Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  Ian Levine, after leaving Blackpool Mecca, had a brief residency at Angels in Burnley and then became a key resident DJ at Heaven near Charing Cross Station, opened by Jeremy Norman, the man behind the Embassy. Levine took Tuesday nights and his music tastes and beatmixing were part of the attraction of the venue, along with a massive sound system and a high-tech lightshow. He later concentrated on production, recording ‘So Many Men, So Little Time’ with vocals by Miquel Brown in 1982 and the massive hit ‘High Energy’ by Evelyn Thomas in 1984, before going on to work with Take That, the Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, Amanda Lear and Dollar, among many others.

  Les Cokell, DJ at the Twisted Wheel on the night Dave Godin visited, was later resident at the gay club Hero’s on Ridgefield in Manchester; he died in a road traffic accident in 1998. Louise’s on Poland Street is now a private members’ club called Milk & Honey. The Timepiece in Liverpool later became the 147 Snooker Club and is now a nightclub called Envi, where recent entertainments have included drag queens, charity boxing matches and a personal appearance by the renowned psychic Derek Acorah.

  Chaguarama’s struggled through 1976. Late that year, and possibly as a last throw of the dice by the cash-strapped owner, or to sidestep a closure order that was hanging over the venue as a result of a petition by local residents, Chaguarama’s had a name change to the Roxy. The owners issued new membership cards with ‘Roxy Disco Club’ printed on them. It appeared to make no difference to the venue’s fortunes. Then, as we’ll see, a new team arrived, looking for somewhere to host some gigs. A deal was done. Apart from building a stage, the other job that needed doing was crossing out the word ‘Disco’ on any of the membership cards that hadn’t yet been distributed and writing ‘Punk’ on them instead.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Secret gigs, home-butchered hair, love action at the Roxy

  The Picture Theatre was a cinema opened in 1915 on Manor Park Road in Harlesden and was soon renamed the Picture Coliseum. In the mid-1970s it offered adult films and kung fu movies. In March 1977, the Clash, having just signed to CBS, hired the venue, invited three other bands on the bill and put tickets on sale; they were £1.50 and included admission to late-night kung fu movies after the gig. The venue later became a pub operated by JD Wetherspoon.

  Reviewing the gig in ZigZag magazine, Kris Needs called the Coliseum ‘the classic definition of a fleapit, all peeling paint and stained seats’. During the Clash’s set, Needs described the crowd activity as ‘a show in itself’. ‘The crowd in front of the stage went potty, pogoing right up into the air, screaming the words, shaking themselves to death and falling into twitching heaps.’ He was accurate enough, but the crowds were not so much shaking themselves to death as shaking themselves into life. Punk gigs were often an encouragement to get involved, make opportunities, participate.

  Punk was another example of the tribalism of the 1970s. To its adherents, it was an antidote to the pseudo-glitz of disco, and a rejection of mainstream culture. Part of the thrill and attraction was that it tapped into a growing disdain for huge rock gigs at the likes of Earls Court and Bingley Hall. In June 1976, even before punk broke, Mick Farren – who had seen Gene Vincent at the Brighton Essoldo in 1960, Jimi Hendrix at the Marquee, and Pink Floyd at UFO – articulated the need to re-energise live music in a polemic in New Musical Express. The paper had been receiving letters from readers hostile to ‘big-time, rock-pop, tax-exile, jet-set showbusiness’ he reported. The hostility had been around for several months, if not years, but Farren now sensed some momentum, and claimed ‘something seems to be happening’.

  At the big gigs, according to Farren, ‘The only role for the audience is that of uncomfortable observers.’ To Farren, the giggoing experience at stadiums and football grounds was evidence of the determination of some artists, promoters and sections of the media ‘to turn rock into a safe, establishment form of entertainment’. Some original thinking and innovative concepts were required, he suggested. It wasn’t just a question of new music but also just as much how music was being staged and promoted. He hoped a new generation might reclaim and remake rock music. He made the prophetic observation that ‘Putting the Beatles back together isn’t going to be the salvation of rock’n’roll. Four kids playing to their contemporaries in a dirty cellar club might.’

