Barker (aka Six) shares photos and stories of his life in London's punk scene, 1976-1978.

This original collection of insight, analysis and conversation charts the course of punk from its underground origins, when it was an un-formed and utterly alluring near-secret, through its rapid development. Punk is Dead: Modernity Killed Every Night takes in sex, style, politics and philosophy, filtered through punk experience, while believing in the ruins of memory, to explore a past whose essence is always elusive.

1981: The cities of England are aflame with widespread rioting. One in ten of the population is unemployed. The Specials' Ghost Town is at number one in the charts. Too much fighting on the dance floor. But don't worry, there's a royal wedding to keep you all distracted, Charles and Diana exchanging worthless vows before a multitude of flag-waving tourists. Meanwhile, a 17-year-old punk rocker, young, dumb, and full of...curiosity, decides to flee the boredom of small village life and a mindless factory job to follow his favourite bands - Siouxsie and the Banshees, Killing Joke, and the Damned - dodging police, skinheads, Perry Boys, football hooligans, and er, the Bath Warriors as he hitchhikes from town to town. Packed with history and hilarity, Punk Snot Dead is a coming-of-age story like no other, and a nostalgic glance at an England that is no more.

Famous for its revolutionary aspects in musical, political, sexual identity and consumerist ideas, punk rock also has its lesser-known gangster ethos as well, explained here by players in the various punk gangs. The Los Angeles, Orange County, and South Bay punk scenes, populated by blue collar kids who responded to the violence and aggression of punk songs and shows. A number of them formed punk gangs that got into beatings, drug dealing and murder. Among them, no gang was more notorious than La Mirada Punks, or LMP. Says LMP chieftain Frank the Shank after getting arrested by police for murder: "After having my hands in so much bloodshed over the years, I most certainly had it coming. I deserved whatever I got." Unexpectedly Frank was bailed out from prison by his father's friend, a mob gangster. "Too many people died at the hands of punk rock violence," said Frank. "I got lucky, some didn't. As an ultra-violent punk rock gangster, I admit my part in ruining the scene. L.A. punk was a magical moment of youth expression like no other. And the gangs ruined punk rock. I still have people telling me today that they quit punk because of LMP. I dig graves at a small cemetery just outside Los Angeles. What else would you expect for Frank the Shank?" Cover illustration by the renowned Raymond Pettibon.

" [An] endlessly fascinating and frankly addictive masterpiece of safety-pin journalism." -- Austin Chronicle An oral history of the modern punk-revival's West Coast Birthplace Outside of New York and London, California?s Bay Area claims the oldest continuous punk-rock scene in the world. Gimme Something Better brings this outrageous and influential punk scene to life, from the notorious final performance of the Sex Pistols, to Jello Biafra?s bid for mayor, the rise of Maximum RocknRoll magazine, and the East Bay pop-punk sound that sold millions around the globe. Throngs of punks, including members of the Dead Kennedys, Avengers, Flipper, MDC, Green Day, Rancid, NOFX, and AFI, tell their own stories in this definitive account, from the innovative art-damage of San Francisco?s Fab Mab in North Beach, to the still vibrant all-ages DIY ethos of Berkeley?s Gilman Street. Compiled by longtime Bay Area journalists Jack Boulware and Silke Tudor, Gimme Something Better chronicles more than two decades of punk music, progressive politics, social consciousness, and divine decadence, told by the people who made it happen.

Spirit of 76 "provides a previously unseen view of the beginning of the punk movement, with portraits of the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Subway Sect and The Damned at the very beginnings of their careers--the only color photographs from this first wave of British punk (as well as many black-and-white images.

Stacy Thompson's Punk Productions offers a concise history of punk music and combines concepts from Marxism to psychoanalysis to identify the shared desires that punk expresses through its material productions and social relations. Thompson explores all of the major punk scenes in detail, from the early days in New York and England, through California Hardcore and the Riot Grrrls, and thoroughly examines punk record collecting, the history of the Dischord and Lookout! record labels, and 'zines produced to chronicle the various scenes over the years. While most analyses of punk address it in terms of style, Thompson grounds its aesthetics, and particularly its most combative elements, in a materialist theory of punk economics situated within the broader fields of the music industry, the commodity form, and contemporary capitalism. While punk's ultimate goal of abolishing capitalism has not been met, the punk enterprise that stands opposed to the music industry is still flourishing. Punks continue to create aesthetics that cannot be readily commodified or rendered profitable by major record labels, and punks remain committed to transforming consumers into producers, in opposition to the global economy's increasingly rapid shift toward oligopoly and monopoly.