Of all the endless retrospectives there are, have been and will be about punk’s explosion in the late 1970s and limpet-like hold on underground culture through the 80s, one thing that seldom comes across is how fun it must have been. The anger, ennui and aggression – the filth and the fury, even – all get hyped up but the TV shows and magazine memorials don’t tend to show many people, y’know, smiling, like they’re enjoying themselves.
The Spitting Image Instagram is an amazing little refuge for all that was enjoyable about being young, unclean and perpetually smashed with all your best friends in one of the modern world’s defining youth cults. Sure, what strikes you first are the fanned-out and dyed mohicans, the leather, the studs, the badges and the booze, but take more two minutes to get beneath the mucky skin of the images and you’ll notice that in almost every photograph, people are fucking beaming – and those smiles are spread wide across the kind of face you don’t often see any more, pre-internet, pre-camera in every high street pocket, pre-narcissism, this is nihilism for kicks, proof that you can listen to bands like Discharge, Blitz, Subhumans and GBH without wanting to violently kill everyone in the immediate vicinity.
Here are some of our favourites:
