Punk Parents Sunday Times May 1986

This is the record shopping equivalent picking it up for the cover, but what a killer cover. I had no fricking idea that punks had parents or indeed that punks were still poggoing around the streets of Tooting Bec London in 1986.

Brilliant shots in this Sunday Times cover story from May 1986 by the world renowned counter culture clicker Iain McKell, Iain has shot the great and the good of the punk elite and so this editorial commission makes absolute sense. As you will have seen from the majority of these Sunday papers blog posts, tons of photographers shot for the daily nationals.  Most probably a nice little earner for fledgling photographers while they were cutting their teeth on the London scene, with of course the added bonus of high visibility.

You don't really hear of kids getting expelled from school anymore for outlandish haircuts or customised school uniforms. There was the hoodie news stories a few years back in the U.K.  For a time hooded sweatshirts couldn't be worn in shopping centres and the like, sod hooded tops and shopping centres anyway - right !? 

In this article Siren was offered £1,000 to get his haircut by his embarrassed suburban dad - not bad in 1986, you could have bought a couple of Lambrettas with that dough. First up in the article Sherrone Waugh then 19,  getting suspended from school aged ten for wearing bondage trousers to school is bloody brilliant - aged 10. 

Sherrone must have been well known with her band Savajazz and on the London scene as I can see she was on the cover of i-D magazine September 1984.   There are no real horror stories of say,  Domestos bleached sofas from attempted DIY bleached jean antics or head shaped ceiling holes from excessive pogoing (sorry Gran). The article reads more like reassurance for the middle-class parents that it will pass its merely a phase, we're in this together.