MBMS

This is a 2005 documentary by Don Letts about the bith of punk music. My brother sent me this on DVD many years ago, and it is a treasured addition to my small DVD collection. I last watched this back in 2011.

It starts off looking at pre-punk bands like The Velvet Underground, MC5, The New York Dolls, and The Stooges, then moves on to the early punk bands in New York such as The Ramones. Then of course it has to go to England where The Sex Pistols, The Damned, and X-Ray Spex did their thing in a very British way.

There were plenty of interviews with people such as Henry Rollins (he had a lot to say as usual), Jim Jarmusch, Jello Biafra, Captain Sensible, Paul Simonon, and plenty of others. And there was a lot of archive footage, all glued together well to tell an interesting and probably quite accurate tale.

One person missing from this was John Lydon, I would have liked to hear his take on it all, but as we know he is quite the difficult fellow, and probably wanted nothing to do with it. We did hear from Glen Matlock (I am reading his excellent book at the moment) and Steve Jones though.

It ends with a look at the grunge scene, which is really a kind of re-birth of punk but with better musicians.

This is an excellent music documentary, an essential one for fans of the seventies and eighties punk scenes.