Punk: the filth and the fury. But it was so much more than that. In The History of Punk Music, author Stephen Palmer depicts the punk rock explosion of 1976-77 in tired, bored, and socially stratified Britain. Emerging from the litter-strewn streets of London, punk’s music expressed the suppressed anger of young working-class people with nowhere to go and nothing meaningful to do. Its music was raw and shocking. Its fashion mocked staid middle-class values. Its art was expressed in cut-outs and by sprayed graffiti. Yet beneath this sudden explosion, frightening to those of the establishment who witnessed it, incomprehensible to white-collar workers commuting to and from work, lay a philosophy of individual creative expression and an ethic of anti-racism and liberation for women. Punk in its original form was a movement of human liberation, a Year Zero moment in the history of a nation more used to colonial exploits and a vast empire. It spoke of fury, of hopelessness, of cathartic