by Bob Stanley
‘Anarchy in the UK’ had some of the best lyrics in pop – almost every line’s a soundbite (‘Your future dream is a shopping scheme’ being maybe the most insightful). But, musically, it was almost nothing like a blueprint for punk; behind Lydon’s ear-piercing, Establishment-baiting voice, it was slow, it had a conventional guitar break, it was hard to pogo to. ‘God Save the Queen’, eventually released in June ’77, was faster, harder, more direct, all about the power chords. And by the time it was released, it had an expectant public – ‘God Save the Queen’ entered the charts at number eleven, climbed to number two, then fell back the following week. It was an abrupt and unexpected drop. Rod Stewart’s ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’ stayed at the top for a fourth straight week. Top of the Pops refused to mention the title of the song at number two.
Conspiracy theorists have cried foul ever since. Did ‘God Save the Queen’ sell enough copies to get to number one?1 Malcolm McLaren always claimed as much. He was wise enough to know pop needs its martyrs: if the Establishment (the market-research company BMRB, the BBC, the government even) had fiddled the Top 10, then so much the better – it kept the group and its fans as outsiders. ‘God Save the Queen’ became a cause célèbre.
McLaren, who understood where Little Tich and Max Bygraves fitted into British social history as well as he understood Larry Parnes and Gene Vincent, happily played up the group’s theatrical side. Rotten came across on stage like a mix of Albert Steptoe and Richard III, noble but very pissed off. Off camera, McLaren’s dealings with the music industry were just as short and sharp; they had been signed to three different record labels – EMI, A&M and Virgin – by the time of their second single (all much to Rotten’s amusement, which gave him the inspiration for ‘EMI’ on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, a UK number-one album in November ’77). This was played up by McLaren as a money-making master plan after the fact, but ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and ‘God Save the Queen’ had more in common with Serge Gainsbourg’s porn-pop hit ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’;2 they were simply too hot to handle.
The mainstream press were unimpressed by the group’s collage artwork or capitalist-baiting lyrics. They saw the dyed hair, the safety pins, the torn shirts, and thought the Sex Pistols were only about destruction: ‘Get pissed! Destroy!’ Their beer-glass-chucking mate John Ritchie was exactly that, a caricature. He was shy around girls and loved his mum, but as alter ego Sid Vicious he was little more than a nihilistic thug with a leather jacket and a pretty face, punk’s poster boy and a dumb prick. Sid joined on bass (he couldn’t play, but that wasn’t really the point) when Glen Matlock was sacked in spring ’77, and things rapidly disintegrated. At a gig in Dallas, Sid was headbutted but carried on playing, blood pouring down his face like a badge of honour. ‘Look at that,’ sighed Rotten, ‘a living circus.’
The pivotal moment for the Sex Pistols’ – and punk rock’s – musical momentum came with the arrival in London of American band the Heartbreakers. They were fronted by Johnny Thunders, formerly of the New York Dolls. They brought heroin into a very innocent drug scene (speed and beer) and changed it overnight. Subway Sect sang, ‘We oppose all rock ’n’ roll’; the Heartbreakers – with first single ‘Born to Lose’ coupled with ‘Chinese Rocks’ – clearly were rock ’n’ roll. As if it was still World War Two, they appeared glamorous to the blushing British punk groups purely because they were American; they flashed their smack like so many silk stockings, took over the London scene and dragged it down with them. The Heartbreakers were ugly ghosts of one of McLaren’s earlier social experiments, and re-emerged to haunt him. Rotten had invited Sid Vicious in, but it was McLaren who encouraged him to become a circus freak, and bequeathed him the consequences.
Rotten pulled the rug from under McLaren by leaving the Sex Pistols at the end of their ’78 US tour. All of pop waited on his next move, as it had done with the post-army Elvis and the post-crash Dylan. Listen to Johnny. Johnny Rotten will know what to do.
At home he had a huge reggae collection. In the summer of ’77 he had appeared on Capital Radio with Tommy Vance (this in itself seemed miraculous – most people assumed he’d trash a studio like a Tasmanian devil as soon as he walked in). ‘Just play the records,’ he told Vance, ‘they’ll speak for themselves. That’s my idea of fun.’ He played music by Lou Reed and Nico but, ever the contrarian, said he didn’t like the Velvet Underground. He played Can and he played Augustus Pablo. He loved reggae, and said he loved the look of pre-release reggae sevens, the idea that you could buy records with little or no clue as to what was on them. That was another kind of anarchy.
Anyone listening to the show may not have been too surprised by his post-Sex Pistols move. McLaren claimed ownership of the name ‘Johnny Rotten’ so he reverted to his real name, John Lydon. With bassist Jah Wobble and guitarist Keith Levene he formed Public Image Ltd, and they released ‘Public Image’ as their first single; Levene’s waves of disorienting, spin-cycle guitar were underpinned by a two-note dub bassline burrowing up from under your feet and between your legs. The drumming was relentless, machine-like, no cymbals, no improv. Above all this was Lydon’s tale of crisp revenge, sweet and merciless. He felt as chewed up and spat out, as abused by his manager as Les McKeown. McLaren could rewrite the Sex Pistols’ history as much as he liked, but Public Image was all Lydon’s – the beginning, middle and end3 of the story would all be written by him.
A number-nine hit in October ’78, ‘Public Image’ sounded like the future – it took a decade for anyone (My Bloody Valentine, Ride) to make guitars sound as intangibly and emotionally unsettling, and for dub (Primal Scream, Underworld) to be absorbed into guitar music as successfully. All that, and it’s a beautiful manifesto: ‘I’m not the same as when I began. I will not be treated as property.’
Some days I think ‘Public Image’ is the most powerful record ever made.
The Sex Pistols wanted to destroy rock, something Lydon made a decent fist of with Public Image Ltd. The Clash, the Pistols’ only real rivals, wanted to save it. ‘It ain’t punk, it ain’t new wave,’ said guitarist Mick Jones, ‘all the terms stink. Just call it rock ’n’ roll.’ As pretenders to the Sex Pistols’ throne, the Clash were presumably pleased as punch with the new back-to-basics direction the Heartbreakers had introduced. Jon Savage wrote about a gig in Harlesden in March ’77: ‘All I can think of, when the Clash come on, is that they jettisoned their great Pollock look for a more militaristic uniform of zippers and epaulettes. It makes them look like rock stars.’
Their singer, Joe Strummer, joined the Clash after quitting pub-rockers the 101ers, and prior to that was involved in the Maida Vale/Notting Hill hippie squat scene. The rest of the band were West and South London working class, and milked this heritage with photo shoots under the Westway – the last gang in town, speakers of the truth. Strummer claimed to carry a knife at all times, and felt a confused kinship with Notting Hill’s black community which he channelled in their first single, ‘White Riot’ (no. 38 ’77). It was written out of envy for the black anti-police riots in the late seventies. The Clash were ready to pick up sticks.
Behind all this bad-boy behaviour was manager Bernie Rhodes, and he was probably the most interesting thing about the Clash. He also managed Subway Sect, from Mortlake, the oddest of all first-generation punk groups. They wore V-neck jumpers and guitars were held high like Gerry and the Pacemakers, while the lyrics suggested Rimbaud and contained no ‘yeah’, no ‘baby’, no Americanisms at all. ‘We dye all our clothes grey, in a big bath,’ said singer Vic Godard. Even Rhodes, sadly, couldn’t steer them into the charts.
Saying that you liked the Sex Pistols or the Clash was as loaded a statement as whether you preferred the Beatles to the Stones: working class versus middle class, art school versus Establishment, Top of the Pops versus The Old Grey Whistle Test, rock versus pop. But which was which? Johnny Rotten wrote ‘I hate’ on his Pink Floyd T-shirt with his own felt-tip pen; Joe Strummer wore jackets with s
logans – ‘sten guns in Knightsbridge’, ‘hate and war’ – thought up by Bernie Rhodes and spray-painted by Sebastian Conran.4
The Sex Pistols could be viewed as a calculated project, structured round a theory largely favoured by student radicals, but the effect they had on modern pop and society beyond was entirely real. Yet the Clash were considered more politically based and socially dangerous in the US than the Pistols, who were largely seen as a contrary boy band spoiling for a punch-up. The manufactured nature of the Clash’s image shouldn’t bother me – I think the Monkees are one of pop’s greatest achievements – but hearing the Clash’s ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’ at a distance, it’s hard not to roll your eyes. Often, they were plain silly: ‘We ain’t never gonna get commercial respectability,’ they told the NME, proudly. The difference between the Sex Pistols and the Clash is that Strummer would have got defensive, maybe even flashed his blade, if you pointed out the incongruity of the Conran connection; Rotten wore Vivienne Westwood gear, or even full Ted regalia, and didn’t give a toss what you thought. The Clash set out parameters, which is one reason it took them ages to find a drummer (‘They gotta believe in what’s happening,’ Jones explained to the NME. ‘They gotta tell the truth’), and then squirmed like politicians when they were caught busting their own manifesto.
They ended up recording a double album (London Calling), a triple album (Sandinista), and then a brace of classic-rock, American radio staples in ‘Rock the Casbah’ and ‘Should I Stay or Should I Go’; they became part of the rock canon. The Sex Pistols’ tiny recorded legacy has been selected, dissected, inspected and rejected so much since the mid-seventies that it seems almost impossible to work out what they were all about. Ask forty punk-rockers how they define punk and you’ll get forty different answers, and they’ll all be right. The Sex Pistols, though, really did stand for something. Here’s what it was.
On what turned out to be their final British tour, in December 1977, there were just four shows, with four more cancelled due to illness or political pressure. The last one was at Ivanhoe’s in Huddersfield. Before the evening show, the Pistols played a matinee for five hundred kids under fourteen. Their parents were striking firemen who, already in the middle of a recession, could expect a Dickensian Christmas.
The Sex Pistols turned the club into a grotto, filling the place with sweets and copies of their LP, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols – kids of ten were running about in ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ T-shirts. There were tables of fruit – pomegranates and oranges; there was a talent competition, which was won by a girl reading a Pam Ayres poem. The children were handed skateboards, the single most desirable 1977 Christmas present. Craig Mallinson was a teenager, the son of a striking fireman, and he told the BBC, ‘They came on and sang “Holidays in the Sun”. Sid Vicious spat on the kids and Johnny had to tell him that we weren’t proper fans – we were just little kids! Johnny Rotten just loved it. He seemed really happy. He put his head in the cake at the end. He licked his fingers, passed it around, and then put his head in and got it all in his hair.’
Footage of the Huddersfield gig will make you laugh out loud. It may not have been on the scale of Live Aid, but its ethics were unquestionable, and it has had a positive, lasting impact on the community: Huddersfield Town football fans still sing ‘I wanna be HTFC’ to the tune of ‘Anarchy in the UK’. On a wall of the building where Ivanhoe’s used to be, graffiti reads, ‘Anarchy in the KU’. Never mind the spelling – people in Huddersfield remember Christmas Day 1977. As a showing of solidarity, a small act of charity, outsiders playing for outsiders, and the very real power of pop, the thought of it can just about break my heart.
1 It suits the Sex Pistols myth to say ‘God Save the Queen’ was stopped from getting to number one by the authorities. Beyond the fact it was number one in the NME chart, and that an unverified source told Virgin label boss Richard Branson it was outselling Rod Stewart’s ‘The First Cut Is the Deepest’ (the eventual number one) by two to one, there is no evidence for this. And yet it reached number two on a chart that only registered sales in a certain number of shops. As well as the BBC and IBA, the single was banned by W. H. Smith, Boots and Woolworths, three major chain stores which chart compilers BMRB would have relied upon. That ‘God Save the Queen’ even reached number two is a miracle.
2 Released on Fontana in 1969, ‘Je t’aime …’ had reached as high as number two in the UK chart before the label, Philips, got cold feet and withdrew it. Independent label Major Minor stepped in at once and took the single over the finishing line to number one.
3 No end in sight as yet. Lydon reconstitutes the PiL line-up every so often and still plays a powerful, lengthy set. There’s no doubting his work ethic.
4 Definitions of the punk aesthetic are numerous, but my favourite is George Berger’s in The Story of Crass: ‘If you want to deface a Pink Floyd t-shirt with “I hate …” you have to own one in the first place.’
40
CRANKED UP REALLY HIGH: PUNK ROCK
The 600-strong line, which last Monday straggled across two blocks outside London’s 100 Club in Oxford Street, waiting for the Punk Rock Festival to start, was indisputable evidence that a new decade in rock is about to begin. Two 18-year-olds from Salisbury were at the front of the queue. ‘I’ve been waiting for something to identify with,’ says Gareth, hopping up and down. ‘There’s been nothing for years. I just want to be involved.’