  Punk audiences and bands understood that gig-going wasn’t a passive experience or spectator sport. Led Zeppelin, ELO or Fleetwood Mac might jet in and jet out to entertain a mega crowd but there would be no call to arms, no aftermath. As we’ll see, however, after Pistols or Clash gigs ripples of activity invariably followed, and a gig was rarely just another gig. There’s an apposite quote from Mick Jones of the Clash: ‘The problem with those bands was that they left you as they found you. They did nothing to change you.’

  In 1976 the people of Manchester and the surrounding area had four opportunities in their locality to see the Sex Pistols. Two were at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, a little all-seater theatre above the main hall where Bob Dylan going electric had precipitated the shout ‘Judas’ during a show in 1966. The first, on the evening of 4 June, was attended by Morrissey, among others, but so sparse was the audience he later described it as ‘a front parlour affair’. Among those at the first Lesser Free Trade Hall show was Paul Welsh, who ran a fanzine, Penetration. ‘They attack their numbers as if they were attacking a gang of thugs in a street fight, viciously,’ he said of the Sex Pistols in his next issue (number 8, cover price 12p). Just over six weeks later the Pistols were back, and a larger crowd gathered.

  The Sex Pistols were an entertainment, a sensation and a revolution. Part travelling circus, part art happening, they’d roll into a town near you and, apart from just a handful of occasions, trigger something, some moment of cultural subversion. An outrage to some, to others an empowering call to liberation. ‘At last our prayers have been answered,’ declared Paul in Penetration.

  All venues provide somewhere to gather but, in addition, occasionally what happens between the four walls of a gig or club has the effect of being a catalyst. As we’ll see, the two Sex Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall are testament to this, and testament to punk’s most important ingredient, its sense of DIY culture. The first gig was staged by two fans of the Pistols, Howard Trafford and Peter McNeish. By the time the Pistols returned on 20 July those fans had formed a band: Buzzcocks.

  In addition to Morrissey and those two Buzzcocks – who rechristened themselves Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley – other people who were said to have been at the first or second Sex Pistols gigs at the Free Trade Hall were future musicians, artists, journalists and photographers including Linder Sterling, Dick Witts, Paul Morley, Steve Shy, John the Postman, Mark E. Smith, Kevin Cummins, Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner. Tony Wilson is also rumoured to have been present. ‘The seventies incarnation of the mythical Manchester scene developed from there,’ says Richard Boon.

  From the early days of the Sex Pistols through to the Clash’s ‘White Riot’ tour, a gig with a bit of a buzz surrounding it would invariably lure the malcontents, the born performers and desperate poets out of the shadows and, in many cases, gave birth to a life, a gang, a band or a scene. Through the next chapters we will celebrate how punk and post-punk had this incendiary impact, activating scenes and cities, although we should be mindful that the reactions among fans of punk were many and various. One writer in Nottingham has a local angle on the Sex Pistols gig at the Boat Club in that city in August 1976: ‘It’s been said that when they played Manchester in the same year, everyone in the audience went out and formed bands. When they played Nottingham, alas, everybody went out to the chip shop and got the last bus home.’

  By the mid-1970s there had been various scattered grassroots attempts to provide an alternative to the big rock shows, the Earls Court-type experiences. But there were two powerful precursors to punk – one of which was pub rock. In that era there were plenty of live music pubs, including cover bands on a Friday, perhaps, or folk sessions on a Sund
ay, or jazz trios maybe, or pubs that would host ceilidhs. By 1975 a particularly strong pub-rock scene in London had been created by various bands inspired by rhythm & blues, including the most celebrated of them, Dr Feelgood. In 1975 Dr Feelgood released two albums, and were soon way too big for the pub-rock circuit.

  The 101ers, including founder member Joe Strummer, were another pub-rock band embedded in the London circuit. In May 1975 they took a weekly Thursday night residency at the Elgin pub on Ladbroke Grove, which they kept for nine months until January 1976 when complaints about noise pollution forced the landlord to switch to acoustic events only. They also played the function rooms of pubs like the Hope & Anchor in Islington and the Nashville in Kensington. From October 1975 the 101ers held down a joint residency on Tuesday nights at the Nashville with Eddie & the Hot Rods, another group popular on the circuit. The Hot Rods had a neat choice of cover versions (‘Wooly Bully’, the Who’s ‘The Kids Are Alright’) but there was something old-fashioned about the Hot Rods, which was both their power and their limit. They were imitating, rather than innovating, albeit with much energy.

