Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  The Electric Circus featured AC/DC in May 1976, but its fortunes were mixed and its finances precarious, so Robinson and Brooks began to allow punk gigs at the venue. You could walk there from the Ranch and it became the place to go to see punk, although only once a week; until the final month or so the venue owners only gave up their Sundays to punk, preferring heavy metal, prog and unpunk rock on other nights. When Buzzcocks played there on 10 November 1976 they were supported by Chelsea, and it was also when Pete Shelley met Ian Curtis for the first time.

  After the two gigs in the summer at the Lesser Free Trade Hall and the non-gig at Didsbury College, the Sex Pistols played two further gigs in Manchester in 1976, in December, during the bands ‘Anarchy’ tour by which time, such was their reputation for being and attracting trouble, they were now banned from the Free Trade, as well as local hotels including the Midland in the city centre and the Belgrade in Stockport. Both gigs took place at the Electric Circus, on the 9th and the 19th of December.

  Just as the Sex Pistols were finishing what was left of their dates on the ‘Anarchy’ tour, the first and perhaps only London club that could lay claim to being punk’s headquarters was opening; the Roxy at 41–43 Neal Street in Covent Garden. There had been many landmark punk gigs in the capital – including the Pistols playing at the Screen on the Green, Islington – and the hit-and-run nature of the one-offs had given early punk some of its appeal and impact. The Roxy – although it came to a messy end, and dragged on way beyond its best-before date – for three or four months was somewhere that programmed punk relentlessly, creating a community of regulars, somewhere you could drop into, sell your fanzine, see a band, be part of a clan.

  Shanne Bradley recalls: ‘There were no other places like the early Roxy. It was tatty, with plenty of mirrors. It was wild, full of spontaneity, full of all sorts. Most of the audience were in bands or wished they were.’

  The Roxy was the Roxy Disco Club, the old Chaguarama’s. A group of friends, including Gene October – who was looking to find some rehearsal space for Chelsea – and Andy Czezowski were looking for a venue to host some punk gigs. They became interested in the venue in the late autumn of 1976, at which time Chaguarama’s, owned by a Swiss-born barrister called Rene Albert, was more or less on its last legs. On a site visit there, they found a small upstairs reception room with a bar, with a dancefloor in the underlit basement surrounded by red leatherette bench seats and mirrors; it had a total capacity of around 150. Andy’s offer to take up some quiet nights and promote some bands there was accepted and a date was set for the opening, 21 December. Generation X headlined and the Roxy was launched. On New Year’s Day the Clash played. Andy’s time managing the Damned had come to an end, but they still owed him some money so he cut a deal with them to play four Mondays for free. And they did, to nearly 300 people a night, way beyond the official capacity, putting the Roxy at the centre of things.

  Andy Czezowski ran the Roxy with Sue Carrington; they took a decision to employ Don Letts to DJ. Andy had been round to Don’s house in Forest Hill and seen the hundreds of records he owned and witnessed the vibe his reggae tunes created daytimes down in the Aquarius basement – he reckoned Don would be an asset to the club. This was still relatively early days in the punk era, so there weren’t many punk records for him to play. Viv Albertine remembers everyone being strict about what music was acceptable and, aside from one or two groups like the MC5, rock’s past was a no-go area, so Don Letts played reggae, dub. It proved to be a welcome break between the spikey, speedy punk playing live onstage. Some of his Rasta mates also worked at the Roxy, in various capacities. ‘The punks couldn’t roll their own spliffs,’ says Don. ‘So the guys swiftly decided to sell ready-rolled ones behind the bar.’

  As its notoriety spread, the Roxy began to attract some of the New York musicians who’d come to London to make themselves available for gigs – musicians like Wayne County and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers. A number of accounts of those years describe an unfortunate downside to this. Don Letts is one eyewitness who suggests that the Heartbreakers and Nancy Spungen were responsible for introducing heroin into the British punk scene. Nancy also, of course, hooked up with Sid Vicious.

  Viv Albertine was at the Roxy the night Nancy targeted Sid and remembers it well. ‘She leaned out from behind a pillar and beckoned Sid to come towards her in the most theatrical cartoonish manner. She beckoned to Sid and I turned round to laugh with Sid at what she was doing and I saw him do this sheepish grin and trot off towards her. I couldn’t believe it; it was like watching in slow motion.’

  So this was another chapter opening in Sid’s life story, the last chapter?

  ‘Yes. They took heroin together that night and downhill he went. We were so anti all that kind of thing and I just saw him completely acquiesce.’

  The Roxy wasn’t a hot spot for romance, but a pattern of more primitive encounters developed. ‘Blow jobs; that was the thing at the time,’ says Viv. ‘People weren’t into having sex, they were into having blow jobs; the men were, I mean, the boys. I don’t know if it was American influence or because everyone was so anti-emotions that blow jobs became the thing, the boys would be pestering you for blow jobs all the time . . .’

  They wanted blow jobs in the Roxy toilets?

  ‘In the toilets, yes, or if it wasn’t that, it was people shooting up.’ She pauses: ‘I distinctly remember one night looking around and telling myself I must remember how boring this is, and not romanticise what it’s like. You’d see the same people every time you went, the same people there, every time, the same conversations every week. The scene was so small, when the Heartbreakers came along it was an injection of something different, “injection” being the appropriate word, I guess.’

  The turning point came at the end of March 1977 when the landlords attempted to sideline Andy. Rene started bringing other people in to book bands and make decisions, notably an ex-partner of his called Reiner. It was one of those occasions when club owners were watching club promoters fill their venue, and greedily and naively deciding to take back control, and it all goes horribly wrong. Andy Czezowski was physically ejected on 23 April 1977, just as Siouxsie and the Banshees were about to take to the stage. He never went back.

  After Andy left, the quality of the bookings began to deteriorate, partly because Reiner didn’t really understand the culture Andy had been operating in, and lacked his contacts, but also because most of the first wave of pioneers had become too popular to be booked into a small venue, so the programme was filled instead with second-division groups. In addition, many of the original crowd who’d been at the Roxy since its first weeks moved on. After the pioneers and the devotees had come the tourists, part-timers, pissheads and the sheep, and a number of people attaching themselves to what Don Letts calls ‘the post-Grundy tabloid punk circus’.

  Punk evolved from a revolution to a cliché in less time than it takes to scan-read a double-page spread on punk in a tabloid newspaper. Even before the ‘Anarchy’ tour, Buzzcocks singer Howard was already restless. In September 1976, Caroline Coon had reported: ‘Devoto insists he is only in a rock band temporarily,’ and by the end of the year he’d gone, left the band, uncomfortable with the direction punk was going in. Richard Boon recalls: ‘I always thought that when Rotten said, “We want more bands like us,” it was bands with the attitude not the style and the look, but you could just see the style and the look taking over in a very tabloid/Xerox way and so it’s possible Howard was correct.’

  A few weeks after their Roxy gig on New Year’s Day, the Clash signed to the major label CBS. The first gig as a CBS band was at the Harlesden Coliseum on 11 March 1977, a gig the band arranged themselves, which also featured the Slits, Buzzcocks (their first gig after Howard’s departure) and Subway Sect. This was the gig that was the subject of the lengthy report in ZigZag magazine by Kris Needs. Subway Sect played first, singer Vic Godard ending the set by stumbling backwards and falling over.

  Viv Albe
rtine was in the audience that evening in Harlesden and it was that gig that pushed her into joining the Slits. The band’s drummer, Palmolive, had been in the Flowers of Romance, but Viv had previously turned down chances to join her in the Slits, partly because she was resistant to being in an all-girl band. ‘When I saw them I was absolutely blown away by them. On stage Ari Up was utterly in her element, it all made sense. I went to the phone box the next day and rang them up, and that was it.’

  On their ‘White Riot’ tour through May 1977, the Clash took support acts Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and the Slits round the country, although not every band played every date. Shows included St Albans City Hall, Nottingham Palais, Middlesbrough Rock Garden, Edinburgh Playhouse and Manchester’s Electric Circus. The further north the Slits travelled the more rapturous the reception, remembers Viv, but the atmosphere could be dangerous too, tense, passionate and unpredictable. ‘That you’d have to stop to fight someone in the front row because they were trying to pull Ari offstage and club them with the guitar was all part of the experience. It wasn’t like, oh that was a bad night; every night was like that.’

