5 Feet of Fury

Julie Burchill: “I was a punk of convenience from start to finish”

She writes about her part in the new documentary She’s a Punk Rocker UK:

Thus began my short career as a hypocrite. But when you’re a stroppy, super-bright working class girl who knows that following one’s mater into the cardboard box factory is DEFINITELY not quite what one is dreaming of, you don’t have the luxury of taking decisions at leisure. Unlike the dreary, late-blooming offspring of the middling class, you don’t faff away your Fruit Salad chew days pissing around with ‘uni’ and gap years and sabbaticals until your mid-twenties. You see a ladder coming down from the ‘copter, and you run towards it – as fast as your bondage pants will allow, of course.

(…)

And I remember that, against all odds, I emerged from it in 1979 with the bare bones of a proper career, as a proper writer, that has served me well to this very day. That was the bittersweet irony; that we banged on about us being nihilists and there being No Future, and it turned out that punk was one big stepping stone from the margins to the mainstream; as I write, John Lydon is advertising butter on TV.