PUNK MOVEMENT

In 1976 Beat Presser had rented an appartement at the Oberer Rheinweg in Basel. With three windows. All of them overlooking the river Rhine. It had a bed, a cupboard and a table. On the table a ruler, a pair of scissors, a pen and a telephone. That two room apartment was the headquarter of „The Village Cry“. One early morning Rolf Paltzer came rushing in: „There is a New Movement coming out of England, The Punk Movement! I have booked two tickets, we shall leave tomorrow morning.“ In London the two man team visited all major punk clubs, took photographs, looked around, collected texts and fanzines and published it all in No. 6, the Punk Issue of „The Village Cry“.

EDITORIAL

Editor
Beat Presser

Publisher
Rolf Paltzer

Art Directors
Beat Presser, Rolf Paltzer

Technical Adviser
Ruedi Knoepfli

Details
5000 copies, 36 pages, black/white
size 28,5 x 40 cm on glossy paper
published in Basel, Switzerland
Autumn 1977

“Everyone is the product of his environment”.

Somewhere something has gone terribly wrong and everyone is asking himself: Why?

But when you think back, the seventies had started out quite nicely. Everything was booming into dimensions that had been unthinkable just a few years before. Full speed ahead was the order of the day. Then all of a sudden those immaculate pillars of our society, prosperity and opulence, began to shake. One spoke of survival and of the need to make sacrifices to overcome hard times. And one did. All down the line, the first man made his at the expense of the second man, he again at the expense of the third, and so on. And the last man in the line, he made it at his own expense. He was left to carry his own burden.

Photograph on the left Annette Weatherman. London
Photographs on the right Jean Philippe Daulte, Lausanne

And again it was the young generation, people under 25 who were hit hardest by unemployment and inflation. No jobs, no money and no chance of getting on. And how do you get out of this dead end street? You become mad, because madness attracts attention.

And the Punk movement was a very particular answer: A youth that expressed their madness by their appearance, their music, their fashion and especially through their music: Punk Rock!