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2,212 Results
Journal Article
American Punk: The Relations Between Punk Rock, Hardcore, and American Culture
Gerfried Ambrosch
Amerikastudien / American Studies, Vol. 60, No. 2/3 (2014), pp. 215-233
Book Chapter
Punk Authenticity: Difference across the Iron Curtain
(pp. 212-232)
Jeff Hayton
From: The Politics of Authenticity: Countercultures and Radical Movements across the Iron Curtain, 1968-1989, Berghahn Books (2003)
Book Chapter
Introduction: Who Is The Doctor?
(pp. 1-10)
Eryka Lorde
From: Doctor of Punk: The Search for Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Most Mysterious Urban Legend, Oxford University Press (2017)
Introduction: Who Is The Doctor?
Who’s the Doctor? Fuck, man, I don’t know.
- Joe Strummer, 1982
Early one Saturday morning in 1980, after playing a gig with his first, failing band The Dreamboys, Peter Capaldi had his Doctor moment. “I hadn’t quite believed that he existed, you know,” he later told NME , “because everyone big in punk seemed to have a story about meeting the Doctor, but nobody was able to tell you anything about him except for what he looked like, not even his name. I thought he was just a myth. But then he came out of nowhere, looking just like everyone described him, and all I could think was ‘This is it. I’m going to make it.’”
According to Capaldi, the Doctor encouraged him to continue as lead singer and guitarist of The Dreamboys for the three gigs they already had lined up, rather than quit the band immediately as he had been considering. The second of those three gigs was as one of the bands opening for Joy Division in Birmingham, where Capaldi and Joy Division’s bassist Peter Hook hit it off and began plans for a side project that would be, in Capaldi’s words “Ziggy Stardust, if Ziggy had the misfortune of being dropped in Thatcher’s England.” This side project, after the tragic suicide of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis less than three months later, eventually morphed into pioneering hardcore goth punk act Ripley’s Sidearm, one of the most influential acts of UK punk’s second wave.
How would punk have developed if Peter Capaldi hadn’t had his Doctor moment that chilly morning in 1980? Would bands such as Chaos UK, Napalm Death, and The Exploited have developed their unique sound and point of view, which came to define second-wave UK punk, without Ripley’s Sidearm? It is impossible to know, of course, but the simple fact is that the story of Ripley’s Sidearm is by no means unique.
Time and time again, punk innovators and superstars alike have told stories of a mysterious figure known only as the Doctor. Whether he’s lurking in the back of the room at early X-Ray Spex and The Clash gigs or providing the push needed for a band to sign to a new label over a more established one, the Doctor slips in and out of the story of punk rock in the UK like a benevolent spectre, leaving behind no known associates or even a name.
So what is known about the Doctor? He has a relatively stable physical description - an older Scottish man, tall and thin, with a shock of white hair and strangely intense eyebrows. Some have reported that he was possibly homeless, wearing many layers of coats, jumpers, and t-shirts, but others claimed that he favored velvet suit jackets with worn Doc Martens.
His politics are somewhat known as well, since he was the one to encourage John Lyndon, then known as Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, to abandon swatstikas and other Nazi imagery in favor of the red and black bisected anarchist flag in their album art and shows. This early tendency towards left-wing imagery, along with the fact that the Doctor is never recorded as attending gigs of bands using Nazi and neo-Nazi imagery, caused right-wing and Nazi punk to become near-extinct in the UK by the ‘80s, in sharp contrast to American punk, where neo-Nazi influence is an ongoing issue to this day.
But besides those small facts, which there is obviously still room to dispute, there is one overwhelming trait that runs through every story about the Doctor - his kindness. Whether he was forcing Sid Vicious into rehab, encouraging future movie star and Lair frontwoman Amanda Donahoe to leave Adam Ant, or lending the weight of his burgeoning punk legend to Rock Against Racism, the Doctor’s legacy can be seen not only in the bands that were bolstered by his presumed blessing but in the moral fiber of a movement that had originally been born out of directionless young anger at the world around them. That’s not to say that the Doctor was a passive figure - there are numerous accounts, in fact, of him punching National Front members who unwisely showed their faces at punk venues - but as time went by he began to take the position of a teacher, a guide, and even a father or grandfather to the punk movement at large.
Even with all that said, there are many who dispute the Doctor’s existence. Is it likely, they say, that an older man would become so involved in and embraced by a youth-led movement? How is it that, in 30 years of popping in and out of punk history, the Doctor managed to never be interviewed for a zine or even photographed? These questions are legitimate ones, complicated further by the fact that many accounts of the Doctor are disputed or from less than reliable sources.
I will admit that, before I began research for this book, which involved over 100 interviews in addition to archival research of punk zines, I was one of those who doubted that the Doctor was a single person rather than an amalgamation of a number of stories. It is only over the course of my research that I have come to the conclusion that there was indeed a single individual known as the Doctor who was deeply involved with the punk scene in the UK from the first Sex Pistols show in 1975 to at least 1989. While there are numerous stories involving the Doctor after that point, some as recent as the gig launching IDLES’ premiere album, Brutalism, this year, the last sighting of the Doctor that most punk historians deem credible is at a Snuff gig in November 1989. I will, however, be including a full timeline of stories and their origins, including those I believe to be false.
And so come rock with me, in a journey that starts at the St. Martin’s College of Art in London, 1975, and spans throughout time and across all of Britain. Following the breadcrumbs creates not only vivid portraits of the most influential names in punk at their lowest points and on the cusp of fame, but also starts to sketch out a view of the man at the center of one of the most pervasive and genre-defining urban legends in the history of popular culture - the Doctor.