One forgets the ugliness of the Seventies – the rotten food; the awful brutalist architecture (I quite like that now); the crimplene flared trousers and polyester shirts, and how everything and everybody stank.
The only acceptable contemporary clothes belonged to the London Rat Pack of the day. They were known as the Mayfair Orphans, notably Roger Moore, Terence Stamp, and Michael Caine. The Orphans got their suits not from the traditional outfitters of Savile Row, but from Dougie Hayward and Cyril Castle, who operated in the heart of that illustrious neighbourhood within walking distance of the Playboy Club Casino and their high-rolling chum Omar Sharif.
At the extreme end of men’s tailoring was the aptly named Tommy Nutter. Everything from the house of Nutter was on a BIG scale: big fat aerodynamic lapels, capacious patch pockets with monster flaps, buttons the size of dinner plates, upholstered shoulders and deep, deep side vents, all cut from what looked like some windowpane-check tablecloth material.
I was a huge fan of the Northern Soul phenomenon – after all, me and my pals had invented it ten years earlier in the cramped basements of central Manchester – but now there was Wigan Casino, which had all the required space to bust those famous moves. What a terrific scene. It was only the dress codes that kept me out: horrible skimpy short-sleeved leisure shirts with a sort of fake collar and a scoop neck, or wife-beater vests worn with high-waisted Oxford bags with turn-ups, multiple pleats and weird pocket placements, usually made from some fire-retardant fabric, and coupled with dreadful Corfam platform shoes. If any of those people had complimented me on my appearance, I would have wondered where I’d gone wrong.
Trying to look normal came at a terrible price: it invited the unfavourable judgement of less discerning fellow citizens. People looking like clowns in gor-blimey parallels and godawful flares would take the mickey out of me for wearing tapered Levi’s, or ‘Shite Catchers’ as they were known in Salford.
The music of the era was mostly as bad as the clothes. There were some exceptions, from the likes of Bryan Ferry, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, the Stylistics, Ken Boothe, The Jimmy Castor Bunch, maybe James Brown, JJ Cale, and, as I’ve said, a whole lot of real good reggae: I went to see the Wailers, Toots and the Maytals, and The Heptones inside one month. Then there was The Velvet Underground, the Stooges, The Ramones, and the New York Dolls. But Genesis, Pink Floyd, Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum, The Bloody Mues: forget it. I’d seen the cream of American rock and roll for nothing, so I wasn’t about to shell out cash money to watch some wanker playing a forty-five-minute guitar solo.
Before The Sex Pistols’ first appearance at St Martin’s Art College in November 1975, I’d seen this very attractive girl called Linder Sterling on the same bus every weekday morning and occasionally around town in the evenings. She had a brand-new look factoring in the pre-Technicolor screen goddess and the kinky pin-up. I thought, ‘Memo to Self: someday all women will look like this.’ In her white Leichner foundation, heavy mascara, and semi-matte jet-black Biba lipstick, coupled with a tight black-leatherette shift, she was all sharp angles and shiny synthetics: a sneak preview of all tomorrow’s people.
The first time I ever saw the term ‘punk rock’ in print would have been around this time too, in a review of The Ramones. If there was any understanding of the word ‘punk’ at that time it had to do with urban-American teenage delinquency: unsuccessful criminals, socially inept fuck-ups of every stripe. Put it this way, it was never a term of endearment.
With the rapid acquisition of their first album I discovered that The Ramones were a welcome return to the core values of rock and roll. They seemed to embody the harmonic sensibility of the Beach Boys, the production values of Phil Spector, and the social concerns of those girl groups who had inspired the New York Dolls, e.g. The Jaynetts, The Shirelles, The Shangri-Las, and, of course, The Ronettes. Their timeless appeal has been best summed up by none other than me in this piece I wrote for the fanzine Sniffin’ Glue:
I love Bob Dylan but I hold him responsible for two bad ideas: a) the extended running time of the popular song and b) the lyric sheet. Both fine for Bob who usually occupied the extra time in agreeably entertaining ways. The rot, however, set in between 1968 and 1975 when the airwaves were clogged by over-manned combos of cheesecloth-shirted bozos, with names like Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum, Supertramp, Barclay James Harvest, Yes, Genesis, Emerson Huntley and Palmer, Foghat . . . the end is listless. Not that I have ever listened to any of the above. Why would I? I hate them.
