In September 1976, an independent band recorded and released a single called '(I'm) Stranded'. It got a rave review in the then prominent Sounds magazine in England: 'the single of this and every other week'. That independent band doing '(I'm) Stranded' wasn't a group from either London or New York, though: they were a group called the Saints, from Brisbane, Australia. And well, Brisbane in 1976 was not the most cosmopolitan place in the world, but Ed Kuepper of the band was apparently crestfallen in mid-1976 when he heard the Ramones' debut album: he thought people would think they were Ramones copyists. What this tells us, crucially, is that New York punk was easy enough to access in faraway Australia; Andrew Stafford in Pig City claims that 'the length of time it took for punk to take off in Brisbane [is] approximate to that of a sea-mail subscription of the NME to reach the country'. Which is to say that the London and New York punk scenes did not exist in isolation from each other.
The New York punk scene based around CBGBs got onto record a little earlier than The Saints. Patti Smith's album Horses came out in mid-1975. 'Little Johnny Jewel' by Television was released on Ork Records in August 1975, while the first Ramones single, 'Blitzkrieg Bop', was February 1976. Blondie's 'X Offender', in June 1976, beat The Saints by a couple of months. Talking Heads' 'Love -> Building On Fire' was February 1977.
In contrast, the first British punk single is generally agreed to be The Damned's 'New Rose', released in October 1976, a month after '(I'm) Stranded'. The Sex Pistols, who had played their first gig in November 1975, released their debut single 'Anarchy In The UK' in November 1976, while the Clash's debut single 'White Riot' was released in March 1977. Instead of being copyists, The Saints were ...stranded in the wrong place (Brisbane, not London) at the right time.
So basically, the New York scene predated the London scene somewhat. And there were connections between the scenes; there was deep interest in American rock in London, and in British rock in New York. Malcolm McLaren, who would later manage the Sex Pistols, spent some time in New York in early 1975 informally managing the group the New York Dolls, who were a bit more rock'n'roll than punk, and who were a bit too big for CBGBs (their first album had been produced by Todd Rundgren, who also produced Meat Loaf's Bat Out Of Hell amongst other things). But the New York Dolls were punk adjacent; when Richard Hell left the band Television after 'Little Johnny Jewel', he started a band with former New York Dolls members called The Heartbreakers (NB. Tom Petty wasn't involved in these Heartbreakers).
Richard Hell's fashion sense is often credited as the source of the punk style; Malcolm McLaren was very much taken with him, and tried to lure him to England to be the lead singer for the band that would become the Sex Pistols, before they discovered a green haired lout with bad dental hygiene called John Lydon wearing a homemade 'I Hate Pink Floyd' t-shirt and immediately decided he would be the perfect lead singer (Richard Hell famously wore a t-shirt with a target on it and the slogan 'Please Kill Me').
However, despite this influence, there were some important differences between London punk and New York punk. The easiest way to explain this is to look at the track lengths of some of the biggest New York punk tracks of the era (excluding the Ramones): Patti Smith's 'Gloria' is about six minutes long. The title track of Television's Marquee Moon album is close to eleven glorious minutes long, full of guitar solos. Talking Heads' 'Psycho Killer' is more like four and a half minutes long, but was prone to stretching out live. And broadly speaking, New York punk sounds tense - it sounds like coiled energy - think, say, 'Psycho Killer', where London punk is energy unleashed.
In many ways, New York punk saw the mid-to-late 1960s New York group The Velvet Underground as their benchmark. The Velvet Underground who were (literally) art rock, given that Lou Reed's lyrics often revolved around life at Andy Warhol's Factory, and groups that were in some way in the Velvet Underground's image - The Modern Lovers, the group of Velvets megafan Jonathan Richman, or The Stooges, whose first album was produced by Velvets member John Cale. This is true of the Ramones and Blondie, too, who had a very 'pop art' approach (which is less clear today, in the wake of what came afterwards) - trying to find art in the mundane parts of pop, the 3-minute singles and the rush of excitement of pop; Blondie had originally been a sort of art-pop girl group, while the Ramones emulated the simple pleasures of the 1960s 'garage rock' on the Nuggets compilations compiled by Lenny Kaye (Patti Smith's guitarist) - for example, stuff like 'Lies' by the Knickerbockers.