Caroline Coon, Melody Maker, October 1976
Before ‘God Save the Queen’, pop was recreational, occasionally a calling; afterwards, it was a religion. I was in Notting Hill’s Record and Tape Exchange one day in 1978 and there were two punk girls at the counter, one flustered and giggling. ‘God, it’s so embarrassing,’ she said as she flogged her copy of Eddie and the Hot Rods’ Life on the Line. And this is Eddie and the Hot Rods we’re talking about, not Yes or Donny Osmond. Barbers were full of longhairs getting five, six, seven years’ growth cut back to nothing. By 1980 no man in Britain had long hair, not even Roy Harper.1 And, like a new religion, pop after punk had no singular vision; it split into more factions than ever before. Punks versus Teds, punks versus skins; there were street punks with their orthodox icons like the safety pin and the sacred leather jacket, and anarcho punks, vegan, almost Lutheran, closer to the hippies than they cared to admit.
Pop had been a dirty word since the late sixties and was still a dirty word in ’77 – it would remain one for a few years hence. No one in a punk group was flying the flag for Abba, David Soul or Smokie. Although these were the names that dominated the UK chart in 1977, they just weren’t as despised as Pink Floyd, Rod Stewart or (most of all) the Stones. Punk rock2 was there to overthrow classic rock, the development of a stratospheric scene of global celebrity which had arrived at the end of the sixties, post-Monterey, and grown throughout the seventies – the ex-Beatles were in this zone, joined by other Britons like Rod Stewart and Elton John as well as the upper echelons of the Laurel Canyon crowd. It was a bit like a retirement home, a bit like the Hotel California the Eagles sang about, and its lack of creative impulse was maddening.
Exactly how punk rock could end classic rock’s dominance wasn’t clear. Punk was as much about what wasn’t there as what was. Stewart Home described it as ‘a receding object; as one approaches, it dis appears’. It was stripped of most Americanisms; it was also stripped of pretty much all black influence. Prog and metal may have been the result of a blues/rock fusion, a coming together of the international underclass, but punk rock disowned it all – it was wrapped up in what the new generation saw as rock’s collective failure. Instead, it found its own underclass and kindred musical spirit in Jamaica and in West London’s immigrant population.
The Clash were largely to blame for punk’s Maoist ‘year zero’ take on pop history. A few older acts – the Velvet Underground, Stooges, Flamin’ Groovies – were permissible, but even a sonic reducer like Neil Young was locked out of the love-in, presumabl
y on the grounds of his long hair. Soon, even the pub-rock R&B acts who paved the way for punk, like Eddie and the Hot Rods, were expelled from the party – they wore flares. ‘Like trousers, like brain,’ said Strummer. This was pop’s own Cultural Revolution – the present was all that mattered. ‘No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977,’ sang Strummer. By 1978 there were no Sex Pistols either, which left the Clash as the punk movement’s unelected figureheads.3
Clearly the Clash loved the USA, and loved rock ’n’ roll. Strummer’s insistence on purity of line was naively genuine, as was the openness of his politics and his sympathy with underdogs – the body-popping kids of the Bronx, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, the kids who bought independent singles in the Rough Trade shop. But eventually their contradictions grew more tiresome, and when Strummer decided to get back to basics one more time, kicking over the statues with a green mohican and an album called Cut the Crap in 1985, everyone winced.
The Damned were much more fun than the Clash: Dave Vanian dressed like a vampire, Captain Sensible was permanently pissed and wore granny specs, while Rat Scabies was the loon drummer to beat them all. They were great, and they didn’t take themselves remotely seriously. The problem with this was that, despite releasing a run of super-fast, super-excitable 45s (‘New Rose’, ‘Neat Neat Neat’, ‘Stretcher Case Baby’, ‘Problem Child’, ‘Don’t Cry Wolf’), nobody else took them seriously either; none of their singles charted, and they split in ’77 before re-forming in ’79 to finally chart with ‘Love Song’ (UK no. 20) and the Farfisa-led bubblegum of ‘Smash It Up’ (UK no. 35). The Damned were also one of the few groups who dared to reference the past – they tried to get Syd Barrett to produce their second album, Music for Pleasure, but had to settle for another Floyd member, Nick Mason.
British punk’s most significant legacy is DIY. The best thing to come from the year-zero mentality, DIY seized the means of production, initially with the xeroxed Sniffin’ Glue, Mark Perry’s fanzine that bypassed the music press to deliver the news from punk’s London frontline.4 Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP, recorded with producer Martin Hannett for the borrowed sum of £500 and released on their own New Hormones label in January ’77, was the green light – for the first time in British pop, you could ignore the major labels and not worry about losing the roof over your head if the record didn’t sell.
