It was late 1976 or early 1977 when a teenage Ian Penman committed the crime that marked him out as a born magazine writer. It was after the Sex Pistols played the Chalet du Lac in Paris, but before the Red Army Faction killed that federal prosecutor in Karlsruhe; after Mao’s death, but before the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. It was, in other words, the historically right time for a schoolboy in small-town Northern England to risk expulsion by spray-painting “ANARCHY RULES” onto the school building’s bricks. Pithy, tongue-in-cheek, on-trend: the phrase was the kind of ironized double entendre (anarchists, of course, are opposed to ruling) that would have looked better on a newsstand. Penman was destined there. Forswearing art school, he moved to London on his nineteenth birthday to become the youngest star critic at the New Musical Express, or NME, writing speedy, heady missives from a world where seemingly everything that mattered was post-something, whether it was structuralism or punk.