In contrast, the influences on London punk were more immediate and less arty (though ...they weren't un-arty). For a start, those influences included the sound and stance of New York punk, which - as the example of Malcolm McLaren going over to manage the New York Dolls suggests - was probably more interesting to British music magazines than it was to the American public in general. But London punk was also inevitably a reaction to the downfall of glam rock; John Lydon in his autobiography Rotten discusses how he liked Bowie a bit, but not that much, but that Sid Vicious was deeply into Bowie's music.
Similarly, in the mid-1970s, there was a burgeoning scene in London centered around Canvey Island that got dubbed 'pub rock', in that it tended to be performed in pubs (what the British call bars) rather than concert halls. The most prominent pub rock band, in terms of the influence on punk, is probably Dr. Feelgood (see 'She Does It Right', which is more than a little punky for something released in 1975); as a bit of trivia, Dr. Feelgood's guitarist went onto play Ilyn Payne in Game Of Thrones. But several prominent London punks - Ian Dury, Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello - played in pub rock bands before making the switch to punk, and The Damned's 'New Rose' - often credited as the first punk single, was produced by Nick Lowe, who'd previously been in a very prominent pub rock band, Brinsley Schwarz.
There are also somewhat different socio-political ethoses in New York and London punk, when all is said and done; thanks to Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols were being directed (if not always successfully) by someone with a background in French situationism, as Greil Marcus describes in detail in the book by Lipstick Traces; the Sex Pistols' nihilism is in some ways straight from situationism. In contrast, in The Clash, you see somewhat more conventional leftists (who called an album Sandinista!, which featured a track called 'Washington Bullets' with lyrics like 'Those Washington bullets want Castro dead/For Castro is the color...That will earn you a spray of lead'). In contrast, New York punk was generally not as self-consciously political; their statements were more social, with more of a focus on gender, decadence, and art. Early Roxy Music - something like 'Virginia Plain' - would have fit in just fine in the New York punk scene, for example.
That said, London and New York in the 1970s both felt miserable, and this is obviously reflected in the music. In John Lydon's autobiography he claims that
'...we'd come together out of desperation. There was no hope as far as any of us were concerned. That was the common bond. There was no point in looking for a normal job because that would be just too awful. There was no way out. We had no inspiration, musical or nonmusical, until the band started.'
and that
Before the Sex Pistols music was so bloody serious, all run by university graduates...how on earth were we supposed to relate to that music when we lived in council flats? We had no money, no job, no nothing. So the Pistols projected that anger, that rock-bottom working-class hate. I don't think that had ever been dealt with in music outside of a 'show bizzy' way.
Not everyone in the punk scene was working class of course. Lydon speaks his frustration about the way the fashionista socialites bought in by Malcolm McLaren and his partner Vivienne Westwood would crowd out the band's more working class fans at early gigs in London. And, of course, the father of Joe Strummer (The Clash) was a diplomat. But politics and class was much closer to the surface of London punk than it was in New York punk.
In contrast, the story of New York punk is essentially the story of arty types moving into low-rent areas of the East Side, and writing about their experience; in 1977, the critic Vivien Goldman argued that the likes of the New York punk scene - who were largely white, it should be said - were slowly gentrifying the neighbourhood until there would come a point where the immigrant community could no longer afford to live there.
References:
The broad context here is the 1970s, a decade characterized by a sense of "malaise" - cultural, political, and economic malaise. This sense of boredom, disappointment, and anxiety was probably exacerbated for many by the sense of hope, activity, and excitement that characterized the previous decade. To a large degree, punk music was a product of this malaise, particularly as it related to the state of popular music.
The idea of punk as a political movement was basically the work of McLaren, who began flirting with political imagery while managing the New York Dolls. The early New York punk bands were not political at all, which is why their albums lack the soapbox sloganeering of their British compatriots. In the U.S., punk emerged as a primarily cultural reaction to the decline of rock in the marketplace; there was no sense of anti-establishment sentiment among the American punk bands and almost all of them aspired to mainstream commercial success - which some bands (Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith) eventually achieved.
