80 free Punk Rock trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Punk rock was a word critics used for 1960s garage bands before it became a scene at a Bowery club, a national scandal on British teatime television and, eventually, a marketing slogan for a Subaru. This punk rock trivia quiz runs from the proto-punk of Detroit and the garage bands of the Nuggets era through the New York clubs, Patti Smith and the Ramones, to a shop on the King's Road, the Sex Pistols, the Grundy interview, the Damned, the Buzzcocks, the Clash and the Australians who got there first. It then follows the schism: hardcore in Southern California and Washington D.C., straight edge, Fear on Saturday Night Live, Crass and anarcho-punk, Oi!, D-beat, the 2 Tone ska revival, riot grrrl, and the 1990s explosion of Green Day, the Offspring, Rancid, Blink-182 and Sum 41 that had purists crying sellout. Easy questions open each era and the deep cuts follow. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's punk rock article, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 80 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Hilly Kristal, owner of the New York club CBGB, preferred to call the new movement at his venue what?
Street rock
The name that stuck came instead from a magazine that debuted at the end of 1975 and codified the term.
Q 02By the end of 1974 the Ramones had played seventy-four shows, each lasting roughly how long?
17 minutes
The band condensed rock and roll to its primal level, drawing on everything from the Stooges to 1960s girl groups.
Q 03Which band formed from the audience of the Sex Pistols' June 1976 Lesser Free Trade Hall gig?
Joy Division
Only thirty to forty people attended, but the crowd also went on to form the Fall and the Smiths, and to launch Factory Records.
Q 04The Damned's October 1976 single, regarded as the first UK punk rock single, was called what?
New Rose
The Vibrators followed a month later with "We Vibrate".
Q 05The Sex Pistols' notorious 1976 Bill Grundy interview happened because they filled a vacancy left by which band?
Queen
The swearing that followed put punk on newspaper front pages and made it a household name within 24 hours.
Q 06Which member of the Sex Pistols did most of the swearing at Bill Grundy on live television?
Steve Jones
The guitarist was reacting to Grundy's drunken remark to Siouxsie Sioux that they should "meet afterwards".
Q 07Where did the Sex Pistols play their first gig under that name on November 6, 1975?
Saint Martin's School of Art
The show soon attracted a small but dedicated following, and the band often provoked crowds into near-riots.
Q 08Before recruiting a new singer and renaming themselves, the future Sex Pistols went by what name?
The Strand
The group hung around Malcolm McLaren's shop and was already being managed by him when the singer's job came open in August 1975.
Q 09What single-word name did McLaren and Westwood give their King's Road shop in 1975?
Sex
The shop built its reputation on outrageous "anti-fashion" and became the meeting point for the future Pistols.
Q 10Which Sex Pistols single reached number two on the UK chart in May 1977 amid a moral panic?
God Save the Queen
It arrived just after Sid Vicious joined the band on bass, and "Pretty Vacant" reached number six two months later.
Q 11What did Sid Vicious throw at the 100 Club Punk Festival in September 1976, leading to his arrest?
A glass
The object shattered and destroyed a girl's eye, and press coverage cemented punk's reputation as a social menace.
Q 12Which Australian band was the first punk group outside the US to release a record, "(I'm) Stranded" in 1976?
The Saints
Co-founder Ed Kuepper hated the first Ramones album when he heard it, because he knew his band would be labelled Ramones copyists despite having played that way for years.
Q 13Sydney's Radio Birdman built the early Australian punk scene around which venue?
The Oxford Tavern
Q 21Whose liner notes for the 1972 anthology Nuggets applied "punk rock" to 1960s garage bands?
Lenny Kaye
He went on to play guitar in the Patti Smith Group; his notes also contain the earliest known use of "garage punk".
Q 22Which 1966 hit was Question Mark & the Mysterians' biggest song?
96 Tears
Marsh later described the band as giving a "landmark exposition of punk rock" in Creem in May 1971.
Q 23Which song by the Kingsmen is often cited as punk rock's defining "ur-text"?
Louie Louie
The Kinks' "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" were both influenced by it.
The venue sat in the Darlinghurst suburb; the band released Radios Appear on its own Trafalgar label in June 1977.
Q 14Which Ohio city's early-1970s scene produced Rocket from the Tombs, Electric Eels and later Pere Ubu?
Cleveland
The scene's live shows were dubbed "Extermination Night", and guitarist Cheetah Chrome went on to the Dead Boys.
Q 15Devo spearheaded a movement named after which Ohio city?
Akron
The Cramps briefly relocated to the same city before settling into the New York scene.
Q 16The Stooges, fronted by Iggy Pop, came from which Michigan city?
Ann Arbor
Their debut arrived in August 1969, six months after the MC5's first album; Fun House and Raw Power followed.
Q 17Which former Velvet Underground member produced the Stooges' 1969 debut album?
John Cale
He later produced the Modern Lovers' self-titled album too, another record that anticipated punk.
Q 18What was the title of the MC5's influential February 1969 debut album?
Kick Out the Jams
The band had formed in 1963 as an R&B and garage outfit; the album is now considered a forerunner of punk.
Q 19Which critic mockingly called Iggy Pop "that Stooge punk" in the December 1970 issue of Creem?
Lester Bangs
The same writer went on to use the term repeatedly for mid-1960s garage acts in the early 1970s.
Q 20Who first used the phrase 'punk rock' in print, in the Chicago Tribune on March 22, 1970?
Ed Sanders
The Fugs co-founder was describing his own first solo album as "punk rock - redneck sentimentality".
Q 24When William Shakespeare used the word "punk" in The Merry Wives of Windsor, what did it mean?
Prostitute
The word later shifted to mean a young hustler, gangster or hoodlum before critics attached it to rock.
Q 25Which English fanzine printed the famous 1976 drawing of three chords captioned 'Now form a band'?
Sideburns
The image summed up the DIY ethic that pub rock's small venues and independent labels had helped make possible.
Q 26Which Richard Hell song, played in Television's early sets, became the anthem of the New York scene?
Blank Generation
Hell soon left Television, and later titled his Voidoids' first full-length album after the song.
Q 27Patti Smith's 1974 debut single, often called the first punk record, paired "Hey Joe" with which B-side?
Piss Factory
She released it on her own Mer Records label with Television guitarist Tom Verlaine playing on it.
Q 28Which band did Richard Hell form after Television, with ex-Dolls Thunders and Nolan?
The Heartbreakers
He left that band too in early 1976 to found the Voidoids, described as one of punk's most harshly uncompromising groups.
Q 29"Chinese Rocks", co-written by Richard Hell and a Ramone, takes its title from a strong form of which drug?
Heroin
Both writers used it, as did Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan, and Thunders helped popularise it among British punks on tour.
Q 30Which label released the Ramones' debut album in April 1976?
Sire Records
The record was embraced by a discerning few and, in one later description, slagged off as a bad joke by the majority.