattin had similar effects on the crowd, but they're both much more self-consciously "art music", so it's not quite the same).

But in a sense there's a precedent for that kind of thing from one of punk's originals: PiL's 'Flowers Of Romance' album. On which, to my ears, John Lydon's quite clearly thinking to himself, this sound and this lyric are really going to irritate the hell out of some people.
 
If we're having bands that no-ones ever heard of, then I want to shout about Snuff, Tottenham AK47s and Dread Messiah, all punk as fuck in their own ways.
 
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