  The second precursor to punk was what was happening in New York in the mid-70s. Chris Charlesworth had reported for Melody Maker from New York in July 1974 at a time when the American economy was going into recession, with GDP falling and unemployment rising. New York was hard hit and areas now busy and full of expensive real estate were then falling into dereliction. His Melody Maker report namechecked the New York Dolls, Wayne County and Television, describing the ‘scruffy late-night’ venues they were playing in the city. ‘Excitement, sweat, crude and simple music, and a “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude mingle together in this new generation of bands.’

  Then there was Patti Smith. In June 1975 NME published a review of a gig featuring Television and Patti Smith penned by Charles Shaar Murray, a show which had taken place at one of those scruffy venues, CBGB (‘an impossibly scuzzy little club’ according to Murray). He was enthralled, ecstatic, proclaiming: ‘Patti Smith embodied and equalled everybody that I’ve ever dug on a rock & roll stage,’ and that Television ‘represent an escape from the rollercoaster to oblivion into which rock is currently straightjacketed’.

  Those nights at CBGB and Max’s Kansas City sounded attractive, certainly more attractive than an evening in a cattle shed or a boxing stadium. Furthermore, the juxtaposition in New York of an economically broken city with a challenging, uncompromised creative excitement thanks to a small venue scene, seemed to encourage some British music press readers to believe that local scenes were also a possibility in Britain’s post-industrial disaster zones, like Liverpool or Manchester.

  Back in the 1920s jazz age, the nation had been in thrall to a version and perception of New York’s shiny chrome and sophisticated modernity. This was so very different; a fascination with failure, ruin, artistic ambition, Warhol’s Factory, Scorsese’s Mean Streets. Punk in Britain would capture the same good rockin’ energy of pub rock, but force a break with the past, and add artistic and cultural ambition. Joe Strummer went on to front the Clash, admitting in interviews that the limit of the ambition of the 101ers was the hope that the lads stood at the bar getting hammered on pints while the band played Chuck Berry cover versions and would come back the next week.

  Sharing a retro impulse but finding a different way of expressing it were the teddy boys. Malcolm McLaren had been at Wembley in 1972, and stocked the requisite jackets and brothel-creepers in his shop Let It Rock, but opening SEX was a break with that, a new route. Intent on getting involved in the music industry, McLaren had been to New York and, enamoured of the New York Dolls, he tried to manage them, without much success. Nevertheless, he still hoped to find or create a band and in some way or other cause a sensation. SEX became the HQ for these activities. Alan Jones remembers the Sex Pistols congregating at the shop. ‘It was all a bit of a shambles to begin with. But I always thought Johnny had something. He looked grungey even though the term wasn’t used then, and he had these rotten green teeth and he had this old supermarket carrier bag he’d be dragging along with his belongings in. I used to love that.’

  McLaren was adamant the Pistols weren’t just going to be another pub-rock band to prop up the bill at the Hope & Anchor. He wanted to clearly differentiate his band from everything else at the time, so the Sex Pistols avoided the existing live venue circuit, and their first two shows, in November 1975, were at St Martin’s School of Art and Central School of Art in Holborn, London.

  In their early days the Sex Pistols would sometimes turn up unannounced and play. McLaren would just make stuff up to get the band onstage somewhere. For practical and financial reasons these performances would be at venues in London or within a short driving distance. As a result, the first stirrings of punk were in the London suburbs and the capital’s satellite towns. These experiences inspired the Sex Pistols song ‘Satellite’. ‘It’s the story of the travelling nonsense, around the satellite towns of London, and picking up enough money to survive for a day or two,’ Lydon (aka Rotten) later explained. ‘That’s what built the Sex Pistols crowd. They came from all those godforsaken new towns: Milton Keynes, St Albans. As bad as it was in London for young people, they had nothing at all in the satellite towns. No social scene, nothing.’

