It's pretty hard to believe that it's been a little more than 30 years since the Sex Pistols released Never Mind The Bollocks their first and last studio album. In spite of bands like the Ramones, The New York Dolls, and others playing a similar type of high energy rock and roll, it was the Pistols who garnered all the publicity and became the face of Punk Rock for the media and everybody else.
England of the mid to late 1970s was in a horrible state with unemployment running rampant among the young. Facing the prospect of a life of poverty and a series of dead end jobs until death, is it any wonder that they were more then a little bit angry and very nihilistic? When Johnny Rotten was singing "no future" the majority of the audience related to the statement personally.
If you went to see the Pistols live, you didn't expect to hear many of the lyrics, but the music was another story. It was loud, abrasive, aggressive, and best of all angry, which not only summed up how the audience felt but gave them the means to express it as well by pogoing with wild abandon. (Pogoing was dancing by jumping up and down and flinging yourself around at the same time.) 
In Canada, the punk movement started around the same time that it did in England. As early as 1977 bands like The Viletones, The Diodes, and others played on a regular basis in a number of small clubs that opened in Toronto Ontario. Out on the West Coast in Vancouver there was a similar out break with bands playing in any number of small venues.
Unlike in England where bands were actually signed to record contracts, in Canada there was very little money around to sustain a band for any length of time; by 1980 most of the bands were no more. In fact, The Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, home to punk music for a few years, was host to an event called "The Last Pogo" in 1980 to officially mark the end of Punk as they saw it.







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