Punk Rock Quotes

“Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and excepting anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As long as it's good and it has passion.”
― Kurt Cobain

“So now we're here and we are not dead, and Mom, what's more punk rock than living despite all that which has tried to make you not?”
― Neil Hilborn

“Hardcore without punk isn't music, it's a genre of porn. And punk isn't a genre of music, it’s a thought process.”
― Dominic Owen Mallary

“After all this time I found that the novel is in fact punk rock.”
― Craig Ferguson, American on Purpose: The Improbable Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot

“never say amen in church if they're
capping off a prayer about you.”
― Exene Cervenka, Adulterers Anonymous

“It’s funny how books can change you. You open up a book and one minute you are who you’ve always been, then you read some random passage and you become someone else.”
― Brian Joyce

“And so you go out with a girl and you’re driving…

“So what are you reading right now?”

“Well, I’m not much of a reader…”

*screeching car brakes*

“I’M NOT MUCH OF A DINNER BUYER! GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT, GET OUT!”

“But we’re lost in the stucco sprawl of L.A.”

“I DON’T CARE!”

But every once in a while you meet the one who reads…

“So what are you reading?” he asked (you know, the date killer question)…“So what are you reading?”

“Well I’m right in the middle of a book right now--”

Oh my god, she’s in the middle of a book. Be still my beating heart.

“So what are you reading?” he asked expectantly, nerves tingling, body aquiver

“Well, I’m in the middle of this Harry Potter b—”

*screeching car brakes*

“DON’T BE AN ADULT WOMAN WHO READS A FUCKING CHILDREN’S BOOK IN MY CAR, GET THE FUCK OUT!”
― Henry Rollins

“I have to reregister a room for my heart. It's been waiting a long time, somewhere outside, without so much as a whisper of protest. That abandonment wasn't just an abuse, it was a sin.”
― Jim Carroll, Forced Entries- The Downtown Diaries: 1971-1973

“Music brought the war in Vietnam right into our bedrooms. Songs we heard from America made us interested in politics; they were history lessons in a palatable, exciting form. We demonstrated against the Vietnam and Korean wars, discussed sexual liberation, censorship and pornography and read books by Timothy Leary, Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Marshall McLuhan because we'd heard all these people referred to in songs or interviews with musicians. [...] Music, politics, literature, art all crossed over and fed into each other. There were some great magazines around too [...] Even though we couldn’t afford to travel, we felt connected to other countries because ideas and events from those places reached us through music and magazines.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“I grew up with John Lennon at my side, like a big brother.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Musicians are our real teachers. They are opening us up politically with their lyrics and creatively with experimental, psychedelic music. They share their discoveries and journeys with us. We can’t travel far, no one I know has ever been on an aeroplane. ... whatever they experience, we experience through their songs. It’s true folk music — not played on acoustic guitar by a bearded bloke — but about true-life experiences.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Sid's quite awkward and talks in spurts like he thinks it's stupid to have a point of view, but he's got to communicate, so he forces the words out. I can see it's not that he's unsure of his opinions, he just thinks it's pathetic to have a strong opinion on any subject; to be intelligent means being able to see all sides.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Ari [Up] hides nothing from our audiences: if she’s in a bad mood, she shows it, and if we happen to be on stage when she’s not happy, she just does a shit gig. There’s no
You’ve paid money to see this so I’m going to give you a good time, or I’m not going to let the band down – she’s just grumpy and uncommunicative. This is a good thing in many ways, we’re against faking it, we tell it like it is. People in bands are just like the audience: they have good days and bad days, we’re not pantomime or theatre, we’re no different to anyone else. We don’t see ourselves as entertainers, trying to make the audience forget their troubles for forty minutes. We see ourselves as warriors. We’d rather people confronted their anger and dissatisfaction and did something about it. Like Luis Buñuel said, ‘I’m not here to entertain you, I’m here to make you feel uncomfortable.”
― Viv Albertine, Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys

“Incremental change is the clarion call of cowards.”
― Richard Cucarese, PUNKS

“As punk rock was able to sweep the board clean in music, so must the board be cleared in visual art.”
― Brian Clarke, Architectural Stained Glass

“I think the best gig we did with the original line up was at the Aquarius club,” recalls Kip. “About 250 people were packed in there and the place was buzzing. We had a big crowd going nuts, people were falling all over the stage, and we were completely covered in spit… so I guess we went down really well!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“It was the first time I looked around at the guys I was with and thinking, ‘I ain’t sure I like you that much …’ I realised they were into rock‘n’roll stardom, climbing the ladder and making money, and I was the only one who seemed to have any punk rock principles. To see the people who had been my closest friends for all these years, the people I’d first sniffed glue with, the people I’d first taken acid with, travelled abroad with, to see them turn into this … this … bull-shit, it was so poor.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“Yet another genius decided to soak the room with the shower and there was the usual surfeit of girls, booze, and drugs. Somehow we got bored with this and the notion of a puking contest was suggested. This apparently, was an entertaining idea and a bunch of us sat around the waste paper basket. After a couple of rounds of retching and gagging (I think there were some rules but they were never written down!), all that had slopped into the bin was about an inch of bile.