In England, punk circa '77 was managed and mediated to a degree not seen in the U.S. McLaren was trying to recreate what he witnessed in New York, and decided that radical politics was the way to appeal to the youth market. You have to remember that the counterculture was still a big deal and many people were aware of how politics and political activism had acquired a strong appeal for young people. To a large extent the Sex Pistols were just fashion models for Westwood that were also "musicians". In England, the look was far more significant than the music, and political symbols and slogans were an important part of the look. By 1980, most of the English punk bands had broken up or "matured" musically, leaving any professed belief in radical politics behind.
To the extent that one can say that punk has a political cast, that is primarily the result of the emergence of hardcore punk, which emerged at the same time as the 'original' punk bands broke up, died off, or went new wave. Hardcore had a focus on authenticity that punk, which was viewed as "artier", did not. While the seeds were planted by early punk (and those seeds were planted by the counterculture), it was hardcore that really joined punk rock and radical politics and transformed punk into and underground, anti-establishment community.
TL;DR: Early punk was not particularly political, except as a marketing ploy. Later, hardcore would affirm the relationship between punk music and radical politics.
On edit: The following is from a research paper I submitted to my History 387 class at Temple University in 2004. I also published it in my blog in 2007.
In the mid-1970s, Great Britain experienced a certain cultural upheaval among the nation’s youth which, when examined later, stands apart from the other various youth counterculture movements in close proximity to that era. Aggressive music, torn and disheveled clothing, wildly colored hairstyles, and the appropriation and reinterpretation of symbolic imagery (such as the Nazi swastika) characterized the outward ‘look’ of this movement; all were integral to the anti-establishment tone of the movement. The movement, which became known as “punk,” was seen as ‘offensive’ to most Britons; resultantly, the press, police, politicians and even ordinary members of society widely vilified and sought to persecute members of this movement. In and of itself, the persecution of a youth counterculture movement may not seem unremarkable to the casual observer. But in the context of post-World War II British society, it can be seen as extraordinary, given the foundations of freedom for which Briton themselves had fought only thirty years earlier: as late as the 1960s, Britons considered themselves to be members of a ‘Permissive Society,’ and allowed the various youth counterculture movements the freedom to run their inevitable courses. The causes of the highly conservative reaction to punk by the mainstream society of England in the mid-1970s are varied and complex; however, it may be that many Britons, including the upper echelons of government, the press, and even ordinary members of the middle class, viewed punks as a genuine threat to their own existence: as such, punks became an enemy to the state and mainstream society—and needed to be silenced, if not destroyed.
To understand the backlash that punk generated, some of the generalities of life in England during this era must first be examined, and a working definition of what exactly ‘punk’ was must be established.
After World War II, England experienced economic contraction on a scale never before experienced by an industrialized western nation. Yet the Labour government in power between the end of the war and 1950 had successfully managed this recession: unemployment remained very low, as significant portions of the British economy were ‘nationalized,’ or turned over to the state for management; they successfully presided over the dissolution of the British Asian empire; it had made the welfare state a reality. During the 1950’s a conservative government continued this course, and conditions continued to improve: new houses were built at a rate of fifty percent higher each year. By the end of the decade, the wounds of World War II had nearly disappeared, and a generation of Britons had grown accustomed to a world in which large-scale unemployment was rare, and a national network of social services could be counted upon.
The 1960s, for the most part, saw continued economic growth, if not continued successful decolonialization. One family in four lived in a house built after the war, which in turn meant a gradual decline in the housing slums. More people achieved a higher level of education than in any other point in British history. Consumer goods like cars and refrigerators were now being purchased on an installment plan—a sign of the growing influence of the United States or “Americanization” of Britain.
