How did you become involved in the Punk Scholars Network? My journey with the PSN began with my co-edited The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music. I’d had a bit of time out of academia since the completion of my PhD in 2005 and on my return was still amazed to see very little written about Crass and the anarcho-punk scene. In 2010 I met up with my PhD supervisor Sheila Whiteley, who recommended I put together a book that pulled together the various strands of the movement (thanks Sheila!). The call for papers went out, and I started to get emails from various weirdos and miscreants: not least Matt Worley, Pete Dale, Matt Grimes and Helen Reddington. As a fellow ‘Pompey punk’ I already knew Russ Bestley, so contacted him directly, but I met Matt Worley at Reading train station for a chat and had a phone conversation with Pete Dale who pushed me in the direction of some bloke called Alastair ‘Gords’ Gordon. I emailed Gords, speaking on the phone with him the next day. He had this idea about building a punk-based academic network, or a ‘Network of Friends,’ as he called it. I popped up to visit him in his vinyl-laden flat where we thrashed out a few ideas about the network; and before I knew it, the pair of us were traipsing round a Leicester Lidls buying crisps and snacks for the first punk scholars-type meeting at De Montfort University. The name was agreed (sorry Pete!), I started the Facebook group that evening, and from there the network just kinda took off. Next off I met Laura Way at the De Montfort-based Console-ing Passions Conference where Gords and I were interviewing Penny Rimbaud from Crass. Laura was a PhD student at Leicester University and we decided to organise the first PSN Annual Conference and Postgraduate Symposium. It was important to have a conference that was inclusive and supportive, and thus the equal footing of postgraduate students in content and title. Consequently, and in a weird world of déjà-vu, Laura and I were soon traipsing around the same Leicester Lidls buying maize-based snacks for the conference. I suppose the rest is history. With events at Reading University and Oxford Brookes, the network began to grow. As Matt Grimes has already said, the journey has been a frustrating one at times, but I’m proud to be have been a part of this process. The PSN is a real team effort with our strength being in our multi-disciplinary – and informal – structure.
Why do you feel it's important that a network for those involved in the study of punk/punks exists? The initial idea for the network was to provide support in research, writing and teaching about punk. I had never received any negative comments around my writing or research, although my MA supervisor’s comments of how he remembered Johnny Rotten’s rendition of ‘My Way’ kind of summed up other issues I faced when writing about this stuff. By the way, my supervisor was an esteemed, multi-lingual musicologist and a world-leading proponent of the music of Luciano Berio: but still got his Rottens and Viciouses (if there is such a word!) mixed up. Gords had had similar experiences, especially in the world of academia: receiving ill-informed review comments on articles and chapters he had written. So one of the first conversations we had was about building a support network for academics in their writing and research around punk. As the network has grown, alongside a publishing imprint with Intellect, an upcoming 7th PSN Conference and the growing stature of the affiliated Punk & Post-Punk journal, it has been hugely influential in providing a peer-reviewed critique of punk. Many in the network were – and still are – practitioners and self-confessed ‘punks,’ meaning there is a balance between academic enquiry and subjective knowledge. And recent publications linked to the network, including Laura Way’s Punk, Gender and Ageing: Just Typical Girls and Ellen Bernhard’s Contemporary Punk Rock Communities: Scenes of Inclusion and Dedication are perfect examples of this equilibrium between the ‘real’ and academia.
Tell us a bit about your own (punk) research? My research on punk began back in the mid-1990s whilst studying for an MA in Music at Sussex University. Although it was a ‘classical’ MA I wrote a thesis linking the Kantian sublime with anarcho-punk and the music of Crass. To be honest, it felt sublime whilst writing it! I carried this idea through to a PhD, which I completed in 2005, focusing on the emergence of the anarcho-punk scene in the 1980s and its links with the wider anarchist movement and ideals. This later culminated in the edited volume The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music mentioned above. From here I began to write about punk pedagogy with a number of auto-ethnographic articles looking at how punk informed my own learning, and the co-editing of Punk Pedagogies in Practice. Since then I have turned to writing about punk and religion. Helped along with the careful guidance of Francis Stewart, I’m currently writing about the so-called Krishnacore scene that formed around New York in the 1990s, whereby some of the straight edgers had close links with the Hare Krishna movement. Indeed, bands such as 108 and Shelter used a conscious aesthetic that drew upon Indian and Western influences. I also run my own DIY press, entitled Itchy Monkey Press. So far I’ve published punk poetry (Factories Run by Robots and Gagging Order), novels (specifically Ted Curtis’ the darkening light) and a collection of books that drew upon the everyday experiences of punks, the first one entitled Tales from the Punkside. I have a number of co-edited books on the horizon including Exploring the Spiritual in Popular Music: Beatified Beats, with Georgina Gregory, and the two follow-up volumes of the Punk Reader: Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global entitled Trans-Global Punk Scenes: The Punk Reader Vol. 2 and Punk Identities, Punk Utopias: Global Punk and Media, alongside Russ Bestley, Alastair Gordon, Paula Guerra and Matt Grimes. I’m also writing a chapter on Skool Bus, tracing its history and practice in the new age traveller of the 1980s and 1990s.
What is your connection to punk/background in punk? I was too young to be ‘there’ in 1977. But got into punk via Jimi Hendrix and the Who in my early teens. I loved Never Mind the Bollocks and especially the music of the Subhumans, Culture Shock and RDF, etc. What I particularly drew from punk was this idea of anarchism, leading me to read about Proudhon, Kropotkin and other anarchist writers. The lyrics also helped me negotiate my way through a re-reading of the 1980s, of how corrupt the Thatcher government was at the time and especially in its disregard for working class communities. As a classical pianist it also informed my playing of ‘rebels’ such as Beethoven, Arnold Schoenberg and George Crumb, and certainly influenced my composition classes at university. It was weird because, growing up I hung around more with metallers and bikers than with punks, going to pubs frequented by the local Hells Angels more than drinking with the local punks. And would I term myself as a punk? I don’t know. It’s such a broad, complex term. I reckon a ‘hippy punk’ would do.
Mike Dines is a British musician, writer, scholar and publisher. He founded Itchy Monkey Press with the publication of the anarcho-punk novella the darkening light (2014), followed by Tales From the Punkside (2014), Some of Us Scream, Some of Us Shout (2016), and And All Around Was Darkness (2017) with Greg Bull. As a scholar he has written widely on subcultures and popular music, co-editing The Aesthetics of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics, Music(Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2016), Punk Pedagogies: Music, Culture and Learning (Routledge, 2017), The Punk Reader: Research Transmissions from the Local and the Global (Intellect, 2019), Punk Now!! Contemporary Perspectives on Punk (Intellect, 2020), Trans-Global Punk Scenes: The Punk Reader Vol. 2 (Intellect, 2020) and Punk Identities, Punk Utopias: Global Punk and Media (Intellect 2021). His current writing takes him in the direction of punk and spirituality with the co-edited collection Exploring the Spiritual in Popular Music: Beatified Beats (Bloomsbury, 2021). He is currently a lecturer of music at Middlesex University and an avid supporter of Portsmouth Football Club.