Rick Walton is something of a cult writer who works in sport. His latest book – Power Chords – is about growing up through punk and ‘the power of music and ideas, pouring in to teenage life’.

(PROTESTING) THE GALAXY OF LOSS.

‘I guess the thing that stirs me the most is the urgent need to change the universe. And that really may be a direct result of punk and Margaret Thatcher’.

So sayeth the 2025 version of my good self. In Power Chords, my recent book. And yes I am aware of how dumb, dated or estranged from the all-consuming now that bold bluster might sound, but I wrote the book because that anger feels fresh. (With white supremacist fires a-burning, why wouldn’t it?) You don’t need to be a zeitgeist-obsessive to sense that the furies I felt in 1976 we may need to feel now.

‘Bit loathe to put dates into this baby (oops) but it may be inescapable. Absolutely not telling you freeloaders my birth date – not until we’re mates and you’ve proved you’re worth it – but suppose I can offer the rough figuration that I was a furious and pyrotechnically hormonal late-teen when the over-combed one began to preen through and over our lives. She, and Rotten’s voice, and Strummer’s heart, and Costello’s lyrics and my father’s death were the things that made me. They were contingent and co-forming energies that powered and power me towards trying, at the very least, to live a life that opposes’.

The energy around and beyond punk was the thing – more than the vinyl *produced within the category*. Don’t get me wrong, The Pistols, Clash, Jam, Buzzcocks were all magbloodynificent: but any tight definition of great punk or great punk bands throws up a confoundingly short list. However, open your hearts to New Wave or Bands Patently Unthinkable Without Punk and one of the most thrilling and conscious periods in popular music pogo(e)s into view.

Some of that was the result of the sort of peak political discontent many of us are experiencing now. Specific hatred – I’m afraid it was! – for Thatcher’s rancid but rising pomp and the prejudice she so brazenly bore against minorities and communities that opposed her. Plus we angry teens were profoundly shifted by the new, articulate raging: Weller, Costello, Devoto and Mark E Smith wading in compellingly against the analgesic banality of The Biz and Normal Life itself.

Not sure the phrase ‘they spoke for us’ was rilly around in 1977, but they did that thing. There was a different drive, over and above the phlegm-heavy sonic charge. This was righteous, electrifying, raw-but-eloquent objection. It smelt like change and de-mystification and it brought both.

‘Punks identified anyone who sounded like The Bizz, or was complicit in its pitches as the enemy. This was of course almost everybody. If you swam complacently along with the major record labels, the machinery of production and the Gods of Commerce then you were traitorous filth: all of you. If you deliberately made your musical sound easy to access, you were shameless, vacuous scumbags. Plus energy. If your energy was that traditional thing aspiring to loveliness and sweet diversion then you were, despite your smashtastic success, a joke’.

If this all sounds a bit judgemental then yes – guilty as charged. But new wave coloured and fleshed-out and was in any event witty and hearty from the start. Lydon may not have been (not intentionally, at least) a bundle of laughs but everywhere you look from Talking Heads, Buzzcocks, Postcard Records to B52s there’s a flush of humour, of the mischief of young people. Reminding me, at least, of the brilliance of purveyors of placards elsewhere and always.

‘The three chords and less than three minutes thing that punk was predicated upon is very pop. It’s also obviously anti-indulgence… and therefore may be supportive of smart choices. Knowing is everything: this includes knowing there is nothing wrong with ‘music to wash up to’. The two poles of what we might call engaged or protest songs and ephemera can absolutely subsist – and did. 1979 may have been the peak of the history of popular music – albums and singles – because of the energy and drive of punk and the sparkling wit of energized pop’.

I express in Power Chords some wee frustration at the lack of articulate voices about or from within punk, at the time, whilst noting that what really matters, of course, is the choons. Sure, Lydon’s reactionary rants and his butter commercials undermine The Cause. The Clash had a kind of daft dressing-up box, full of photogenic rebel gear. Image has always been huge, to Weller. And yet the legacy – the real legacy – is stellar and seminal to so many of us.

‘Lydon was and is somewhere between the various caricatures of force of nature, clown and cultural icon. He was and is punk, for better and worse. For all his loudmouthery and those moments where we Guardian-reading liberals had wished he would ‘just stop!’ Lydon has produced material of staggering ambition and import. (So I for one largely forgive him). The Pistols singles are almost as sensational now as they were then. ‘Public Image’ the single is an extraordinary and well-executed re-birth. ‘Poptones’, ‘Careering’, ‘Flowers of Romance’, ‘Keep Banging the Door’ and ‘Rise’ are all giants’.

Power Chords was generously described as ‘a life in music. Beautifully told’ on the cover. (Many thanks @memorialdevice). Meaning it’s not just about punk – although it may be about growing up through punk. I wrote it last year because it felt that my anger was spiking to teen levels because of the crassness and racism and deconstruction of the truth in the ether now. I’m glad I did that – put on record my daft association of the current galaxy of loss with my precious experience of equivalently-perceived evils. I was there, then, and *I did learn stuff* so this is my protest song.

‘Foolish to remotely compare how things felt from Year A to F, but the parallels around race and wealth, between Thatcherite Ingerland and Trumpian North America are striking. Thatcher (for us) was an obvious bigot and likely white supremacist: see also Trump and Musk. In both eras there is an extraordinary sense of the rich getting richer – by design. That shamelessness, now so epitomized by Trump’s cohort of oligarchs and technocrats is both the exercise of increasingly authoritarian power and triumphalist cruelty. Meaning a particular kind of wickedness’.

There are challenges.

‘Where lies progress in all this? On a political level I suppose we need to elect governments that will be a) strong enough morally to oppose prejudice and b) smart enough economically to improve the lot of the disaffected. Clearly, sadly, the momentum appears to be going the other way in certain key democracies’.

And yet, as always, there is hope. In this most recent book I call out to our next-generation Angels of Protest, invoking the power of tremendous and life-changing songs of meaning, wherever they are, however they sound, to carry us somewhere better.