Hitsville UK

Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns is an examination of the UK’s p unk music boom from 1976 to 1984 which avoids the usual clichés and stereotypes. Instead of concentrating on the Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned triumvirate as recent publications have tended to do, old punk, lecturer and graphic designer Russell Bestley aims to focus attention on the groundswell of punk bands, including all the uncelebrated provincial punks and none-hit wonders. This booklet and three-poster package examines punk via 7 inch picture sleeves. At the time most chart singles came in plain sleeves with record company logos. Picture sleeves were initially a sales gimmick, but punk bands quickly seized the opportunity to create bold, colourful, eye-catching sleeve designs giving a flavour of the exuberant music inside and picture sleeves quickly became de rigueur.
One side of the posters has a gallery of singles’ sleeves; put these up at home and you’ll instantly recreate the atmosphere of a late-’70s/early-’80s independent record shop. You’ll be transported back to Saturdays spent gazing up at walls festooned with record sleeves knowing you wanted all of them but had enough pocket money for just one single and the bus fare home. The reverse side of these posters joins up to make an enormous punkiodic table: a graph with tiny pictures of hundreds of single sleeves mapped out by release date and geographic location. Most 40-/50-somethings will find this completely absorbing, poring over the posters for hours mentally ticking off all the bands you saw and records you bought. The wealth of information on the posters (the result of many hours of research and scouring eBay) is accompanied by a booklet which covers all possible categories of UK punk, with succinct articles on each: Proto Punk, Pub Rock, New Wave, Novelty Rock, DIY, Post Punk, the Avant Garde, Oi, Street Punk, Real Punk, New Punk, Hardcore and Anarcho Punk – labels which might seem blurred and irrelevant now, but which were fiercely argued and fought over at the time.
This is an excellent package of nostalgia-inducing historical research, all for the doing-it-for-the-kids price of £3.50 – echoing the “pay no more than 99p” slogan that certain punk bands always printed on their records.
Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns accompanied an exhibition in May at Millais Gallery, Southampton, but Russell Bestley is looking for other venues for the exhibition to tour to, particularly in faraway towns.

£3.50+postage; russwyd (X) hotmail


Reviewed by Mark Pawson for Variant Magazine