Punk rock was many things: a musical movement, a fashion statement, a generational howl of frustration. But above all, it was tribal. You were either in or you were out, and most of the rock establishment was very firmly out. The old guard — the stadium gods, the prog architects, the millionaire riff merchants — were the enemy, and being seen to enjoy their music was a social crime of the highest order.
And yet. For all its absolutism, punk had its blind spots. Certain artists slipped through the ideological net, earning a grudging respect — or at least a conspicuous absence of contempt — from a movement that prided itself on contempt. Some shared punk's anger. Some shared its DIY spirit. Some were simply too raw, too weird, or too dangerous to dismiss.
Here are eleven bands that punk, despite its best efforts, couldn't quite bring itself to hate. For the bands it absolutely could bring itself to hate, read our companion piece: Rock Royalty vs The Ripped Jeans Brigade →
11. Alice Cooper — The Original Shock Trooper
When John Lydon auditioned for the Sex Pistols, the track he chose to perform was Alice Cooper's 'I'm Eighteen' — a detail that tells you everything about where punk's true roots lay. Cooper's early records were built on teenage alienation, theatrical rebellion, and a gleeful contempt for polite society. These were not alien values to the punk movement.
Joey Ramone later admitted that the first song he wrote for The Ramones drew directly from the same Cooper track. The connection wasn't coincidental. Cooper's band had been doing something close to punk — in spirit if not in sound — years before anyone had a name for it. The shock tactics, the confrontational stagecraft, the refusal to be respectable: punk didn't invent any of this. Alice Cooper got there first.
Official Alice Cooper Merch at Wonderhaul
10. Can — The Avant-Garde Godfathers
Krautrock isn't an obvious entry point for punk credibility, but Can were no ordinary Krautrock band. Their wholesale rejection of conventional song structure, their embrace of improvisation and noise, and their deeply anti-corporate approach to making music placed them closer to punk's philosophical core than most British bands of the era.
John Lydon was a devoted Can fan — particularly of the sprawling, hypnotic Tago Mago — and their influence on his post-Pistols project Public Image Ltd was unmistakable. Siouxsie and the Banshees, Buzzcocks, and The Fall all cited Can as a touchstone. The Germans had been doing DIY before DIY had a name, and punk recognised a kindred spirit.
9. The Stooges — The Blueprint
If any single band can claim to have written punk's instruction manual before punk existed, it's The Stooges. Iggy Pop's performances in the late 1960s and early 1970s — confrontational, physically dangerous, and utterly indifferent to audience comfort — were a direct template for what followed. The baiting, the chaos, the deliberate ugliness: punk didn't invent these tactics, it inherited them.
The connection was made explicit when 'No Fun' — a Stooges track from their 1969 debut — appeared on the B-side of the Sex Pistols' 'Pretty Vacant'. It was an acknowledgement of lineage, and a statement of intent. The Stooges weren't punk's predecessors. They were punk's founding fathers.
8. Mott The Hoople — The People's Band
The Clash's Mick Jones was a devoted Mott The Hoople follower, trailing them across the country on tour as a teenager. Their influence on his songwriting was direct and lasting — most obviously on 'All The Young Punks' from Give 'Em Enough Rope, a track whose title alone signals the debt. When Jones was recording London Calling, he invited former Mott producer Guy Stevens into the studio — a gesture of loyalty that said more than any interview could.
What made Mott acceptable to punk was their attitude as much as their music. They were never rock gods. They were a working band who happened to make great records, and that lack of pretension earned them a respect that more technically accomplished contemporaries never received.
7. The Sonics — The Garage Originals
Formed in Tacoma, Washington in 1961, The Sonics were playing something close to punk a full fifteen years before the movement had a name. Gerry Roslie's raw, visceral vocal delivery — all screaming urgency and barely controlled aggression — sat alongside production values so deliberately crude they sounded like a manifesto. Three chords, maximum volume, zero polish.
The Clash described themselves as a garage band, and the lineage from The Sonics to the punk movement runs in a straight line. Lenny Kaye's Nuggets compilation, which gathered the best of the mid-60s US garage scene, was a frequently cited influence on the American punk scene. The Sonics were its most extreme expression.
6. Hawkwind — The Outsiders' Outsiders
Hawkwind were never part of the rock establishment, and the rock establishment was never particularly keen on them either. Their music was loud, fast, and deliberately abrasive — qualities that punk could respect even when the cosmic imagery and space-rock mythology felt like a different universe.
The connection ran through Lemmy, who played bass with Hawkwind before forming Motörhead. Lemmy was an early and vocal champion of both The Ramones and The Damned, and the mutual respect between the Motörhead camp and the punk scene was genuine and well-documented. Hawkwind's anarchic outsider stance and contempt for the music industry's conventions gave them a credibility that more polished contemporaries could never claim.
