The Observer - From the Archive - G-Mex Festival of Tenth Summer 27 July 2014
Manchester is united in its regard for punk https://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/jul/27/manchester-united-regard-punk-birthday-observer-archive From the Observer archive, 27 July 1986 The city's greatest bands help the tireless genre celebrate its 10th birthday in its spiritual home Jon Savage First published on Sun 27 Jul 2014 00.04 BST Punk is now a costume on the very clothes rack of youth style it set out to subvert. Its 10th anniversary is turning into one of the media obsessions of the year, yet just as the past is rewritten in the language of the present, then so is a series of complex and contradictory signs (about which no one can agree) reduced into a sludge of nostalgia and style recycling. The fact that nobody can agree about what punk was or is may well be a sign of its continued vitality, or at least nuisance value. One way out of the morass is to see punk as an approach to culture that worked. The speed of the media retrospectives hints at the broad inf