MT12 his life and his work, hoping that disarming blandness will eventually yield serendipitous results. There appear to be two major lines of attack when it comes to punk. One levels the accusation of inauthenticity, the other claims inconsistency. Neither carries much truck with Mott. It can’t be inconsistent because it was just a “raw thing”, just a bunch of messy kids with spiky hair who were bored of life in drab 1970s Britain. To be politically or ideologically inconsistent it would have to have had grand, voluble views from the beginning – which wasn’t the case. “It became ideological in retrospect,” he explains. At the time it was just a wave of visceral discontent, focused primarily on the stultifying claustrophobia of being a kid in London at this time. Of course, there were “more sophisticated people” who got involved, like Jamie Reid of Sex Pistols’ iconography fame, who were out to make more elevated statements, but for the most part it was just “zeitgeist”. And anyway, Mott himself had moved on from punk by 1980, in part because he regarded punk’s more explicitly political manifestations, the anarcho-communalism of Crass and various splinter-groups, as a “dead-end”. Mott dismisses inauthenticity with the same reasoning, and with a hint of irritability that suggests he’s bored of the debate. He expressly does not go along with the idea that someone like Malcolm McLaren packaged punk: “I don’t believe it was dreamt up by a few people in an office off Oxford Street – I believe it was a real explosion, during a time of massive social change.” Most significantly, he believes that punk was unique in postwar
British history, as a cultural phenomenon that was authentically British, and authentically devoid of commercialization. Punk may have ended up on Top of the Pops pretty quickly but that was because it was popular, not because corporate interests sensed an opportunity: “it was popular because it was different – but that doesn’t mean commercial interests caught up with that and exploited it – because they didn’t.” Perhaps somewhat inevitably, his argument requires drawing a rather hazy line between “real punk” – authentic and consistent – and the fakers. Punk as it emerged in the mid-1970s, snarling and dynamic and creative (“the real wave”) was different to both modern day imitators – Green Day, Blink 182 etc. – and the stereotypical image of punk that has been passed down across the decades: mohawks and pink hair and tattoos on the Kings Road. “Those guys aren’t punk – that’s just a theatrical pantomime version of punk.” In fact, it is this distinction between ‘commercial’ and ‘noncommercial’ which informs most of what he’s got to say about youth culture more generally: skateboarding, for example, is of little value in his eyes because “it mainly revolves around what you are buying, a lot of it seems to be about your trainers – whereas punk wasn’t about that sort of stuff.” Of course, this is a tricky position for him to argue. His money-making may not be strictly commercial – his clothing brand, ‘Toby Pimlico’, is not exactly Nike – but he does sell in Topshop. And what better symbol of the corporate suit than Sir Philip Green? In a sense, Mott is the living embodiment of The Rebel Sell.
But he’s also refreshingly honest and pragmatic. He calls himself a “Gold-Card Anarchist”. He’s not pretending to be a rebel, nor is he living in some self-deluding dream-world where he is still dangerously subversive. “I haven’t opted out, I’ve opted in,” he explains; which probably means he’s not a hypocritical wanker. So, if the obvious criticisms of someone like Mott don’t really ring true – if he is, on balance, authentic and consistent – then maybe those attacks on punk which focus on its spokesmen, those ‘old sell-outs’ like Mott (or most famously, Johnny Rotten), are themselves fairly useless. And anyway, as the authors of The Rebel Sell argue, perhaps those tedious arguments about so-and-so ‘selling out’ are ubiquitous in movements like punk
Has he not become one of punk’s exploiters, guilty of commodifying the dissent he was once part of? because they’re actually a reflection of deep-seated anxieties: that really everyone had sold out from the beginning. Mott’s claim (maybe in part retrospective justification) that he’s “always been interested in being successful” kind of extricates him from this merciless logic. Particularly so, in fact, given his agility at by-passing most criticism by reminding everyone that punk was, after all, mostly “just a bit of fun”.
TOM GARDNER 50