In late 1975, I read an article on The Ramones, a four-man gang from Queens. Much was made of their snotty asocial stage manner and the speed and brevity of their songs. The black and white photograph shot by the unimpeachable Roberta Bayley – surely the uncrowned queen of American punk iconography – showed them to be four terrific blokes.
I bought the LP: ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, ‘Pinhead’, ‘Judy is a Headbanger’, ‘Havana Affair’, ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’, ‘Stormtrooper’, ‘I don’t wanna go down to the Basement’ ‘Loudmouth’. The Ramones were and are, an enthusiasm of mine. They understood that it was better to have clever lyrics about moronic subjects than the other way round.
Any interest I had in punk came on the back of The Ramones, who seemed to be untainted by the sun-sedated sounds of psychedelia with its nebulous dogma of free expression and universal ‘love’.
It wasn’t until I read the write-up in the back pages of the NME of The Sex Pistols’ appearance at the Marquee Club in February 1976 that the word ‘punk’ appeared again.* The piece carried a tiny mugshot of the group’s singer in action: at first I thought it was Johnnie Ray making an unlikely comeback, his paranoid face frozen in a mask of fugitive anxiety, eyes like saucers, his hair a multi-directional mess of greasy spikes, gaunt sunken cheeks, and the complexion of a compulsive blood donor. Actually, it wasn’t the Nabob. It was Johnny Rotten. Wow! Is that his real name? Fancy looking like that!
Then I read the review, which reported renditions of lesser-known Dave Berry songs and the Monkees’ B-sides, cavortings with scantily clad birds, furniture getting thrown around, and some French bloke shouting out, ‘You can’t play!’ to which Steve Jones replies, ‘So what?’ You can’t argue with that – what a fucking rotter!
By the time I blagged my way into the Lesser Free Trade Hall with my then girlfriend Trish, it was The Sex Pistols’ second visit to Manchester, this time supported by Slaughter and the Dogs and the debut appearance by the newly formed Buzzcocks. After the reviews, I was expecting a level of ineptitude that never materialised. All concerned seemed reasonably proficient in their respective capacities. Steve Jones often credits the Pistols’ recorded guitar work to Chris Spedding, even claiming that he was playing behind a curtain at their earlier gigs. Surely a piece of mischievous myth-making. The Steve Jones I heard was a one-man orchestra, a high-voltage practitioner with no visible equal. In fact, the sonic overload had me scoping around for the other nine hundred and ninety-nine guys.
This gig couldn’t have been a better introduction to the punk phenomenon. In contrast to the ponderous aural sludge of the time, all three bands kept their songs fast and short, but that’s where the similarities between them ended. Punk hadn’t happened yet in Manchester – most of the kids in the audience were in flares and tie-dyed tops – but the line-up itself perfectly encapsulated three very different interpretations of punk fashion as we now know it.
The Sex Pistols were all in variations of the whole new look created by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. This involved visual elements of every youth tribe since the Second World War blended in a thoughtful, attractive, and artistic way: a three-button blazer, a ripped-up pullover, a leather jacket or a Teddy Boy drape worn with peg pants or bondage trousers along with shit-kickers, Day-Glo socks, and a homemade, slashed-up haircut.
Then you had the Buzzcocks, who looked like throwback ultra-Mods minus the designer labels; very striking in an odd, indefinable sort of way. Pete Shelley was in pink jeans and cheap Woolworth’s gym shoes, and he’d got this crap catalogue cheapo guitar that he’d sawn the top off. Howard Devoto wore one of those French garbage men’s chore jackets, buttoned up to the top like a shirt.
