Age of Majority at the LSPU Hall, 1990. Photo courtesy of Doug Jones. 

The biggest impact that the punk rock movement has had on small towns and cities like Mount Pearl has been the do-it-yourself spirit that it instilled in young people. If you couldn’t access the big cities and musical hubs, punk taught you to make your own scene, in your own backyard.

It has become a pop culture trope that with the rise of rock & roll music in the 1950s and 60s, there was a generation of kids who stood in front of their bedroom mirrors and lived out pipe dreams of being rock stars through fantasy and mimicry. For the punk rock scene that started in the 1970s and 80s, the raw energy and basic tenets of the fiercely independent community offered far less of a barrier between the bedroom mirror and an actual live audience. Punk music not only encouraged kids to get involved with the art, but it also offered them the basic instructions of how to claim the culture for themselves.

Punk landed hard in Newfoundland & Labrador. Only a few short years after the first punk rock bands formed on the island in the late 1970s, the scene had evolved into a youth-driven movement that created its own art without the frivolities and profit-focused interests of the mainstream music industry. The all ages punk scene in St. John’s gradually stretched beyond the capital city, and by the late 1980s, the community inspired its first hardcore punk band from Mount Pearl. This band was called Age of Majority…

Read the full story at the Admiralty House Museum blog…