ABSTRACT
Hebdige, above, utters words of caution as the music press rejoices in punk bands getting record deals, bank clerks metamorphosing into fanzine editors (Mark Perry of Sniffin’ Glue) and then into music journalists and so on; subcultures become focused on ‘a handful of brilliant nonconformists’, he claims. By presenting the experiences of a group of contemporaries I interviewed, who were in bands in East and West London, Cambridge, Brighton, Oxford, Southampton and Manchester,2 we will see how their experiences empowered them, and how the punk community supported them. What these women have in common is that they started playing instruments in bands around 1976-77, during the moment that punk first became a major youth subculture; their mass-cultural reference points are therefore very similar, although at the time their ages would have varied from 16 to 45. Some of these women (for example, Lora Logic) made recordings and were quite prominent musicians at the time, with reviews and interviews in the music press. Others made no recordings and gave no interviews, but were just as deeply involved in the production of music and living in the punk subculture.
