Anyone Can Do It: Empowerment, Tradition and the Punk Underground

Pete Dale is renowned in the punk underground for his involvement in the Slampt Underground Organisation and groups such as Pussycat Trash, Milky Wimpshake and Red Monkey. His recent PhD research at Newcastle University explored the politics of punk. He taught music in a Gateshead secondary school for many years. He is currently Popular Music Fellow at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

• Contents: Introduction; Part I Anyone Can Do - What?: What is punk; The folk 'us'; Punk as folk; Conclusion to part I. Part II Can Any One Do 'It'?: Punk, avant-gardism and novelty; Marxism, anarchism and the issue of universality; Justice to come and the micromatic recoi; Conclusion to part IIl. Part III The Beginning of a Continuation: Interlude 1: an original rebirth?; There is no authority, but ...; Indie pop ain't noise pollution; Conclusion to part III. Part IV The Continuation of a Beginning: Interlude 2: still birth?; The arrival of a new, renegade, girl-boy hyper-nation; Delivering the groceries at 138 beats per minute; Conclusion to part IV; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

'This is a history which deserves, indeed needs, to be told. That Dale has chosen to attempt to make sense of a subject so diverse and self-contradictory as this is laudable. If the anarcho-punk tenet ’there is no authority but yourself’ is to be followed, then he has admirably succeeded in proving his point - ’le punk est mort, vive le punk’. Penny Rimbaud, former member of Crass 'A long-needed study... promise[s] to become central to current research in the area of punk rock.' - North American British Music Studies Association Newsletter“Dale’s study is theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous, mediating between closereadings of songs and historical, social, political and philosophical themes… The book iscommendably ambitious in its thematic range.” - Wilkinson, D., Worley, M. and Street, J. (2016) ‘“I Wanna See Some History”: Recent Writing on British Punk’, Contemporary European History