Punk rock first came to light in the mid 1970’s in the United States of America. The first thing that springs to most peoples mind when the word punk is mentioned is usually the sex pistols, Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten, along with the Clash. You wouldn’t usually associate punk with love poems (Liebesgedichte) and I love you. So you might be surprised to know that there is such a thing as a punk love song.

Unlike other love songs, punk love songs somewhat deviate from the traditional love songs. I first found out about punk love songs back in the early 1980’s when I was big into punk and used to pride myself on my huge orange Mohican and my red and black checked trousers with braces to match, I thought I looked wonderful and I had a punk boyfriend to match. My mother was old school and thought that I looked ridiculous, but I just thought that she needed to be up to date with the fashion like me.

It was approaching valentines day in 1982 and I wanted to give my boyfriend a mix tape to show him how much I loved him. It wasn’t very cool as a punk to say ‘I love you’ (Ich liebe dich) to your boyfriend, so I wanted him to know it though a mix tape filled with punk love songs. I put on songs such as – punk rock love and everything sucks when your gone. I thought the tape was great and played it to my mum, she thought that I should have love songs by Rod Stewart and the Beatles, but that would have been totally un-cool.

To accompany my mix tape I also wrote him a love poem, I knew I would never get to read it to him, but I hoped he would understand just how much I loved him, even though our views on life were slightly different to other peoples.

I handed both the mix tape and the love poem to him just after a Friday night out, I had packaged them well so he would be surprised. On the Saturday morning a van arrived at our house, a delivery man walked up the drive holding a bunch of flowers, although it was valentines day I assumed they would be for my mum or sister not me. I was wrong they were from Roger. The card simply read ‘I love you’.