Official Motörhead Merch at Wonderhaul
5. Captain Beefheart — The Avant-Garde Wildcard
Captain Beefheart occupied a category entirely his own. His music — particularly the landmark Trout Mask Replica — was so aggressively unconventional, so deliberately hostile to easy listening, that punk couldn't dismiss it without looking like the very kind of conservative it claimed to despise. Joe Strummer reportedly listened to Trout Mask Replica obsessively as a teenager, which explains a great deal about The Clash's more experimental tendencies.
John Lydon was equally devoted to Beefheart's chaotic rhythmic world. The Captain's refusal to make music that was commercially viable, his contempt for the music industry, and his absolute artistic autonomy were values that punk claimed as its own — even if the music itself sounded nothing like a three-minute thrash.
4. Bob Marley and The Wailers — Solidarity Across the Divide
The relationship between punk and reggae in 1970s Britain was one of the era's most unexpected cultural alliances. Working-class kids on both sides of the racial divide shared a deep distrust of authority, a frustration with economic marginalisation, and a music press that largely ignored them both. Reggae and dub were already part of the sonic landscape for many of the teenagers who would form punk bands.
The Clash made the connection explicit, covering Junior Murvin's 'Police and Thieves' on their debut album and wearing their reggae influences openly. Bob Marley, for his part, acknowledged the kinship by releasing 'Punky Reggae Party' as a single — a track that name-checked the Wailers alongside the Clash, the Damned, and the Jam. It was a gesture of solidarity that neither side forgot.
3. Dr Feelgood — The Missing Link
Before punk, there was pub rock — and before The Clash, there was Dr Feelgood. The Canvey Island R&B band played fast, hard, and without ceremony in the back rooms of London pubs, stripping rock back to its essentials at a time when the mainstream was adding orchestras. They were, in retrospect, the missing link between the rock and roll of the 1950s and the punk explosion that followed.
Joe Strummer was fronting a pub rock band, The 101ers, before he was recruited by The Clash — a direct line of descent. Dr Feelgood's Lee Brilleaux and Wilko Johnson were not men who wore capes or arrived by helicopter. They were a tough, unpretentious working band, and punk respected them for it. Their early live performances remain the stuff of legend.
2. New York Dolls — The Attitude Merchants
The New York Dolls didn't just influence punk — they practically invented its operating principles. Their central argument, delivered nightly at the Mercer Arts Center in the early 1970s, was that attitude, energy, and swagger mattered more than technical ability. This was not a subtle message, and it was received loud and clear by a generation of musicians who would go on to define the punk era.
The connections were direct and numerous. After the Dolls split, Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan formed The Heartbreakers, key players on the New York scene. Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols' manager, had briefly managed the Dolls. Steve Jones played Never Mind the Bollocks on a Gibson Les Paul Custom that had belonged to Sylvain Sylvain, acquired through McLaren. The Dolls' DNA runs through punk like a thread.
1. Thin Lizzy — The Exception That Proved the Rule
Most of the rock generation that preceded punk viewed the new movement with suspicion, contempt, or studied indifference. Phil Lynott was the exception. Thin Lizzy's frontman embraced punk's raw energy with genuine enthusiasm, recognising in it something he'd always valued: authenticity, street credibility, and a refusal to be anything other than what you were.
The punks returned the favour. Lynott's outsider status — as a mixed-race Irishman fronting a hard rock band in 1970s Britain — gave him a credibility that no amount of stadium success could erode. He was cool in a way that punk understood instinctively.
The alliance became concrete when Lynott formed The Greedy Bastards alongside Steve Jones and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols during Thin Lizzy's downtime. The supergroup released 'A Merry Jingle' as a Christmas single in 1979, reaching the lower end of the UK charts. It was a small record, but a significant one: proof that the wall between punk and classic rock was never quite as solid as either side pretended.
Official Thin Lizzy Merch at Wonderhaul
The Bigger Picture
Punk's cultural narrative has always been one of total rupture — a year zero that wiped the slate clean and started again. The reality, as these eleven bands demonstrate, was considerably more nuanced. Punk didn't emerge from nowhere. It had parents, grandparents, and a whole extended family of influences that its most zealous adherents preferred not to acknowledge.
The bands on this list weren't punk. But they shared something with it: an anger, an energy, a refusal to be comfortable. And in the end, that was enough. Punk could hate Pink Floyd all it liked. These eleven got a pass.
Read the companion piece: Rock Royalty vs The Ripped Jeans Brigade: How Classic Rock Survived the Punk Wars →