In this context, the youth counterculture movements that developed in the 1960s—the Mods, the Rockers and the Hippies—were generally accepted by Britain’s ‘permissive society.’ Although some members of British society objected to aspects of these movements, most of their objection lied upon moral, and not political grounds. Rock groups like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were vilified because they advocated premarital sex and the use of marijuana and LSD. Blame for the use of drugs among the young was laid squarely on the shoulders of rock groups: the members of several groups were arrested and charged with possession. Although they disliked the supposed drug message within the lyrics and often the album art that the bands used, mainstream society and the British government were generally tolerant of any political message the music may have contained.
This occurred for two reasons: the bands were commercially successful both at home and overseas, and therefore contributed to the economy. Furthermore, any political message the music contained or the artists espoused independent of the music was largely anti-American in nature: America, whose involvement in Vietnam ran contradictory to Britain’s own decolonialization; America whose commercial hegemony was seen as threatening to Britain’s self-identity; America, who, along with the Soviet Union, had come replace England as the architect of world affairs.
By the close of the 1960s, however, the economic boom that had characterized life in Britain for decades had begun to end: the annual growth rate had shrunk from an already small three percent to less than two percent. In 1970, the mood of the electorate had changed enough that conservatives won Prime Minister and a slight majority in Parliament. This victory, however, caused the ideological distinctions between the Labourites and the Conservatives to reappear after nearly three decades. Conservatives generally viewed the greatness of Britain as the product of “freedom, not in reliance on the state…the acceptance of personal responsibility, not dependence upon the state, [was what] made this island so dominant in the world.” It was the private, and not public, sector of the economy that had precipitated the economic rebounds of Japan and Germany, which the conservatives hoped to imitate. Labour, however, was more concerned with the distribution and not the production goods. In 1973, Labour promised to bring about “a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favor of working people and their families.”
Trade union militancy accentuated the sense of ideological tension between the Labour and Conservative parties. Strikes occurred with ever-increasing frequency. In 1971, a strike of Post Office workers led to forty-seven days without mail. In 1972, the first coal strike since 1926 led to extensive electricity cuts and caused the layoff of 1.5 million people. The number of working days lost to strikes was four times higher than in any year during the 1960s. Such strikes often entailed little economic risk for union members, as welfare was available easily.
Such strikes did not merely injure the reputation of reliability for British manufacturers, but they also led to increasingly inflationary wage settlements, which in turn led to higher costs to the consumer, and pressure from other unions to catch up. As inflation made exports more expensive, the international balance of debt payments left over from World War II was in deficit for the first time in three years. By 1974, the British pound had been devalued twenty percent in comparison to other major western European currencies. Coupled with the cost of imported raw materials, the economic decline that had begun in the late 1960s was now barreling headlong toward an overt economic recession. The general index of retail prices shows that, in the years between 1974 and 1976, prices increased by nearly twenty-five percent annually. Unemployment increased from 615,000 in 1974 to 1.3 million in 1979.
It was within this political and economic environment that punk developed.
The term ‘punk’ is a nebulous concept—the definition of ‘punk’ can change from person to person, and often changes to an individual over time. However, it is necessary to begin with some kind of working definition in order to proceed. At a basic level, ‘punk’ was a subculture best characterized as being part youth rebellion, part artistic statement. It peaked as a movement during the period of 1976 to 1979, most visibly in England and the United States.
It had its primary manifestation in music, not only among the disaffected rock and roll bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash that made the music, but also their fans. Secondary manifestations of punk were fashion and the visual arts. Philosophically, punk stood for identifiable attitudes: an emphasis on nihilism, a consciousness of class-based politics, a belief in spontaneity, and an ethic of ‘do it yourself.’ Finally, because ‘punk’ also entails political and class consciousness, it can only have begun in one place: England in the mid-1970s. This perhaps one of the most important distinctions between the punk bands and prior rock and roll groups that had come before them: their music was directly political.
Bands that had come before punk did have political leanings; however their politics were largely discussed in the press, and, rarely, if ever, appeared in the music. The Beatles, arguably the most successful British rock band of all time, were notoriously anti-war. But the closest they ever came to a genuinely political song was “Revolution,” in which John Lennon sings
You say you want a revolution / Well you know we’d all love to change the world / You tell me that it’s evolution / Well you know / We all want to change the world / But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out / Don’t you know its gonna be alright