Pic of the Poseurs

Back through the misty glades of time, the streets of London were paved with punk and in our outposts around the country, we participated in it all in our own way. Wherever you were, the meanest accusation you could make to someone was that they were a poseur- or a poser, as we called it. You'd fling this at rich punks who bought their clothes from Vivienne and Malcolm rather than being given them or stealing them, or at people who bought their clothes from Boy rather than making them themselves. It was silly, but quite a lot about punk was silly; the self-policing wasn't anything to be proud of when we should have been dealing with the violence. The thing is that we were all really young and something had been created that was beyond anyone's control. This was our magazine, printed at the trusty Resource Centre in Brighton. We knew that some of the London punks laughed at us, and this was us laughing back. The young woman on the cover, Darla Jane Gilroy, later went on to be a famous fashion designer and is now a University lecturer; here she's tearing up a copy of Sniffing' Glue. In terms of content our mag was pretty cruddy but it was a lot of fun to do it and it was part of that 'we can do anything' feeling that permeated the whole of the latter part of the 1970s and that got stronger the harder people tried to stop us. 'Punk is over now in London', advised a friend down from London for the weekend. He didn't understand how little that mattered to us; we were far to busy to pay any attention, and anyway he wasn't in a band or anything like that: he was a watcher. Joby, our lead singer, was really into printing and made loads of posters that he slapped on hoardings all over Brighton until the council stopped him. We were nuisance and in many ways we were fearless because we had absolutely nothing to lose.