Punk enjoys a payday as collectors see rebellion turn into money

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WHEN The Clash sang in I Fought The Law “I needed money ’cause I had none”, they spoke for many of their fans. But times have changed.

Those once-teenage punks have settled down, built careers and reached the point when they can now spend what they might have once regarded as a small fortune on buying back memorabilia from those days at vastly increased prices.

Which explains why some of the clothes they wore and the posters with which they adorned their bedrooms are now being sold at auction for thousands of pounds and, in some cases, tens of thousands.

Dealers have said that demand is such that now is the ideal time for fans to root around their attics for items of memorabilia from their wilder days.

While promotional tour and record posters for punk bands can fetch as much as £600 at auction – and more for rarer examples – objects once owned by band members themselves can go for several thousands.

A recent sale by Bonhams auctioneers saw punk memorabilia, including posters for Sex Pistols concerts that never took place, going for thousands more than their estimated value.

One particularly rare Sex Pistols poster from 1976 recently went under the hammer for almost £8,000 – seven times its estimate – and a customised shirt worn by The Clash’s late lead singer Joe Strummer sold for £22,500.

Stephen Maycock, of Bonhams, said: “Punks are now in their 50s, a lot of them have money, they are trying to recapture those times. It’s 40 years since punk. It’s natural for people to look back. It’s history, and history is always being raked over.

“You can’t be a punk for ever. It was largely a teenagers’, early 20s’ fashion trend. We all go through those things. They have the money now to collect. It’s a very strong driver.” Punk itself came out of a backlash against the rock dinosaurs and stadium bands of the mid-Seventies – the likes of Led Zeppelin, Yes and the Rolling Stones – and its adherents proclaimed a do-it-yourself philosophy, with anyone free to write a song, play a tune or design a record cover or T-shirt.

But it was also a cry of despair against the grim economic realities of the era, coupled with a rejection of the racism and sexism prevalent across so much of society.

Those impulses were reflected in the home-made clothes worn by punks, decorated with zips and studs, scrawled with slogans, ripped and held together with safety pins, along with boots and leather jackets.

It was a cheap look for youngsters who for the most part had little money. The era saw the rise of Ramones, Television and Patti Smith in New York, fol

‘Punks are now in their 50s, a lot of them have money, they are trying to recapture those times’

lowed by the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Siouxsie and the Banshees in London, with younger bands such as Buzzcocks in Manchester, Stiff Little Fingers in Belfast and the all-female The Slits taking up the banner as punk spread out from the capital.

Forty years on, the items worn by those young punks are being turned into what the Pistols’ singer Johnny Rotten described as “filthy lucre”.

Strummer himself might not have begrudged his old fans turning what they once wore into an investment. But he did after all make the pointed observation, in one of The Clash’s greatest songs – in which he railed at the routine phenomenon of once-outlaw bands “selling out”: “Ha, you think it’s funny, turning rebellion into money?”