Slaughter and the Dogs, from Wythenshawe, were definitely going down the David Bowie glam route. Their singer Wayne Barrett wore a bottle-green silk pyjama suit with matching hair. This he would generously douse in talcum powder before taking the stage, then at the beginning of their set he would shake his head vigorously and his whole face would disappear in a white cloud. It was better than dry ice.
Even though the punk-rock look was a stylistic mélange, there was a right way and a wrong way. It was a matter of judgement; you knew it when you saw it.
Manchester caught on to the punk-rock vibe right away. Months before their infamous encounter with Bill Grundy on Thames TV’s Today programme, The Sex Pistols made their first ever TV appearance in August ’76 on Tony Wilson’s Granada TV music show So It Goes, with a live performance of ‘Anarchy in the UK’. So you know, credit where it’s due. In the same episode, Clive James had done a studio interview with Peter Cook and later wrote about it in the Observer. He wasn’t a Pistols fan apparently, describing Johnny Rotten as ‘a foul-mouthed ball of acne calling himself something like Kenny Frightful’.
Very quickly the city provided a number of punk venues. Under Steve Morris’s broadminded and go-ahead management, the Band on the Wall was an early platform for Manchester’s burgeoning punk groups. To Steve, business was business: liquor sales came before any serious music policy. Aesthetically he may not have cared for the punks’ music, but one thing about them was that they drank a lot, and if you were dragging in the punters, you were Steve Morris’s pal.
Not long after The Sex Pistols event, I was doing my thing at the Band on the Wall and in the crowd was Pete Shelley along with Howard and Linder, who were now an item. It was delightful to meet them so soon after their performance. Now that I saw Linder in context, her look immediately made sense. Give it a name: punk.
Linder had graduated from Manchester School of Art, and was now responsible for the in-house graphics at New Hormones, the Buzzcocks’ independent record label. Her monochrome Fluxus-style cut-ups and collages seemed to be more considered than the soon-to-be ubiquitous ransom-note graphics of Jamie Reid at Glitterbest.
In my club entertainer uniform of neat suit and wide-awake demeanour, I was the antithesis of what had been going down pre-punk, which was really default hippy. Even people’s dads were growing their hair over their ears, sporting elaborate face furniture, and wearing flared trousers with seed-packet shirts, while I favoured a degree of restraint with my monochrome-block colour scheme and sharp silhouette.
Fortunately, in so doing I had unwittingly obeyed the only three rules of punk rock: narrow lapels, no flares, no beards. You could be as punk as you liked, you could sound like The Ramones, but if you looked anything like a hippy, you weren’t allowed in.
Howard Devoto had an apartment in Lower Broughton and I started to see a lot of the Buzzcocks, Linder, and the band’s manager Richard Boon (not to be confused with the screen actor of the same-sounding name who played Paladin in Have Gun – Will Travel). Howard was quite the aesthete, a bookish type whose literary enthusiasms seemed similar to mine: he was very keen on the work of Samuel Beckett, then as now a blind spot with me, but we were both fans of Albert Camus.
Howard was very supportive, and because of the way I looked, which was anachronistic enough to qualify as punk, he thought I should be working in that area. According to him, punk rock was really taking off, and now had international status: the Buzzcocks were going to fucking Paris the next week, and shit like that. He said I would fit right in. I didn’t look like anybody else; I looked like a punk.
At that point, my plans in this regard were further emboldened by the runaway success of the American punk poet Patti Smith. I started to frequent the various punk-rock venues around town. As well as the Band on the Wall, there were Thursday nights at the aforementioned Fagins cabaret joint and disco in the town centre; Rafters, ditto, but a different night; the Ranch Bar next door to Foo Foo’s Palace, an under-age drinking den done up like a Wild West saloon complete with oil lamps, cow horns, swing doors, and saddles in lieu of bar stools; the Squat, a disused Victorian school hall off Oxford Road; and the Electric Circus, which opened at the end of October 1976.
