For fifteen-year-old Joe Martin, growing up on the outskirts of West London, the summer of 1977 means punk rock, busy pubs, disco girls, stolen cars, social-club lager, cutthroat Teddy Boys and a job picking cherries with the gypsies. Life is sweet—until he is attacked by a gang of youths and thrown into the Grand Union Canal with his best friend Smiles.
Fast forward to 1988, and Joe is travelling home on the Trans-Siberian Express after three years away, remembering the highs and lows of the intervening years as he comes to terms with tragedy. Fast forward to 2000, and life is sweet once more. Joe is earning a living selling records and fight tickets, playing his favourite 45s as a punk DJ, but when a face from the past steps out of the mist he is forced to relive that night in 1977 and deal with the fallout.
Human Punk is the story of punk, a story of friendship, a story of common bonds and a shared culture—sticking the boot in, sticking together.
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John King is the author of seven novels to date. His first, The Football Factory, was an immediate word-of-mouth success and was subsequently turned into a high-profile film. Headhunters, England Away, Human Punk, White Trash, Skinheads, The Prison House, and The Liberal Politics of Adolf Hitler followed. His stories reflect his cultural interests—particularly music, pubs and youth cultures—while challenging a range of stereotypes that are often accepted by the established political factions. Common themes are powerlessness and enemy-creation, the contradictions found in every walk of life. Before becoming an author King worked at a variety of jobs and spent two years travelling around the world in the late 1980s. He has long been associated with fanzines, writing for various titles over the years and running Two Sevens in the early 1990s. He currently publishes and edits Verbal, a fiction-based publication. He is currently working on an animal-rights story, Slaughterhouse Prayer. He lives in London.