These were just kids that were joining in with the punks, rather than punks themselves. They were walking up and down the King’s Road. There were going to be fights between them and the rock & rollers and bikers. In actuality, it never happened. It was written up in the newspapers and there was quite a heavy police presence. There was a lot of punks and punk hangers-on. A few arrests were made, but I don’t think there was ever any fighting. It was all posturing. You can see somebody being arrested. The photo of the four friends walking down King’s Road is from that same day. One of those guys is Gary Holton in the white dotted coat. He died some time ago, but he was an actor and a singer in a band called the Heavy Metal Kids. They weren’t really punk either, but they came up in the time of punk as well.

It was a terrible miserable wet day, and I think it was a day that everybody thought was going to be a big punch up between the new punks and the mods or the bikers. But it never was, it was just something dreamed up by the media. It was a lot of punks and an assortment of young people just walking up and down in the rain all day. In these kind of social situations and moral panics, there seldom are any fights. Sometimes a big group of people would chase a group of others, but there was never usually more than that. Ever since the police were called out a bit in the 60s and early 70s after the riots at the carnival in Notting Hill, they would police these things quite heavily, following the groups of people up and down the road, forcing them to leave.