The Zine UK

The anger is here. It has not gone away. It is just being charged £30 for a rehearsal room.

Fifty years after 1976, the question is no longer whether anger exists. It does. Kneecap have found a path through, but it is hardly a movement. Craic Killers, by contrast, are also singing in Irish about British imperialism and Palestine - and donating most of the meagre earnings to the causes they mention. Bob Vylan are shouting about landlords and police violence. Lambrini Girls are tearing strips off abusers. Benefits sound like a nervous breakdown in a Teesside precinct. Big Joanie, Problem Patterns, Kid Kapichi. The list goes on.

The politics hasn't disappeared. It's been pushed to the margins.

To ask whether there will ever be another punk movement is to ask the right question in the wrong way. In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus argued that punk was not simply a musical genre; it was one episode in a longer secret history of refusal - Dada in Zurich, the Situationists in Paris, the Sex Pistols in London - a recurring demand that the world be remade rather than managed. That demand does not die. But each eruption depends on conditions that allow refusal to be lived for a while, not just streamed.

The secret history has its own blind spots, though. It privileges the gesture over the movement, the bohemian over the tenant, the image over the rent strike. 1976 was also exclusionary, often hostile to women, queer people, and people of colour and heavily mediated by the same industry it claimed to oppose. If we invoke it, we need to do so without the romance. The question fifty years after 1976 is not whether punk will repeat itself. It will not. The question is whether the conditions for such a rupture still exist. The answer, increasingly, is that they are being priced out of existence.

Meanwhile, the charts are full of artists who have learned that saying nothing is the safest career move. Taylor Swift endorses Democrats and posts about voter registration. Harry Styles is visibly pro-choice. Ed Sheeran has spoken on homelessness. This is not silence. It is safe politics as personal branding, managed, individualised, and structurally incapable of threatening the systems that fund the careers.

But the safe/dangerous binary is too crude. Taylor Swift's voter registration posts have measurable effects. Harry Styles' pro-choice stance reaches people who would never listen to a band from a squat. This is politics as normalisation, not interruption. It can shift an Overton window an inch; it will never threaten the landlord. The point is not that these artists say nothing. It is that what they say is safe enough to be monetised. The distinction is not between silence and speech, but between speech that can be absorbed and speech that cannot.

The beige is not the absence of anger. It is anger with a LinkedIn profile.

The industry does not hate political music. It hates political music that cannot be sold as a lifestyle choice. Idles sell out arenas. Fontaines D.C. are festival headliners - and I adore them, genuinely, they are one of the best bands in the world - but their anger, real as it is, has been sanitised, stripped of the messy organising that makes it dangerous. The system does not silence anger; it curates it. It picks the bands that can be photographed, playlisted, and sold to a middle-class audience without causing a fuss. The rest are left to rot in the margins.

Internet blockade?

There is a lazy explanation for why political music stays marginal: the algorithm. The platforms censor nothing, but they monetise everything. A political band can go viral and vanish in the same week. It is widely understood that algorithms actively shadow-ban or censor keywords like 'Palestine', 'Gaza', and 'Revolution', throttling the reach of overtly political bands before they can even gain traction. Studies and platform experiments suggest reach can drop by seventy or eighty per cent overnight. The post goes nowhere. The band stays small. You can scream into the void, but the void has a content moderation policy. But the algorithm is not the main problem. The main problem is that being in a political band now costs money most people don't have.

A rehearsal room in London costs £30 to £60 for a few hours. A band needs to rehearse weekly. That's £150 to £300 a month before anyone has played a note in public. Equipment costs hundreds. Transport to a show in a neighbouring city costs £80, and the band might be paid £50 or nothing. In Dublin, Cork, or Galway, the story is similar, with the added joy of a housing crisis that makes London look almost functional.

None of this is to deny that making music has never been cheaper in one sense. You can record an album on a laptop, release it on Bandcamp, and find a global audience without leaving your bedroom. But the cheap part is the part the platforms have monetised. The expensive part is the part that builds scenes: rehearsal rooms, touring, venues, the physical infrastructure of solidarity. You can go viral from your bedroom; you cannot build a movement there.

