Just to clarify this, Peter Green did not join a cult. He spent one night on acid in a German commune jamming before being “rescued.” Mental illness plagued him for much of the 1970s and '80s before he returned to performing in the '90s.
Danny Kirwan did not join a cult, either. He became a homeless alcoholic and died in 2018.
Jeremy Spencer joined a cult, to which he belongs to this day.
His personality changed before he became famous. He was a posh kid, but as soon as he became this punk violinist with a fake Cockney accent he got all this recognition at the same time. It’s all a persona.
Even so, I once met a sound mixer guy who used to work with lots of big names, including Steven Tyler, who he said he had worked with both before and after he got sober. I asked him whether sobriety made him different. He said, “You could actually talk to him after he got clean.”
But then Dion got clean and found Jesus. But he’s the biggest jerk I ever met in show business. Eventually I started thinking, you know, maybe I just met him on a bad night and he’s not usually like that. But from everything I hear, he really is that. He’s a clean and sober Christian asshole.
I don’t know if it’s a thing, but there’s nothing really about the punk ethos, I think, that would preclude a violin player from joining in. Really, any instrument can be punk.
Punk or almost any genre depend on attitude and style, not instrumentation. Western classical (some, anyway) can be played on musical saw and washtub bass. Punks can wail on pipe organs. It’s all in the mindset.
Yes, as others have said, Punk is a culture, not just a music style. Nigel Kennedy eschewed the stuffiness of classical music, and though he still played it extremely adroitly he accompanied it with lifestyle changes and attitudes that were meant to upset the establishment.
To be fair, not many people really believed it was anything more than a kid acting up and going through a rebellious phase.
Phil Collins. With Genesis, with Peter Gabriel on vocals, he was an amiable drummer. After Gabriel’s departure, he was an amiable frontman, with a bit of an ego. When he went solo, he became more sanctimonious with each album and holier-than-thou hit. I don’t know how that translated to his offstage personality, but I stopped listening to the prick after his third solo album.