Turns out an eleven-year-old with a phone and genuine curiosity is a more receptive audience than most of the actual crowds I’ve played to.
My nephew, eleven years old and recently obsessed with a chart-topping pop act I am contractually obligated, as his aunt, not to publicly criticise, asked me last weekend, with the genuine innocence of someone who has never once considered the question before, what punk actually is, and I spent the following two hours realising I did not actually have a clean, simple answer prepared despite having spent the better part of two decades of my own life inside this specific subculture.
I started, predictably, with the sound, guitars, speed, a certain deliberate roughness that refuses to be sanded smooth, and got about as far as playing him three genuinely foundational tracks before I noticed his attention had drifted somewhere between the second and third song, which taught me something useful and slightly humbling: the sound alone, divorced from any actual context, does not automatically land with an eleven-year-old raised entirely on genre-blended, algorithmically smoothed playlist culture. I had to start over, properly, from somewhere else entirely.
What actually landed, once I found it, was the attitude underneath the sound rather than the sound itself: the idea that you do not need permission, or expensive equipment, or any of the industry gatekeepers, to simply make something and put it into the world, loudly, imperfectly, on your own terms. I told him about my own first gig, badly played, terrified, in a venue I have, coincidentally, just been writing about elsewhere on this site given the news of its impending closure, and watched something genuinely click behind his eyes in a way three carefully chosen songs never quite managed on their own.
By the end of the afternoon he had, with a confidence that genuinely startled me, declared his own bedroom drum kit “basically punk now” and started planning what he described, with total seriousness, as his own band, currently consisting of himself, one friend who apparently owns a keyboard, and a plan that involves considerably more ambition than actual musical ability, which, I told him honestly, describes roughly the first several years of nearly every band I have ever personally been part of, including my own.
I think what struck me most, reflecting on the whole afternoon afterward, is how much punk as an actual ethos, rather than punk as a specific historical sound tied to a specific decade, remains genuinely, immediately legible to an eleven-year-old the moment you strip away the aesthetic signifiers and just explain the underlying permission it grants: you are allowed to make something before you know how, you are allowed to be loud before you are polished, you are allowed to simply start. That message, it turns out, does not actually need leather jackets or safety pins to land. It just needs someone willing to explain it properly, which, apparently, is now my job within this family.
He has already asked if he can come to my actual gig next month, an ask his parents are, understandably, still deliberating given the venue and the hour, but I am, for what it is worth, quietly rooting for them to say yes. Every generation deserves the chance to work out, on its own terms, exactly what refusing permission actually feels like.
My sister, overhearing the tail end of our conversation from the kitchen, asked afterward whether I was worried about “corrupting” her son with what she called, only half-joking, my questionable musical influence. I told her, entirely honestly, that if the worst outcome of this afternoon is an eleven-year-old who grows up believing he is allowed to make things before he is technically ready, imperfectly, loudly, on his own terms, I will happily take full responsibility for that particular corruption, and I suspect most of the actually interesting people I know personally would say precisely the same about whichever aunt, uncle, or stray family friend first gave them that same specific permission at roughly the same age.
He has already started, with genuinely touching seriousness, sketching a logo for the still entirely hypothetical band on the back of his maths homework, which I am choosing to interpret as a genuinely promising sign rather than a concerning one, whatever his teacher eventually makes of the doodles covering his fractions worksheet.
I sent his mother, my sister, a slightly apologetic text later that evening warning her the maths homework might have taken a hit, and got back a message that simply read “worth it,” which I have decided to take as a genuine family endorsement of the entire afternoon’s activities, homework casualties included. There is, I think, something worth protecting in a family willing to trade a slightly messier fractions worksheet for an eleven-year-old discovering, properly, for the first time, that he is allowed to make noise before he knows what he is doing, and I intend to keep showing up for exactly that kind of trade whenever I am asked.
It has left me thinking, too, about my own aunt, who did something roughly similar for me at almost exactly the same age, sitting me down with a stack of records I was far too young to properly appreciate at the time and explaining, with the same patient seriousness I apparently just inherited without noticing, why any of it actually mattered beyond the sound itself. I never properly thanked her for that, not really, not in any way that captured what it actually set in motion. Perhaps this diary entry can, belatedly, function as that thank you, passed forward rather than backward, which feels, on reflection, like the more fitting direction for this specific kind of debt to travel anyway.
More from this author at Siobhan O’Donnell, prat.uk.