Touring is worse. Post-Brexit visa rules, cabotage restrictions, and merch limits have made Europe expensive and bureaucratic. The van tour through France and Germany that used to build international scenes is now a financial risk. Kneecap can do it because presumably they have Irish passports. Most UK bands can't. Irish bands, at least, can still cross the border without a visa, but the same monopolised venues and rising costs await them on the other side. Booking the van is a gamble. Booking the ferry is a second mortgage. The romance of the road has been replaced by the reality of the spreadsheet.

Ticket prices have risen. A grassroots show that cost £8 in 2015 now costs £20. That's not just gouging. That's venues passing on energy costs, security, insurance. But the result is that the audience for political music is increasingly the people who can afford it. That is not the working class the music claims to represent.

In 1976 there was enough slack - cheap rooms, the dole, squats - to give refusal a bit of time. I won't romanticise it. The dole was meagre. Squatting was precarious. Most young people were not in punk. But the key difference is this: the slack then was not yet fully commodified. The cheap rooms were cheap because nobody wanted them yet. The squats were possible because the buildings were not yet assets. Today, the ruins have been priced in. The derelict building is a development opportunity. The cheap room is an Airbnb. The garage is a boutique gym. Universal Credit sanctions and the gig economy punish free time; the state no longer tolerates idleness, it optimises it for delivery apps.

Punk was never dependent on stable venues. The Roxy lasted barely two years. The Vortex was a short-lived room. The scene was built on people willing to use whatever spaces existed. That willingness is not gone. What's gone is the space itself, not because there are fewer rooms, but because every room now has a price attached. The only free space left is online, and the algorithm is the gatekeeper. The rent is paid in attention, and the tenant is always in arrears.

The local band used to be a fact of life. Every town had one. They played the pub, the youth club, the community centre. You knew them. They were yours. Now, the middle ground is gone. A band is either a bedroom project chasing algorithmic luck or a London-based operation with management and a PR strategy. The space between - the sticky floor, the terrible sound, the ten mates who came - that space has been priced out. The local band is becoming a memory, and with it, the idea that music belongs to everyone, not just the people who can afford to be seen. It turns out you cannot have a scene if you cannot afford the rent.

Supporting infrastructure has collapsed

It is not just the rooms. It is everything around them.

Independent music journalism has not vanished. It has been fragmented and impoverished. There are Substacks, podcasts, YouTube critics, community radio shows, and Bandcamp curators doing serious political music criticism. What has changed is that there is no single national monoculture to amplify them. In 1976, fanzines and writers at the NME could champion a band, explain its politics, and build a scene. Today, the mainstream music press is SEO listicles and PR-managed interviews. The transmission system is not gone; it is scattered across a hundred small rooms, each with a handful of listeners. The audience is out there. They just cannot find each other.

The NME was the dream. Every kid I knew, including me, wanted to be in it. To have your band reviewed, your photo taken, your voice heard - it meant something. Then it lost its magic, disappeared, and came back as an advertisement for blandness. The death of the NME was not just the death of a magazine. It was the death of the idea that music criticism could be a lever, a weapon, a way of building something. The NME now is a ghost, haunting its own corpse, proof that the industry would rather sell nostalgia than risk building the future. The dream is dead. Long live the SEO headline.

There is no John Peel. This is both true and unfair. There is no single figure with a national platform who can play a band once and change its life. But the next John Peel is not absent. He or she is stuck in a bedroom, running a non-profit music blog with 43 listeners, two of whom are their parents and one of whom is a bot scraping for keywords. She is doing a community radio show from a portacabin in Sligo, playing three political bands an hour between ads for the local butcher. The problem is not that no one is playing the records. The problem is that the infrastructure that once turned one play into a national event has been dismantled, and no one has replaced it with anything that reaches beyond the already converted.

BBC 6 Music plays some political music, but within tight brand management. Commercial radio is beige by design. Community radio exists but is chronically underfunded.

Ticketing is monopolised. Live Nation and Ticketmaster extract income from every level of the industry. Merch cuts and venue hire fees mean even a sold-out small show can lose money. The house always wins, and the house is building another luxury flat on the site of the venue. The venue becomes flats. The band becomes a memory. The ticket price becomes a reminder of what you missed.

