God Save The Teen! Three Punk Songs That Rocked My World!!!

Please check out my friend Simon's blog, The Glass Walking-Stick where he's also written a post on his Top 3 Teen Punk Songs.  Thanks to him for accepting my writing challenge, which I pitched to him a week ago.  I had a lot of nostalgia-filled fun writing this and I can tell from his post that he had great fun writing his.  So without further ado, here it is... 

In the process of thinking and writing about this blog post, I’ve been reminded just how important your teenage years are.  You pick up hobbies and interests, sometimes influenced by your friends’ hobbies and interest but sometimes through your own exploration of your own likes and dislikes and you go on a journey with it.  These years can be turbulent, confusing, messy, but the turning-over of the ground beneath you is perhaps what makes the teenage landscape so fertile for growth.  

I’m always reminded of this at work.  The workshop is next to my boss’ house and three of his five children are teenagers.  They’re very lucky to be in an environment where they’re encouraged to try things out and their folks will do their best to help them.  Sometimes that hobby will stick, sometimes it won’t. When said hobby is accidentally set on fire (this has happened) or blown up (so has this), their developing brain will take a step back and learn a better way to do it next time.  That’s the theory anyway.  But the important thing is that they’re given the freedom to try.  My own hobbies as a teenager included mountain biking, films and computer games.  There was almost plenty of opportunities to go out riding with my friends or go down the video shop to rent a film or simply just stay in and play my latest computer game for hours on end.  The teenage brain can’t be rushed in bolstering existing and establishing new neuro-pathways and I’m glad I grew up in an environment that allowed that.  What’s interesting about my key interests is that each one seemed to blend with my love of punk music in its own unique way.      

In the 1990s, the music video was king.  And this was also a time when the video games industry reached a mass audience.  The Offspring played a role in both.  The Offspring’s ‘Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)’ was a huge hit for the band.  The song was as catchy as hell and the music video helped make it one of The Offspring’s biggest hits.  This was the first single from their 1998 album ‘Americana’, but it was their third single from that album that would really hook me in.  As a 13 year-old, I thought ‘The Kids Aren’t Alright’ was the greatest song I’d ever heard.  And the music video that accompanied it, with morphing, shapeshifting people (some of whom appear from interesting places) as the camera’s revolving centre, it was one of the weirdest music videos I’d ever seen.  I asked my mum to ask HMV if they had a copy of the single when she went into town, but they hadn’t.  But all I needed to do was switch between The Box and MTV for long enough and eventually I’d be able to hear it.  The song still reminds me of a very specific place within the grounds of Churchdown School.  I must have been thinking deeply about that song as I left school on one particular afternoon in 1999.  During the same year, I traded my Sony Playstation in for a Sega Dreamcast and went on to buy a game called Crazy Taxi.  It was a frenetic, arcade-style game in which you drove around picking up customers and got extra points for dropping them off at their destination in the fastest possible time.  And it was no other than The Offspring that provided a large part of the soundtrack.  For a teenager who already loved The Offspring and loved computer games, it felt like I was getting an album and a computer game for the price of one.  

I was an unusual teenager.  I used to love cleaning my room.  I know that sounds like an odd admission given my love of punk, but I’m afraid this punk just liked to keep things tidy.  And as a huge film fan, I would always choose a film to watch while doing it.  There were three films that had on hard rotation: The Matrix, The Shawshank Redemption and a very different type of film called Evolve.  These were my big three re-watchables.  We all know about Mr Anderson and Mr Dufresne, so let’s talk about Evolve. 

Evolve was a mountain bike stunt video.  It epitomised what I loved about being a mountain biker.  It featured all the best trials riders and it followed the riders across America as they hopped from literal pillar to post.  It’s a highly re-watchable and fun 45 minutes and it’s made even more re-watchable for its amazing soundtrack.  It gave me a taste of nineties American punk that I wouldn’t otherwise have had access to.  You can always trust a punk band to think up an interesting name: Jon Cougar Concentration Camp and 88Fingers Louie were two of the bands that featured on the soundtrack and it was brilliant from start to finish.  The songs were lo-fi, high-octane and always, always fun.  My choice of song in that soundtrack may just be the funnest, high octane one of them all: ‘I Need Some Brain Damage’ by The Lillingtons.  Watch this from 27:37 and you’ll know what I mean.  Every one of these songs have a very special place in my heart.  The songs blend effortlessly with the stunts on screen.  Look how well director Reed Merschat synchronises the guitar solo with Ryan Leech doing a manual (a wheelie without pedalling) down the steps.  As a 15 year-old, this was beautiful to behold.  

Everyone had a punk rock girl in their year at school.  The one in my year always wore a NOFX hoody.  She was in my GCSE Business Studies class so I was reminded of this maybe-band, maybe-not-a-band-but-probably-something-punk-related, almost every week for two years.  It wasn’t until the end of Year 11 that I was bitten by the NOFX bug.  And I caught it at The Crypt School’s summer car boot sale.  I was wandering around with my parents and saw a copy of their 1994 album ‘Punk in Drublic’ being sold on a CD stall.  Well, the band’s merchandising department and that punk rock girl deserve a pat on the back for that hoody because I bought the album and never looked back.  

It was the first album I really, truly fell in love with.  I’d grown up listening to the likes of Good Charlotte, Green Day, The Offspring and Blink 182.  They may have all started out as pure punk, but you couldn’t call any of these genuine punk bands without putting pop in front of it.  These bands didn’t-but-did give a shit - and that’s fine, but it goes against the true punk ideals.  I still liked all of these bands, but I was 16 now and my taste in music was evolving.   I liked that NOFX were edgier,  had never sold out and, let’s be honest, had probably been in more fights and taken more drugs.  It’s hard to choose a song because the album works so well as a whole, but the opening song ‘Linoleum’ occupies a very special place in my heart. As soon as Fat Mike sings ‘Possessions never meant anything to me’, I was hooked.

 

I was very lucky that the year 1999 and the years surrounding it had a lot of things going for it.  It was pre-social media, pre-Trump, pre-Covid - pre-a lot of things actually.  I don’t know how easily I’d negotiate being a teenager in what seems like more complicated times these days.  Having done so well in my GCSEs, I got so distracted by chatting on MSN Messenger with my friends that I didn’t do so well in my A Levels.  With all the doomscrolling delights of the modern day, I think technology would have chewed me up and spat me out if I had social media to hand 20 years ago.  But the teenagers I know all seem pretty well-adjusted so perhaps it’s just me watching too many Black Mirror episodes.  In what seems like much more complicated times, it’s important to give yourself time to take a break from The House of Zuckerberg and Co and enjoy the things you liked to do when you were young.  And if that included rocking out to a bit of good old fashioned punk, then all the better!