My Suburban Heart

The song of the failed oik.

When I was a writer on the pop magazine ‘Sounds’ in the late 1970s, the punk aesthetic was absolutely at its pinnacle. I was in the office when the first punk single came in, The Damned’s ‘Neat Neat Neat’, and witnessed the excitement as it was played to the whole room on our collective sound system.

We on the staff of ‘Sounds’ weren’t really punks, though. As I recall it, although my memory may be a bit shaky, most of the writers were middle class, and the middle class was the enemy for punks.. I was one of the few genuinely working class journalists on the paper. I always hoped that this would bring me kudos but it didn’t, because I was the wrong kind of working class. The kind of working class that 'Sounds’ and its more successful compatriot, ‘NME’, favoured, lived on council estates or in high rises, liked to sniff glue and ideally ran their own fanzine or started their own group.