The Electric Circus was the club that punk built. Right from the start, it was A-Number One. A condemned movie theatre not far from the Embassy Club, it was a health and safety black hole. The demolition orders were already pasted on the wall outside so it always had that fin de siècle ‘get it while it’s here’ kind of vibe. All of the big names appeared at the Electric: The Sex Pistols, The Ramones, Talking Heads, The Stranglers, The Damned, Warsaw, Buzzcocks, The Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Fall, The Drones, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, The Clash, and me.
There were lots of other bands as well, some of whom were unjustly overlooked: Terry and the Idiots, Eater, and The Drones, to name only three.
The Drones – M.J. Drone, Gus Gangrene, Steve ‘Wispa’ Cundall, and Pete Purfect (they later all adopted the surname Drone, presumably in homage to The Ramones) – were originally a Salford pub-rock combo. They had reinvented themselves as punk rockers with Paul Morley – yes, Paul Morley – as their manager, and were now signed to Valer Records.
Valer was a plastics firm like Ronco or K-tel, responsible for those multipurpose kitchen gadgets, As Seen on TV: one bit dices potatoes, another chops onions, another slices carrots, and all with a cheese grater fitted as standard. Valer had no reputation in the music business, but it did have a lot of plastic at its disposal; someone there had obviously seen an overcrowded marketplace and thought: ‘me too’.
Don’t go mistaking the Manchester punk rock scene for some whole other body: there was nothing cooperative about it. Quite the contrary. They all hated each other; ‘everybody sucks but us’ was the prevalent attitude. Equipment theft, sabotage, and casual violence were always in attendance. With characteristic wry humour, Pete Shelley would regale The Drones with the following catch line: ‘Chop, Core, Slice, Dice!’
I love The Drones actually, and, more recently, often played them on my BBC Radio 6 show. They brought out a picture disc called ‘Bone Idol’ featuring a monochrome snapshot of the lads in some Salford front parlour. There they are, surrounded by mum and dad furniture, prostrating themselves in front of a life-size skeleton from a medical supply shop perched imperiously on a G-plan throne. Bone Idol. Geddit? It was so fucking corny you had to love it.
When I had the chance, I made sure to go and see some of my other punk enthusiasms when they came to town. I saw Patti Smith, with The Stranglers as support, at the Free Trade Hall in October ’76. For ages I thought The Stranglers were an American band; I’d been reading about the CBGB axis, so I just assumed they were part of that New York scene. The name sounded American, they didn’t sing in Cockney accents, they didn’t sing about council estates or being on the dole, plus they had that Nuggets-y sort of sound, with the Hammond organ. I was a fan from that very first sighting, so to do a record with Hugh Cornwell later was quite a thing. The Stranglers were unique in many ways. They didn’t obey any of the rules.
For a start, they were much older than any of the other punk bands, and they transgressed the facial dress codes: Dave Greenfield had a handlebar cookie duster, while Jet Black sported the full-face beard. Lastly, they had a level of musical expertise that allowed a degree of emotional nuance.
In December, The Electric hosted The Sex Pistols, The Clash, the Buzzcocks, and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers on the Anarchy tour. Later, I would play with The Sex Pistols, but not as much as I would have liked. Not only because I didn’t drive, but because a couple of gigs were arranged but never happened, which was obviously no fun.
Sometimes if trouble was expected, fanzines like Sniffing Glue, for example, which were only available to the cognoscenti at a small number of punk venues, would disseminate information about forthcoming Sex Pistols gigs under various aliases: the Swankers, the Flowers of Romance, to name but two. Even then, it was no guarantee that the gig would go ahead. Don’t forget, this was before mobile phones; other than stopping at a service station along the motorway, there was no way of finding out if in the interim period the venue had been forced to call the whole thing off: hence the picture of the Pistols’ tour bus, with the destination above the front window showing ‘Nowhere’. It said it all. In many cases, that was true in a way; yes, they were going somewhere, but for no reason.
Eight out of ten of their early shows got cancelled by the local council at a moment’s notice. What a unique rock and roll experience. I don’t know anybody else that ever happened to, so for that reason I was quite judicious about going miles away on a train and stumping up for somewhere to sleep for nothing. That’s when you start to question your chosen career: when it starts to cost you money.