Then there are the record deals themselves. A young working-class band signs to a label for an advance that sounds like a lottery win but functions as a loan. The label recoups the advance from sales, streaming, merch, touring, sometimes from everything. If the record flops, the band is dropped, but the debt remains. They are not unemployed musicians; they are defaulting borrowers. In 1976, the exploitation was real too, low royalties, dodgy contracts, managers taking cuts, but the sums were smaller, the indie sector was a genuine alternative, and the dole meant you could sign a bad deal and still eat. Today, a bad deal can follow you for years. The label takes your publishing, your merch rights, your likeness, your data. It is not a record deal; it is a mortgage on a career that might not exist. The Sex Pistols were exploited, but they could also burn through three labels in a year and still be a cultural event. Now, one wrong deal and you're a cautionary tale on a music industry podcast, working in a call centre to pay back an advance for an album no one heard. The difference between 1976 and now is not the existence of exploitation. It is the disappearance of the safety net that made exploitation survivable. The safety net was threadbare, but it was there. Now the net is gone and the fall is longer. And the label is selling tickets to watch you hit the ground.

Music education has been cut. Bands used to form in youth clubs, school music rooms, and community centres. Those spaces have been stripped away by austerity. Music is becoming a middle-class pursuit, and middle-class political music tends to be less dangerous. The working-class kid with a guitar and a grudge is now more likely to be working a zero-hours contract and saving for a deposit on a rehearsal room they will never book. And the guitar is brought on Klarna. The next generation is not apathetic; they are just priced out of being heard. The average age of new political bands is creeping up, because teenagers cannot afford the startup costs anymore.

The festival circuit is dominated by heritage acts. Bands from the 70s, 80s and 90s sell guaranteed tickets, so they get the slots and the fees. New political bands are frozen out because they are a financial risk. The industry has learned it can make more money selling the past than investing in the future. Punk has become a heritage product. That is the cruellest joke of all. The rebellion is now a gift shop. The revolution is a t-shirt. The anger is a vintage pressing on coloured vinyl for thirty quid.

None of these forces are coordinated. They do not need to conspire. They share a logic: culture is real estate, anger is a liability, and the only value that matters is the value that can be extracted. The same property market that evicts a venue evicts a family. The same platform economy that buries a political band turns every worker into a gig worker. This is not a music industry problem. It is a class problem with a soundtrack.

The culture around the music

The gatekeeping in underground scenes is exhausting. Who is authentic enough? Who sold out? Who was political first? Who is faking it? Who is a plant? A scene that punishes newcomers for not knowing the history, for not using the right language, is a scene that will stay small. It will stay pure. And it will die.

This is not new. Punk had its own authenticity police. But today the gatekeeping happens online, in public, and it leaves a permanent record. Every mistake is screenshotted. The cost of participation is now so high that many people choose not to bother. The revolution will not be livestreamed; it will be subtweeted to death before the first chord is played. It is not just the rent that is due; it is the therapy bill. The constant scrutiny, the financial anxiety, the purity tests - it grinds people down before they have a chance to get good at being angry in public. You cannot afford the room, you cannot afford the equipment, and apparently you cannot afford to be wrong on the internet either. So you stay quiet. You stay home. You stream something safe.

There is a particular cruelty in the way the internet judges class. If you are not visibly working-class in the approved ways, if you have a middle-class accent, if your parents helped with rent, if you went to a decent school, you are automatically an industry plant. The label is applied with the speed of a subtweet and the nuance of a sledgehammer. But class is not a costume you can wear to pass an authenticity audit. It is a relationship to power, and that relationship can be rejected or reproduced by people of any background. The question should not be where someone came from, but what they do with the privilege they have. Do they share it? Do they use their platform to open doors for others? Do they put their money where their mouth is? Or do they use their working-class credentials as a brand while hoarding every opportunity? A trust fund kid playing at poverty for an album cycle is a legitimate target. A trust fund kid who funds a rehearsal space, books diverse bills, and uses their connections to fight the system is doing more than a thousand purity tests. The scene should judge people by their actions, not their postcode. Otherwise, we end up with a movement that is perfectly authentic and completely empty. In 1976, the scene was small enough that you could judge a person by what they did in the room.

Now, you are judged before you enter it.

The discourse is also toxic. Political artists are held to impossible standards. One wrong word, one misjudged collaboration, and the response is not criticism but cancellation. The same energy that should be directed at landlords and politicians is directed at each other.

Accountability matters. But there is a difference between accountability and destruction. The first builds movements. The second builds graveyards. A scene that spends more time auditing its own purity than fighting its actual enemies is not a movement; it is a book club with guitars.

