Right time, right place: The British Library’s Punk 1976–78 exhibition

Abstract

To mark the 40th anniversary of punk rock, the British Library ran a free exhibition and a series of associated live spoken-word events in the summer of 2016. Punk was always both outsider (rhetoric, sound, fashion) and insider (the big names of the first-generation UK bands mostly signed to major labels). Using Simon Frith’s framework of three overlapping discourses in pop- ular music (folk, pop and art) I argue that the contradictory strands of ideology in and around punk made the British Library the perfect site for this show.