To make things more interesting it was proposed that, for a sum of money, someone should drink the colon cocktail we had regurgitated. We all dug deep in our pockets and began to throw pfennigs and marks on the table. On seeing the pile of cash, our ‘Bastard Roadie Number One’ took up the challenge. We all moved close to the broken sink and he lifted the bin to his lips. He put it down again.
“Several times he raised it to his lips and balked. Finally he got the rim on his bottom lip and began to tip the bin. As the slime slid towards his mouth someone – it might have been me – said, ‘And you have to gargle’.

He didn’t stop; he opened up, threw back his head and gargled the stomach contents of about half a dozen punks. He didn’t throw up, but he might have screamed and jumped around a lot. Victorious, he grabbed the money… which when converted back to sterling came to about two quid. It wasn’t a very successful tour!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“Our message, such as it is, has always been, have fun,” he continues, attempting to define the secret of their longevity. “That’s timeless and appeals to everyone. If your songs are about the political state of the country, or a victim of police brutality in the Eighties, then the agenda that you established for yourself becomes obsolete. You become an anachronism…”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“We’ve always been a very lazy band,” admits the vocalist, “And we’ve always spent most of our time drinking, so whenever anyone booked a studio, we’d get it done as quickly as possible so we could get down the pub. We never wanted to spend much time with the actual production side of things, so that got left to the guy in the studio, who probably had very little allegiance to punk. So we always had a bad sound, but I think a lot of bands back then often did.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“and I thought, ‘What does a good punk band need?’ Something to fight against’, and so I became a lot more political.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“The truth is that I got into punk rock because I have always had a predisposition to tell people to fuck off in an amplified ambience”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“We had a sort of manager at the time, and he introduced us to John Curd and his partner, Chris Gabrin, so we turned up at this pub in London on our bikes, and gave Chris a pint of piss! That was our introduction to our management – we all pissed in a beer glass, put a bit of brown ale on the top and brought it out to him outside the pub! And we made him drink it; we were a right bunch of wankers!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“When Nick started the label, he put us in Pink Floyd’s studio in Britannia Row,” says Del incredulously. “It was massive, and when you went upstairs, they still had that big pink pig up there. It was phenomenally expensive, about £500 a day, maybe more, which was a lot of money in 1983. We had the studio block-booked for a month, and we never used to go. It was always empty; we’d be back in Brighton doing loads of mushrooms and acid! I’d be tripping all night, get up about 4 o’clock in the afternoon, go to the pub, and suddenly remember I should be in the studio doing guitars, and I’d just blow it out and go back to bed.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“It was Buck’s first time ever on a stage, and he dealt with it the way so many other young punk musicians have dealt with it since:

I drank a bottle of Olde English cider to calm the nerves… but it didn’t work as I puked up at the side of the stage! I know that we played ‘Anarchy In The UK’, ‘Janie Jones’, and ‘White Riot’, but I can’t remember much else!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“It was a lot of fun in the beginning, going on tour in the UK, then going to Spain and getting thrown in jail for trashing the hotel… that made the Sunday papers! My dad always read the News Of The World and he saw the story about this wild Scottish punk band, and shouts to my mum, ‘What’s the name of that band our Karl’s in?’ ‘The Exploited,’ she replied. ‘Bloody hell! He’s in jail! It’s here in the paper!’ My parents had a fit; I wish I could’ve been a fly on the wall at that moment.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“I think the big Livi scene grew from small factions in small areas all coming together, to drink alcohol basically, when we were all around the age of sixteen or seventeen.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“The first time I saw Gogs was in Rainbow Records, wearing these kids’ plastic sunglasses, like Captain Sensible used to wear,” laughs Welshy. “He had a chain going from the glasses to his earring, which had a tea bag hanging off it! And to finish off the look, he had ‘I don’t care’ written on his back in huge letters… but he’s a superb bloke, and it was a pleasure when I finally played with him in Swine Flu years later.”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“The gig was a disaster though as their singer Hendo drank a bottle of whisky before he went onstage. Halfway through the first song, he passed out, fell off the stage and didn’t get back up! Gig over!”
― Ian Glasper, Burning Britain: The History of UK Punk 1980-1984

“Pink electricity snakes out from her fingertips, jumping from the guitar and sending rainbow-hued sparks floating to the ceiling. She leans her hand to the strings and feels the chunky, percussive roar of the palm mute rumble through the amps. It gnaws at her bones, shakes her blood in her veins like some kind of fantastic, terrible cocktail of sound and iron, and she is so desperately happy.”
― Addison Lane, Blackpines: The Antlers Witch: The Light in Her Dreams