  The Slits didn’t feature the night the ‘White Riot’ tour landed at Eric’s but the band subsequently performed there several times, including 20 August 1977, 17 March 1978 and 6 January 1979. On the latter date they also played a matinee show. Drawing on his experiences back in the early days of the alcohol-free Twisted Wheel and the daytime drop-in vibes of the Magic Village, Roger knew that he could embed Eric’s further into the music consciousness of the city, and give bored kids a treat, by staging alcohol-free matinee shows. Thus, in this era, the Liverpool youth would get to enjoy 5 p.m. shows by the likes of the Rezillos, the Gang of Four and Iggy Pop (April 1979). In August 1979 Joy Division played a matinee show supported by Swell Maps (£1.10 members, £1.35 guests).

  After a short while Roger, who liked to DJ as often as he could, realised that as promoter he needed to keep an eye on what was going on at the door and make sure backstage wasn’t getting trashed by bands, so he brought in some youngsters to DJ in his absence; one of whom was Norman Killon. It wasn’t unknown for former habitués of Revolution to turn up and hassle Norman to play hard rock, but Roger had strong views on the importance of Eric’s having a strong identity, and wouldn’t have anything on the juke box or played by the DJ that didn’t fit his mission to educate and convert. On one occasion Norman buckled and played something by Free, but Roger was adamant there had to be a line drawn and Norman learned it was best for a DJ to ignore unhelpful requests, even if it meant, as it sometimes would, trad rockers shouting at him, ‘Stop playing this crap!’

  When the Clash played Eric’s on 5 May 1977 the gig energised Liverpool as the Sex Pistols gigs at the Free Trade Hall had energised Manchester. Bill Drummond had been drinking with the ex-Cavern DJ Bob Wooler and Clive Langer from Deaf School. They’d been in the Grapes on Mathew Street and had then wandered up to Eric’s. By the time the gig had finished Clive Langer had challenged Bill to get a band together, write some songs and, if he did, then Clive promised he’d join.

  And so it came to pass; within weeks they took the name Big in Japan and Jayne Casey became the singer. In a flurry of personnel changes in the subsequent months, a young guitarist studying for his O levels, Ian Broudie, also joined the band, Holly Johnson joined and left and Peter Clarke – better known as Budgie – who’d been in the Spitfire Boys with Pete Burns, eventually became the drummer. In the words of Paddy Shennan, writing in the Liverpool Echo, Big in Japan were ‘a supergroup with a difference – its members only became super after they left’.

  Julian Cope had arrived in Liverpool. He was at the Clash gig at Eric’s too, as was Ian McCulloch who was out celebrating his eighteenth birthday with his friend Pete Wylie. Pete Burns was dressed head to foot in PVC, his hair in a quiff that looked like it was made of molten vinyl. They all went on to be in groups, with each other and without, as Eric’s became a hotbed of bands getting together and splitting up, rivalries growing, egos careering out of control. At Eric’s it was, just as Mick Farren had hoped, ‘kids playing to their contemporaries in a dirty cellar club’.

  By May 1977, Don Letts had walked away from the Roxy, but not without having left something of a legacy. He’d picked up a Super-8 camera and reinvented himself as a film-maker, shooting footage at the club, including a backstage conversation between Siouxsie and Reiner about whether the Roxy was closing or not. As well as valuably documenting some of the activity there, he’d also helped cement a punk/reggae connection which manifested itself in many ways, from Johnny Rotten namechecking Dr Alimantado in interviews, to a young Ranking Roger (before he joined the Beat) entertaining punk fans at Barbarella’s by toasting and MCing during the DJs’ sets. Don’s work also fed into the consciousness of Grant Marshall in Bristol, before Grant had become Daddy G and ten years before Massive Attack formed.

  After the Roxy, Don was still hanging out with punk characters, like Johnny Rotten, Ari Up and Joe Strummer, all of whom, and others, would occasionally accompany him to the dark, weed-heavy Four Aces reggae club in Dalston. A month after the Clash played at Eric’s, Don took Joe Strummer to the Hammersmith Palais, to a reggae all-nighter featuring Dillinger, Leroy Smart and Delroy Wilson. This time it would be Strummer himself who’d find the gig-going experience feeding into his creativity. Having witnessed the Notting Hill riots in August 1976, and hungrily devoured the often revolutionary dub reggae Don Letts would play, Strummer expected that the vibe at the Hammersmith Palais all-nighter would be heavy and political but was disconcerted not to hear the incendiary voice of struggle. To him, it was a tame, relatively mainstream show. Out of this experience came one of the most memorable singles of that era, ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’.