The disconnect runs deeper. As Seamus from Craic Killers pointed out in a recent interview, even bands like Kneecap, who project a strong political message on Gaza on the surface, have fans buying Coca-Cola and McDonald's at their gigs, in direct ignorance of the BDS movement. The politics is worn as a badge, a fashion, a stage prop, but it stops at the merch desk. The fans feel righteous for streaming a protest song, but they will not change their behaviour. They will not boycott. They will not organise. The music becomes a substitute for action, not a catalyst for it. The band says the right things, but the audience is not listening; they are consuming. The revolution is being streamed, not attended.

Then there is AI. But let's be precise about what AI is doing. It is not that AI cannot make political music. It can, in the same way it can write a political slogan. The threat is economic. AI can produce acceptable music cheaply. It can flood streaming platforms with generic content that can be licensed for playlists, gyms, and cafés. If AI can produce the beige for pennies, why pay artists? The beige doesn't need to be made by humans anymore. It can be generated at scale.

This is not about creativity. It is about labour. AI is not out-writing political musicians. It is undercutting them. The market rewards cheap over specific. The threat is not that AI will write a better protest song. The threat is that it will write an acceptable one for less than the cost of a rehearsal room. That is the sound of the future: not a scream, but a royalty-free loop. The machine does not need to be angry. It just needs to be cheap. And cheap always wins.

Could we have a Poly Styrene now?

Could we have a Poly Styrene now? The question is not whether someone like her exists, there are young women with braces, with bodies the algorithm would not approve, with voices that do not fit, making music in their bedrooms. The question is whether they would ever be seen, and whether they would survive being seen.

Poly Styrene was not a perfect punk. She was a working-class woman of colour in a scene that was often racist and misogynist. She wore braces and refused to smile for the camera. She was not a brand. She was a person, and she was visibly struggling. Today, she would be photographed and filtered before she left the house. The braces would be whitened or edited out. The unfiltered anger would be repackaged as 'aesthetic'. And if she refused to play along, she would be labelled difficult, or problematic, or simply ignored. The algorithm would have smoothed her edges. The PR team would have softened her voice. The audience would have consumed her and moved on. She would have been a trend, not a rupture.

The internet is not a neutral stage. It is a courtroom with a live feed. Every flaw is evidence. Every wrong word is a conviction. Poly Styrene would not have been allowed to be a work in progress. She would have been cancelled before she had a chance to cancel anything herself. And that is the deeper loss: not just that we might not have Poly Styrene, but that we might never know she existed, because she would have been too scared to go out with her braces and no filter. And who could blame her? The internet has made the cost of being seen almost as high as the cost of being invisible.

The 1976 scene had its own cruelties, but it also had a certain privacy. You could be a mess in a small room and grow. Now, the mess is public before the growth begins. The next Poly Styrene is probably out there, but she is checking her angles, editing her bio, and wondering if she can afford the exposure - emotionally or financially. The question is not whether she exists. The question is whether we have made it survivable for her to exist in public.

Politics consumed, not organised

Political music exists, but it is often consumed as mood rather than movement. A song about police violence can be shared, streamed, and playlisted without ever leading to a meeting, a picket, or a rent strike. Music becomes the substitute for action rather than the catalyst.

This is not the musicians' fault. It is the result of a culture where political expression is individualised. We feel like we're doing something when we stream a protest song. But streaming is not solidarity.

This is not to say music must always lead directly to organising. Music can shift consciousness, sustain a subculture, or simply help someone survive a bad week. Those are political effects too. But when the dominant mode of consumption treats anger as a mood rather than a catalyst, the structural link between music and movement is severed. The task is not to make every song a call to action. It is to rebuild the connections that make action possible when people are ready.

When music is consumed as a soundtrack, it becomes another commodity. The anger is felt, then filed. The listener moves on. The system continues. Punk was not a soundtrack. It was an interruption. Today, the interruption is buffering.

The algorithm does not just suppress keywords; it shapes the music itself. A protest song that takes three minutes to build is punished. A fifteen-second loop with a dance is rewarded. The medium is not neutral. It favours the hook over the argument, the mood over the demand. The next generation is not learning to write songs that build and break and demand. They are learning to write songs that work in thirty seconds on a vertical screen. The form of resistance is being redesigned for consumption, and the kids growing up on this diet will not know what they have lost. It is harder to dance to a boycott.

What would help

The question isn't whether another punk movement will happen exactly as before. That's the wrong question. The question is whether any political music can survive at all and what can be done to give it space.

