Punk: Attitude

Don Letts was a contemporary of the London punk scene in the late 1970s as a DJ and later went on to co-found Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones and be a music video maker for a wide range of alternative bands. His film is a comprehensive compendium of punk from its heyday in London and New York through to today. A good thing it is to have such a thorough visual document although perhaps a little too much of one and most will be well punk'd out, particularly by the time the film arrives at more recent corporatised variants of the tradition like Blink 182. But then most historical overviews tend to getting ragged at they approach the non-historicised present.

Although there is a tendency to rather superficially jump from one band to the next, the strength of this film for most will lie in its coverage of the classic years of punk with some nice vintage live footage of bands such as The New York Dolls and The Sex Pistols and characters such as David Johansen and Henry Rollins reflecting on the whys and wherefores of it all.

 

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