Columnist Paul Burke - "Why punk was fake news"

Contrariness - we've got it.

"If you were born after 1970 and don’t remember punk, you’ve almost certainly been misled by people who do. You’ve probably been told – through countless paean-to-punk retrospectives, documentaries and newspaper culture pages ­– that it was a glorious, anarchic revolution that swept all before it. I can tell you first-hand that it wasn’t.

Punk was as middle-class as a Labrador in a Volvo. Far from being hugely influential, punk was a passing fad that made little impression on the charts and left the lasting legacy of a spent firework."

So says Paul Burke, novelist and columnist. Paul has the conch for this episode, then I'll follow up next week with a counter blast on why punk was really rather important, after all.