Polish Punk

 

Poland 1978

The Polish Punk began in Poland in late 1977 when barley anyone heard of Sex Pistols and famous punk bands from different countries. Situation in Poland was really tough because of the Communism and poverty.  Rebellious music found a strong support in Poland under the communist regime, and its beginnings included big-city art galleries as much as small-town cultural centres. 

At the beginning, young people gains knowledge about punk music from the newspaper clippings. The famous Polish songwriter Lech Janerka wrote his first song, Klaus Mitffoch’s (Muł Pancerny) while he was still in the army, after reading an article about the Sex Pistols. Surprisingly he’d never heard of the band, but he tried to imagine what their aggressive and noisy music would sound like.

The article about Polish Punk Rock in popular newspaper Warsaw Life (zycie Warszawy) stated:

The movement started in Poland a little blind. I remember I found an article in ‘Warsaw Life’. At the time, they were writing dreadful lies about punk rock in the West. A few truths were tangled up in there too, which interested me.
They wrote that punk songs are very short, rhythmic, with aggressive lyrics. I liked that. I really wanted to play music, but I was turned off by bands like Yes, full of blokes wearing flowing, sequined shirts, standing there in beams of light and singing about purple radiators in crimson skies. So I really wanted to discover this new music, which was simple, without overwrought metaphors. I was in my second year of high school and finally stumbled upon some CDs. One day, a friend and I dressed up so that there would be no doubt that we were punks. We put on old suit jackets, to which we’d stuck a bunch of safety pins and razor blades. We painted our eyes black up to our eyebrows, and we boldly stood under the Rotunda, waiting to make contact with someone. In a bit, a bloke in a leather jacket buttoned up to his chin started hanging around us. ‘That’s got to be a cop’, I thought. Suddenly he comes up, unbuttons his lame coat, and under that, he has a thin tie covered in safety pins. ‘Gentlemen, me too,’ he said. ‘Let’s meet at Club Bolek’. That’s how it started. There was no punk uniform à la ‘Ramones and a mohawk’ yet, just total freedom.

Polish Punks and leather jacket with the sentences "I have enough!" and "I'm the future of the nation" 

This article explains how the beginning of the Punk  subculture looks in Poland. There was no possibility to buy a Sex Pistols album in the shop, young people 9 if their lucky) get their first albums from their relatives from England. Later on everyone makes copy on the audio cassette. Very popular back then was listening to a foreign radio, that was the way to find out more about what is happening abroad and listen to Black Sabbath or Led Zeppelin.

Young people were very frustrated because polish radio did not play any punk music, they wrote a letter to the popular radio station  - Radio Free Europe, complaining about lack of punk rock music. 

Not much later the radio dedicated to the listeners a whole hour of punk music.

The punk lifestyle was propagated in alternative zines. These articles helped unite the movements and were sources of information, writing about new developments in the scene and local gossip. Punks were compared to Dadaists and Futurists and, next to recaps of concerts, there were pieces about Andy Warhol, video art and mail art.

Poland 1978

During my time as a punk, everything looked different. We had access to punk music and famous artist albums from all over the World. We followed the same ideology and live does not look perfect to us. It was mostly rebellious against the rules and government. Polish Punk music scene were more popular  and festival Woodstock gather together young people and artists from all over the country. In 1999 I went to my first Woodstock festival and we stayed there for three days. Beside the amazing atmosphere, freedom and favourite music around me I also remember the extremely hot weather, where we could barely find shade to hide from the heat as the festival was in the middle of the field, next to the Zary City.  

the crowd during the Woodstock festival, 1999

Woodstock Festival, Poland 1999

Przystanek Woodstock 1999, Poland

Young people on their way to the Woodstock Festival, Zary, 1999

Vice (2017) "The history of Polish Punk in pictures"  Available from https://www.vice.com/pl/article/ezzx8m/historia-polskiego-punka-w-obrazkach Accessed on: [06.06.22]

Zary (ND) "Przystanek Woodstock 1999 Galeria" Available from: https://www.zary.pl/PL/zdjecia/2838/43/1/grupa/ Accesssed on: [06.06.22]

Culture (2020), Razor Blades & Safety Pins:The Beginnings of Polish Punk, Available from: https://culture.pl/en/article/the-beginnings-of-polish-punk, [Accessed on: 06.06.22]