This is how punk sometimes ends. On 14 January 1978, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, John Lydon asked the audience at a Sex Pistols gig - after one song - “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” and walked off.
Sound familiar? “We’ve always said we’ll either succeed, or be some massive crash-and-burn failure. But that’s fine because the space in between is really fucking boring” (James Watt, Guardian interview, 2016)
Compared with that, the BrewDog 8 May corporate announcement that James was moving upstairs to be “Captain and Co-Founder”, leaving James Arrow to be CEO, was a model of smooth media relations.
The BrewDog Equity for Punks Forum is currently split down the middle between “Godspeed” and “Good Riddance”. I suppose I am not sufficiently emotionally invested -only financially, and let’s come to that - in BrewDog to fall into either camp. I am just one of the thousands of people who attended a couple of BrewDog AGMs (https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/in-dog-we-trust-part-2 and https://www.londonbiermeister.co.uk/blog/hair-of-the-dog-2023 ) and had a friendly brief conversation with The Captain at one of them.
So let’s be dispassionate. At one level, BrewDog has been a mighty business success. Look at the beer section of any big UK supermarket and you can’t move for the Punk, the Planet Pale and the Lost Lager. If people want a four pack of “decent beer, not your bog standard stuff”, they grab BrewDog. Their beer is not the very best, but it is good. They have grown all over the world. Their marketing has at times been genius. The loyalty of their core customer base, especially around Scotland, is palpable.
But what’s the future? All the evidence is that they are short of cash. They have relied on a big infusion of money from the private equity firm TSG Consumer Partners. It is widely reported that they were talking to Heineken about a takeover (and there were rumours that the presence of JW was a sticking point in any deal). Many Equity Punks cling desperately to the idea that at some point they will float for billions and that everyone will make a profit. I don’t see it happening, and neither do those of my fellow Equity Punks who actually understand these things. If it were any other brewer, the obvious answer is that they will be snapped up by one of the big players (AB InBev? [Shudder]) before too long. At this point it will become clear that the stake held by the Equity Punks is something less than preferential and our losses will be crystallised. And the BrewDog name will continue.
This happens in business all the time. People like me should have read the small print and caveated before emptoring. But this is BrewDog, right? Not meant to be just like any other business?
Which brings us to the key word - “Punk”, and all of its connotations.
Mr Lydon was asked recently about US bands who were calling themselves “punk” and was quite scathing - this was latching onto a label without understanding what it meant. I think the punk branding works for the early days of BrewDog. There are analogies between 2000s CAMRA ideology and 1970s progressive music, and there was a space for someone to shake things up. The big corporate brewers, like the big record companies, were throwing their weight around.
But ultimately a rich punk businessman is an anomaly. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a successful business to maintain punk credibility. It becomes a question of power. A kid making music - or brewing - in their garage can behave like a punk and be a hero. A successful businessman who tries to behave like that is at best a diva and at worst a bully. The Sex Pistols imploded before they faced this contradiction, so Mr Lydon is now free to go around endorsing Trump and gets away with it.
Which gets us to “Punks with Purpose”, the BBC documentary, etc, etc. I won’t stray into commenting on the merits of the allegations. Not least having read that JW has taken to employing Carter Ruck and Partners. It just shows that when you are a large corporate entity you do have to be, in JW’s own words, a bit “fucking boring” or take the consequences. I would not myself have accepted an invite to Nigel Farage’s 60th (leaving aside the fact that I would not have been invited...) ; I kind of admire JW for going and not caring; but the branding just doesn’t work.
I started this blog not quite sure what I was going to write. I am still not quite sure. I think I will, on balance, raise a glass to the Captain over the weekend in grudging respect.