Punk Shockers

'DID you ever see Penetration?" asks a sober-suited Terry Ruane excitedly, his eyes lighting up at the memory. "It was at the Assembly Rooms," he explains. "They used to have punk bands on there quite often. Look at it now."

"The Vibrators played there as well, didn't they?" asks Mandy Key. And we're off, back to the heady days of punk, when the music was brash and raw and freedom blew through the land like a trumpet blast.

The Sex Pistols formed 25 years ago, an anniversary marked by today's release of the film The Filth And The Fury in York.

Mandy, now a 37-year-old sales rep with two children, was a teenage punkette still at Huntington school back then. When school was out, punk ruled.

She was, she thinks, just about the only punk at large in posh Badger Hill. She favoured black hair with red spikes. "My dad put a toilet chain in my trousers - torn denims," she says. "My mum said: 'You're not going out like that!'."

It was the summer of 1976 when the punk phenomenon exploded. It was every respectable mum's nightmare. Suddenly their offspring were going round with green and pink Mohican haircuts, torn jeans held together with safety pins - and ears, cheeks and noses pierced with everything imaginable.

Actor Tim Welton, currently starring in Closer at York's Theatre Royal, was a 13-year-old Guildford schoolboy at the time.

Genesis and Santana were the big bands that summer, he recalls. "Then suddenly I can remember this injection of adrenaline. That long hot summer of 1976 ended with a complete explosion. I remember all the lads ripping holes in their jeans and tying them up with safety pins." A friend of his started experimenting with ear-piercing: and soon they were all at it.

"He used to hold a block of ice to your ear until it was numb, then pierce it with a sterilised safety pin," Tim recalls. "This was going on behind the science block and the French block at school!"

Tim admits he was a bit young to have been into the Sex Pistols at first - though he does recall their infamous TV interview. But he was soon hooked.

He recalls going to one gig at Guildford Civic Hall. "There was this sea of people just all pogoing. You could just see them, heads bobbing, floor shaking. And there was a stream of spit going from the audience to the stage. The lead singer was leaning forward from the microphone going 'Gob on my head, gob on my head!'

"It was an expression of everything that previously had been unacceptable. There were no rules. It was just such an adrenaline rush, incredibly freeing."

In York, punk bands began appearing at the Assembly Rooms, The Forge on Tadcaster Road, the university and Ripon and York St John College - and pubs like the Grob and Duckett (now McMillans).

Terry Ruane, now a 38-year-old business unit rep with the Evening Press, recalls the day the UK Subs came to gig in York and brought with them their hard-core followers from Middlesbrough.

"After the concert there was a right big melee," he said. "A bit of a free-for-all."

Local punks, though, often had to travel further afield to see their heroes.

Mandy says: "We would go to a gig Friday night, wake up the next morning and we'd think, where shall we go next? You could end up going to Newcastle, or the Brixton Academy in London.

"There was a two-day Punk festival at the Queen's Hall in Leeds once. You used to wake up with someone covered in beer trying to get into your sleeping bag."

Evening Press chief sub-editor Steve Nelson admits to having been a part-time punk when working as a cub reporter in Nottingham. "I was more Captain Sensible than Johnny Rotten. But it was a chance to dress up, to shock, to let off steam to the music."

Mandy insists punk wasn't just about rebelling against authority. It was about a new sense of freedom. "Everything was accepted," says Mandy. "Nothing you could do would surprise anyone."

"There were no stereotypes," Terry agrees. "If you were a mod you had to wear winkle-pickers. If you were into heavy metal, it was leathers. With punk, there was nothing like that.

"There were people with Mohicans next to people in jeans and T-shirts, and nobody minded."

Tim Welton says one of the great things about punk was the small bands who learned how to play a single chord and then took to the stage.

"It seemed like every village had its own band. And it wasn't about people who were signed up to record deals, they weren't just in it to make money."

York had its own share of local bands - Semaphore and Cyanide among them.

"Cyanide actually had a couple of singles out," says Terry. "I think one of them got into the top 100, and they were pretty big on the pub circuit!"

The punk phenomenon lasted a surprisingly long time. But by the early 80s, it was losing its anarchic freshness. Bands like Joy Division and The Police moved off in different directions - and then there was Goth music and New Romanticism.

"Things got more musically complex: but that pure adrenaline rush had gone," said Tim Welton. "There was a sense of what do you do with it now?

"I can remember going to a gig and trying to wear a pair of my sister's high-heeled shoes. And I thought, naah, we've lost it now.

"By then I was at uni, and I carried on wearing black and thinking back to the old times."

Punk has never really died. "The music has lasted," says Terry. "You can go into HMV and still get The Clash, The Damned, The Sex Pistols. And the bands that were supposed to be just a phase, they're still around. The Stranglers at the Barbican pulled 500 or 600 people."

You can still see the same people, older now and more respectable, going along to see their favourite bands whenever they play locally, he says.

"You don't know their names, but you recognise them.

"They're a bit fatter in the face, they've got a bit less hair: but they're the same people."

See tonight's Evening Press for Charles Hutchinson's review of The Filth And The Fury on the front page of Friday Night Fever