Punk

Punk: Attitude is a new DVD that has come into the Learning Centre and is now available for loan.

"Director Don Letts' documentary Punk: Attitude takes viewers down anti-establishment memory road to examine the politics, fashion, and music of the punk pop culture trend. Punk: Attitude features interviews and shares performance footage from a variety of famous musical acts including Black Flag, Jello Biafra, Legs McNeil, The Ramones, and proto-punks The Stooges and New York Dolls. In describing the ascent of punk later in the 1970s, Dead Kennedy's frontman, Jello Biafra talks about how just about every smaller town and city had one guy who was into The Stooges and The Velvet Underground who then moved to the bigger cities, met up with all the other like-minded small-town new arrivals, and started bands. Don Letts, renowned DJ and later member of Big Audio Dynamite, armed with a Super 8 during the heyday of punk, has now taken his footage and made a documentary ably willing to tell the story of how a few guitar chords changed the world. Punk: Attitude is the quintessential walk through music history not appearing on MTV. The Ramones, Television, The Velvet Underground, Black Flag and dozens of other bands were trekking the streets of NYC with a new mantra of DIY. As any music fan knows, the underground movement didn't begin with grunge. It began long before on the stages of The Roxy and CBGBs in the early 1970s. Peppered among the live footage from the 1970s and 1980s are interviews with infamous artists synonymous with what became the Punk scene - Henry Rollins, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon from The Clash, Chrissie Hynde, David Johansen from the New York Dolls, writer Legs McNeil whose Xeroxed newsletter reported on the fray, Howard Devoto of Magazine - the list goes on. The documentary manages to transcend the obvious trappings of mohawks and moshing by bringing in the ethos of fashion, film and hip hop to get at the heart of what was punk. Don Letts was the DJ at the Roxy in London, the club of the infamous "100 days of punk" at which every band in the UK punk scene in its heyday performed. When the Roxy began, there were no punk rock records to play, so he played hardcore reggae and dub and is widely credited for helping bring that influence to UK punk rock. He also had his video camera with him. There are interviews with Jim Jarmusch, Roberta Bayley, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon, Siouxie, Steve Jones, Tommy Ramone, Handsome Dick Manitoba, James Chance, Glenn Branca, and Thurston Moore. (From the US, in English)" -- website