There are attempts to push back. Music Venue Properties, a community ownership society backed by the Music Venue Trust, is buying grassroots venues to protect them from developers. Co-operatives and land trusts are appearing. The future of political music might be small, community-owned, and deliberately unprofitable. There are glimmers. The Windmill in Brixton runs on sweat and goodwill. The Punk Rock Savings & Loan, a mutual aid network, has kept a few vans on the road and a few bands from quitting. They are small, fragile, and they prove the model is not dead; it is just unprofitable by design. The resistance is happening, but it is happening in the margins, on the cheap, in the cracks. It is not a movement yet. It is a stubborn refusal to stop.

Independent promoters are pooling resources. Mutual aid networks are forming for touring musicians. Some radio and print are operating outside the platforms. Some audiences are treating music as a public good rather than a private playlist.

But none of this is enough on its own. If we are serious about political music, we need a programme, not just a wish list.

Here is a short, unsexy one:

Public funding for grassroots venues. Not loans, not lottery grants with strings, but sustained revenue funding and community ownership support. If a venue can be bought by the community, the state should help buy it. If a venue is at risk, the state should treat it as infrastructure, not as a failing business. The state found money for wars and bailing out banks. It can find money for a room in Belfast or Galway where a band can be terrible in public for a year until they become dangerous. It is cheaper than a missile and lasts longer.

Regulation of ticketing monopolies. Cap resale mark-ups. Cap merch cuts and venue fees. Break up Live Nation's vertical integration. If the market will not self-correct, the law should. A band selling T-shirts at a venue should not be treated as a cash cow for a corporate landlord.

Legal reform of post-Brexit touring rules. Visa waivers for touring musicians and crew. A cultural exemption from cabotage restrictions. A sensible merch limit that does not treat a band selling T-shirts as an international smuggling ring. The Musicians' Union has been saying this for years. It is not controversial. It is just ignored.

Unionisation of musicians. The Musicians' Union exists, but musicians are atomised. Platform royalties, streaming rates, and live fees need collective bargaining. A band is not a hobby. It is precarious labour. It should be protected as such.

Basic income for artists. Ireland has a Basic Income for the Arts pilot, giving €325 a week to 2,000 artists, including musicians. It has kept some people in rehearsal rooms and studios who would otherwise be stacking shelves. It is a start, not a solution. It is also under constant threat from a political class that sees culture as a luxury and artists as scroungers. But it is the closest thing to the old dole-and-squat slack, and it should be extended, protected, and replicated. The UK has no equivalent. It should. A basic income is not a grant for nice people. It is the return of the dole to its original function: buying time for refusal.

Music education. Fund instruments, youth clubs, and school music rooms. The next political band will not form in a private school. It will form in a community centre in Tallaght or a youth club in Sunderland, if those places still exist.

None of this is glamorous. It will not make the front page. It will not trend. But it is the difference between a scene and a memory.

So, will there ever be another punk movement?

Fifty years after 1976, the answer is: yes, but not as nostalgia.

It will not call itself punk. It will not hold an anniversary. It will not be commemorated by a heritage festival or a Netflix documentary. It will be smaller, more local, less photogenic, and easier to miss. It will not be on your For You page. It will not be on your playlist. It will be in a room you did not know existed, in a city you have never visited, and it will be the best thing you never heard.

It will be two people in a community hall in Galway or a bedroom in Stockport, funded by a combination of dole, arts council grants, and stubbornness. It will be priced at £12 and still lose money. It will be on at the same time as the Taylor Swift re-record, and it will be better, and almost no one will know. It will be better because it has to be. It will be better because there is no other reason to do it. It will be better because nobody is making money.

It will be an interruption, not a soundtrack. It will not be streamed into a playlist; it will be felt in a room. It will be wrong in public, and it will keep going.

Whether it grows into a movement depends not on the anger that has never gone away but on whether we stop making it impossible. The anger is here. It has not gone away. It is just being charged £30 for a rehearsal room.

The task is not to wait for it. The task is to stop making it impossible. And if we cannot do that, the next punk movement will happen anyway. It will just be smaller than it should have been, quieter than it needed to be, and it will still be the most alive thing in the room because the alternative is not silence. Go to a local show. Buy merch directly. Donate to a venue fund. The algorithm will not save you; your feet and your wallet might.

The alternative is a picking up a guitar and starting to scream.