Historical Association: No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976-84

Matt Worley examines how punk was more than a style or a consumer trend, exploring its role as a musical form, an attitude and an aesthetic in Britain between the late 1970s and the early 1980s.

The lecture considers whether punk gave young people a platform to challenge the world around them and express their own ideas in a period shaped by social fragmentation, violence, high unemployment and wider socio-economic change. It is delivered by Professor Matt Worley of the University of Reading for the Historical Association’s Bristol branch.