  In November 1975, as a result of Malcolm McLaren’s habit of blagging dates, the Sex Pistols turned up at Hertfordshire College of Art and Design in St Albans and got themselves a gig. Shanne Bradley, then doing a foundation course at the art college, was in the audience. She was an inveterate gig-goer and unconventional teenager, and had a thing for dressing in daft clothes. When the Pistols played she was a bit of a sight in her customised outfit comprising an old ladies’ salmon-pink corset from Oxfam and ripped tights. Inadvertently she had a haircut Johnny Rotten approved of: home-butchered hair, bright orange due to a henna/peroxide chemical reaction.

  Subsequently, Shanne had a hand in booking the Sex Pistols for more gigs at the College of Art and Design. She also booked the Damned to perform after she’d seen them at the 100 Club, which was their first or second gig, and met their manager Andy Czezowski there. There’s talk that they played the Nag’s Head in High Wycombe just before, which would have made St Albans their third or perhaps – at the most – fourth gig. No one seems to know. There’s so much urgency and chaos in the early days of punk, everyone getting stuck in, there’s a lack of documentary evidence, aside from a few unreliable gig listings. No one was paying much attention.

  As a result of this flawed record of events, various mythologies have thrived, particularly with regards to what happened at or who attended some of the landmark gigs of the era. There’s even a book, I Swear I Was There, about the Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, who was in the audience, and the impact of the Manchester gigs. There’s a chapter in another book that discusses reasons why a Sex Pistols gig in Manchester on 1 October at Didsbury College – listed in many of the completist web pages and fan sites – didn’t have the cultural impact of the other four in the city that year. The truth appears to be that the Sex Pistols didn’t actually play there. If they were booked, they didn’t show. This is according to conversations I’ve had with Steve Shy (the young man behind the fanzine Shy Talk), who went there with Paul Morley and saw a band called the Undead but no sight of the Pistols. Other histories claim the Sex Pistols never played in Liverpool . . . except, as we shall see, they did.

  In the wake of gigs by the Pistols and the Damned at Hertfordshire College, St Albans became a regular stopping-off point for punk bands. In the first few months of 1977 Antibof appeared, a St Albans-based fanzine which mixed sideswipes at St Albans and ‘the dozy morons who inhabit this place’ with appeals to the populace to wake up to punk music. Phil Smee started a record label – Waldos Records – and began by releasing a seven-inch by the Bears and, later, singles by the likes of the Tea Set and Clive Pig. Much later Mr Smee designed the lettering for the Motörhead logo.

  At that first Hertfo
rdshire College Pistols gig Lydon took a shine to Shanne – he asked if she’d ever been to a shop called SEX, told her about a girl called Jordan who worked there and had a bold look, and suggested that she should go to London, meet up with him, and pay the shop a visit. It was an appropriate choice. There was no live music venue or nightclub at the time that could lay claim to be the headquarters of punk, but if you had home-butchered hair and a passion to find out what was afoot then SEX was a great hangout. In fact, SEX was Britain’s first important punk venue.

  Just along the King’s Road from SEX, the Aquarius indoor market was mostly older stall-holders selling antiques, but one or two upstarts were also there, including Bernard Rhodes, who would later go on to manage the Clash; he had a stall selling screen-printed T-shirts among other things. When Acme Attractions opened in the basement of the Aquarius, the owner John Krevine asked Don Letts to work there. On one of his Monday nights out at the Lyceum he met Jeannette Lee, they started dating, and she began working at Acme with him. Acme became a place to hang out. Don blasted out reggae and there was a scooter in the basement.

  After Don had got acquainted with Bob Marley after the Lyceum gig in 1975, Marley used to visit Acme to purchase weed whenever he was in London. Apart from weed, among Acme’s other best-selling items in 1975/76 were winklepicker shoes and peg trousers that came in colours like shocking pink, but you’d also be able to get mohair jumpers like the one Johnny Rotten liked to wear, James Dean leather jackets and electric-blue zoot suits. Don began wearing one.