  The Pistols didn’t attempt a full-scale tour in Britain in 1977, although in the last week of August and the first week of September they played a series of secret gigs. Without the internet and the instant messaging technology of today, secret gigs were easier to stage and harder to discover. Fans looked out for clues, and there were a number of false alarms, but among those shows that did happen were those at Wolverhampton Lafayette (the Pistols were billed as S.P.O.T.S., which stood for Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly), Doncaster Outlook (billed as the Tax Exiles), Middlesbrough Rock Garden (Acne Rabble) and Penzance Winter Gardens (Mystery Band of International Repute).

  They played their last British gig (until they re-formed in 1996) in Huddersfield at a former cinema, built in an approximation of a Greek Revival style, which had opened in 1921. The cinema closed in June 1957, and in the 1960s became a ballroom and concert venue called the Sheridan Rooms (known affectionately as ‘The Sheds’). The building was subsequently converted into a nightclub, Eros, later renamed Ivanhoe’s.

  Ivanhoe’s welcomed the Sex Pistols on Christmas Day 1977. They played two shows, one in the evening with tickets £1.75, with proceeds going to help the striking firemen of Yorkshire. They played an afternoon show, too, which was a free show for kids. During the afternoon Johnny Rotten and Sid handed out cake and a food fight ensued. The DJ was running various competitions to win T-shirts and other Pistols artefacts, but also had a skateboard as a prize. Jez Scott took home the skateboard after winning the pogoing competition.

  Three weeks later, on 14 January 1978, the Pistols completed their first (and last) tour of the USA at the Winterland in San Francisco, and the project fell apart. Later in 1978 Lydon went to Jamaica to scout for acts for a new reggae imprint at Virgin called Front Line, and invited Don Letts to film some of the trip (and Vivien Goldman of Sounds to cover it for the paper). Back in London he pulled together a new band, Public Image Limited, recruiting Jah Wobble and Keith Levene. This was May 1978. Levene later recalled that he actually thought the Sheffield Black Swan date in July 1976 would be his last gig with the Clash (he was out a few gigs later, after a Roundhouse show) and that one evening two years before he’d discussed one day forming a band with Rotten.

&
nbsp; The Black Swan later metamorphosed into the Boardwalk, which played host to local Sheffield bands in the early twenty-first century; including the Arctic Monkeys, who entitled their first demo Beneath the Boardwalk. Ivanhoe’s in Huddersfield closed in the early 1990s; the interior was redesigned and turned into a supermarket. Over in Chester, Quaintways is now known as Rosies, which has no apostrophe, but does a rock disco on a Tuesday and modern R&B most of the rest of the week (with semi-permanent offers on bottles of WKD).

  As the Roxy deteriorated in the wake of Andy Czezowski’s eviction, another promoter, John Miller, moved in on Crackers on Wardour Street, and, as the weekends and most other nights were doing just fine playing funk and disco, took Monday nights there, calling the venture the Vortex. His first night featured Buzzcocks, the Fall and John Cooper Clarke, and soon his punk rock gigs took over Tuesdays at Crackers too. Andy Czezowski continued in a career that took in band management and running venues, notably the Fridge in Brixton.

  The site of the Roxy is now the flagship store for the swimwear brand Speedo. Shanne Bradley, who’d been at the Roxy from day one, formed the Nipple Erectors, recruiting Shane MacGowan (then known as ‘Shane O’Hooligan’), guitarist Roger Towndrow and, as drummer, the gloriously named Arcane Vendetta from Ilford, who edited a fanzine, These Things (his real name was Adrian Fox). Several line-up changes ensued. Vendetta’s place behind the drums was taken by Jon Moss, who later joined Boy George in Culture Club. By this time the band had been renamed the Nips.

  Jeannette Lee started managing Public Image Limited, and then joined the band (she’s the cover star on the sleeve of their Flowers of Romance album; the lack of activity by Viv and Sid’s band wasn’t going to waste a neat phrase). Jeannette went on to manage the likes of Scritti Politti, Spiritualized and Jarvis Cocker, and since 1987 she has played an integral role at Rough Trade Records.