Free Event – but booking necessary

WOT IS IT?
WHY PUNK? is a talk about the music, the feeling & the audience in Punk’s early days in Derby.

Hosted by Aaron Williamson with a panel of Derby-Punk and provincial-Punk connected figures, the event will celebrate, discuss and contextualise the early punk movement, scene and attitude in and around Derby.

The talk will bounce off the archive materials, gig lists and photographs explored in QUAD’s current exhibition, ‘Jubilee City – Derby Punk in the 1970s‘.

Derby punk can be dated to the infamous non-appearance of the Sex Pistols at the King’s Hall in November 1976. Despite this absence of a focal performance event, many of the young people who assembled outside the King’s Hall that evening went on to form their own bands, publish fanzines, rework clothes and put on their own gigs. Punk was alive and kicking in Derby; a moment when young people were engaged with autonomous Do-It-Yourself production rather than submitting to the passive consumption of the music industry.

Come along and discover Punk’s impact on Derby’s youth culture – how it happened then, and how we can re-engage with that Punk energy now. Find out about Derby’s electric, alive and grubby place in the history of Punk.

‘WHY PUNK?’ is part of our Heritage Lottery Fund Project- Dancing Through Time – From Pop to Punk in the City of Derby, in which we’re creating a massive social and photographic archive of Derby’s rich music, club & dance scenes in the ’60s through to the early ’80s.