Oh This Punk Heart

Hello you beautiful lot,

How on earth are you and Happy New Year! Eeee!

If you follow me on social media you will know of my ‘slight’ (okay huge) excitement to get stuck into the new year. Its not about resolutions and stressing yourself out with silly deadlines for yourself but just having a brand new exciting year. I often feel with my job and working with people I lose the last 2-3 months of the year due to having to prep for Christmas and starting a new year means theres just a blank canvas for me to get creative.

Thats right. For my first blog post of 2018 I decided to expand and tell you a little more about my love for punk. Now that might seem very random on a blog about healing from trauma and mental health difficulties but I believe the music I was brought up in shaped my life and determination for it massively.

You guys seemed to love when i created ’13’ which was a post where I wrote a letter to my oh so terrified 13 year old self and recreated my look from when I was 13. In this post im sharing with you where my love for punk came from as you guys are always interested in my taste of music and how its so unexpected for this pastel pinup. Ive also jumbled along and created a punked up version of myself which I obviously greatly enjoyed. (And wish I was cool enough to keep) based on the grungey/punk years of Brody Dalle

Punk is where my heart is. Every little thing about it makes me so incredibly happy. I don’t just mean Punk Rock music but the punk ideology attached to it too.

Punk-
The best description I’ve heard of punk was by Henry Rollins. He describes it as questioning anything and everything.

Now lets go right back to the real littlest lady and me growing up. I was brought up with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney being shoved in one ear and a mixture of death metal and punk shoved in my other ear from my dad. I mean the thought of that is enough to bamboozle your brain right? I guess it very much resulted in me and everything I am. I dress quite ‘dainty’ (or so ive been told) and love nothing more than pastel coloured clothes and big puffy skirts. Inside, well its very different. I feel like my ‘inside person’ would have a mohawk, patched up jacket and a faux (obviously) leather skirt.

I feel I have a strong heart for the things I really believe in and will always stick up for what im passionate about. With a bit of honesty, im a huge pushover in everyday life and I’m often getting told off for letting people get away with all sorts. On the other side theres nothing more than fight in me. Im not sure what that means and why I cant apply that to daily life and goings on (and it probably has some deep meaning oOoOo) but Id say Im a very passionate person in lots of aspects of my life.

My college teacher was the first person to tell me I had a punk heart after id spent months on an art project all about what I called back then ‘protest art’ and the imagery that is used to shock when creating attention to negative topics. For example the imagery used on cigarette boxes to deter people away from smoking.

I spent all day every day on this project, no seriously. This project I often didn’t sleep during and it really was a chance for me to pour my heart out about all the misdeeds and injustice in the world. I created a book all about these very wrong doings and plastered it with quotes from the greatest punk rockers and slung lyrics across it too. I also ended up recreating several pieces of my own ‘protest art’ combining song lyrics and advertising and for my final piece used the lyrics by the (not really punk) band Senses fail – Irony of dying on your birthday and made it in to a canvas almost the size of my college which as you can imagine was pretty intense.

Its safe to say the examiner was erm, lets just say taken by surprise with it all? and noted that it wasn’t something she had seen before (whoops) however I ended up getting an A+ for the whole thing and its to this day the best thing I’ve ever created.

I find it so incredibly interesting that I had created all this especially as when I created it I was around 15 years old and had just come out of my abuse and had pretty much no idea how bad things were in terms of my abuse. I had no idea that when I created my final piece talking about drinking and drugs as a result of trauma that I had in fact been through a trauma and that life could be that way for me. I had a fight for protecting and helping everyone else but had no idea what I was in myself. I also didn’t know that all this fight and determination I would have to use in my own life to get through things.

15 years old and id printed gruesome picture of animals hacked up because I wanted to show the reality of what happening in the world. That poor poor examiner I almost feel like I need to find her just to apologise. Eek!

I was going to say goodness knows where I got this punk heart from but I guess it really is a mixture of things. My mother was a very strong and determined person but it was all in the wrong ways. Her determination was for destruction of not only herself but others too. I remember my mother watching a documentarys of the sex pistols where they spoke about god save the queen being banned and even remember the YEAAH GO ON! shouted at the television by her amongst the madness. She definitely had that ‘eff you I don’t care’ attitude. But lets not glamourise that with her in mind.

I had a high influence of punk from my dads side and if you’ve been a reader of my blog for some time you will know all about me running round venues whilst my dad was working with bands like The Misfits.

Honestly ive gone backwards and forwards trying to put it into perspective what I feel about punk,its music and the ideology attached but theres just no words. Punk heart will always be one of the best descriptive words someones used to describe me. This little lady no matter what the outside looks like, sure has fight.

A list of all my fav’s:
Some old and some new –

Refused
Bad Religion
Minor Threat
Rancid
Millencolin
Pennywise
Ramones
Circle Jerks
Misfits
Adolescents
Black Flag
Agent Orange
Germs
Millencolin
The Distillers
Bad Brains
Dead Kennedys
Propagandhi
GBH
The Exploited
U.K Subs
The Casualties