After every fad or fashion has its day, it is followed by a pastiche, as the unhip take up its coat tails.  View the images of punk rockers of 1976 with those picture postcard made-up Mohicans of the 1980s, to see how an idea is debased. The actuality of the early 1970s was the revenge of the tragically unhip, a time for the social failures to take all the hippy/yippie ideas and potentials of rage, love, drugs, music and freedom and turn them into pedestrian puerility. A period bestrewn with those who had failed to find a summer of love, the free love and communality so touted by the media, who instead transferred the ethos into dirty little betrayals with the husbands and wives of neighbours and friends. Too pitiful to even find drugs they drank from party ten cans of Watneys piss beer, their parties suburban orgies of drunkenness and deceit, leavened only by the sight of too-long flares flapping against the vomit so freely flowing on the stripped pine. East Finchley so much to answer for.

To be young in the 1970s was to see life not raw, but skinned.

To be young in the 1970s was to be cold, every day of every year was freezing. The cold, the strikes, the petrol prices, the jaded gaudy glitter that failed to shine. Everyday was like a drunk’s morning outside Kentish Town tube, or a suicide on Archway bridge. Except of course for the heatwave summer of 1976. The year when those who had been the real children of the 1960s grew up, and laughed off the mediocrity of their elders. 

The rejection so fullsome and righteous as to defy reality today. It is from a distance impossible to describe the freedom and opportunity that Punk engendered. Though the period was brief from that that moment we were never left alone, as Punk continued to disgorge band after band from its corpse. From Joy Division to the Smiths we were birthed and led through our first few years of real consciousness in music so glorious, complete and intelligent, accompanied by our parents the UB40 card (15 pounds) and John Peel.

The acute awareness of the late 70s continued into the first five years of the 1980s a period still yet to be deciphered or deconstructed by history, when every Saturday in Trafalgar Square there was a revolution. Where demonstrations could snake along with nothing but demands announced by Borroughsian cut-up chants of the impossible.

From the villas emanating out of the stations on the Northern Line we emerged with hope, we thought as we rioted against war, as we Stopped the City, squatted the lot, occupied the army bases and held the Wapping wall, that we could tear it down. We felt the rage of Baader and Esslin, and preached a synthesis of Marx, Kerouac and Debord.  Leaving our homes to agitate against the poverty of life, we remain a community outside of community.

Leaving East Finchley isn’t hard, the strip of estate agents and cafes, struggling to encompass a village, against the traffic flow. Not the end but the start of the Northern line tunnel, where the Archer shoots you out of suburbia into the city. What memories of a period, what trace today, our fading graffiti slogans, Martin once a school now a sink, the Phoenix ever slightly but never changing, the Herbet Wilmot once home for a night to Eater (the youngest of Punk acts), never to be repeated. 

 
 East Finchley © 2000
 

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