Going to Sea in a Sieve: The Autobiography (20 page)

What nagged at me in the coming days though was what fun it would actually be to write about records, even for a flimsy 10p supplement that would only be circulated among the queue up at the Marquee Club. For a fact I could write better than Mark Perry, and even he acknowledged that I had a better record collection than anyone else we knew. It was just that I hadn’t got a clue what was really going on, or to be more precise, what a global avalanche Mark and a tiny collection of like-minded misfits were about to call down.

I was given a sudden, shocking and extraordinary crash course in these new ideas barely three weeks later when the Sex Pistols played, or rather,
attacked
the Screen on the Green cinema in far-off Islington. By this time Mark had a second edition of his fanzine out and because of the speed with which this new phenomenon was gathering pace, there was to be no room this time for anything like previously established acts in its revolutionary pages. Seeing the jagged and apocalyptic fashions in the crowd that night, feeling that cackle in the air signalling everything was about to be turned on its head and, most of all, hearing the smashing, crashing anti-matter noise of the groups on the bill – Pistols, Clash, Buzzcocks – suddenly
Sniffin’ Glue
made absolute perfect sense. I’m still not sure whether Mark was a maverick genius ahead of the curve or had simply lucked into a sensation that brilliantly dovetailed with his meagre methods and budget, but what was very clear was that his stark, cheap and ugly creation fitted this cultural explosion better than any copy of the
NME
. It was Mark Perry, not Nick Kent, that was now surfing the zeitgeist. It’s always the quiet ones, eh?

The whole history of punk rock in Britain has since become so mythologized and romanced that, when I try and tell people who weren’t even born in 1976 what it was like to live through and how it affected the country, they invariably dispute it and inform me that I am wrong in recalling even my own thoughts and emotions.

Chroniclers and scholars of the period would have you believe that punk was some sort of bomb that went off to wake up the nation. They tend to kaleidoscope everything that happened over almost three years into a series of seismic weekends where the nation trembled before the voice of youth reborn. Well, don’t you believe it. If any kind of violent imagery might be invoked then I would suggest rather than a bomb, it should be a gas that slowly and invisibly came to creep across the nation, bringing about a very gradual change in fashion, attitudes and art. For a short time it even threatened to be a popular music as well, but punk was always too narrow, too tuneless and hard on the ear to truly find a place in the heart of the charts.

Another entirely bogus piece of received wisdom has it that punk came along to rescue poor old pop music after it had been hijacked by progressive rock bands foisting five-disc concept albums on us all. This is an out-and-out fallacy. I never met a single soul who ever said they were involved with punk because they were tired of their prog rock record collection. Prog rock – never a massive movement anyway – was long over by then and, frankly, it takes an awful lot of juggling with the dates to place groups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes and Jethro Tull at the heart of what was happening in the mainstream of 1976. Instead it was the airless studio-desk-bound tinkerings of acts like Queen, ELO and Abba that chiefly caused those who sought far cheaper thrills to revolt. But nobody wants to hear that. Glossy turns like Queen, ELO and Abba have all long since been given a free pass amid the punk-plot revisionism and now have entire feel-good industries behind them to convince people that their high-end production and corny showbiz styles were as welcome back then as they are aboard the pop nostalgia bus today. For my own part, I can clearly recall just how revolting I found reports that Freddie Mercury had stood onstage at Wembley and, taking a breather from whatever overheated and complex aria Queen were stolidly clanging through, toasted the packed-in peasants with, ‘May you all have champagne for breakfast, darlings!’ How everyone applauded while Freddie drained his glass. It was this, as lovable and retro-gifted as Freddie has become, that rock had bloated into, and it was this growing distance from the lives of all those who paid to be thus patronized that really lit the fuses in a thousand dirty little clubs.

Beyond a general disgruntlement with Moët-swigging, be-leotarded Sun Kings, it had also been a few months since the latest musical genre had been conjured up to distract us all and quite rightly we obsessives were getting hungry for something fresh. Think about it. It had been only
seven years
since Woodstock and yet in that time contemporary music had literally pulled from the air
brand-new
genres such as heavy metal, glam rock, country rock, folk rock, Kraut rock, prog rock, jazz rock, pub rock, fusion, bubblegum, the rebirth of Motown with Marvin and Stevie, funk, P-Funk, the thunderous rise of reggae and dub, the singer-songwriter phenomenon, disco, the computer future courtesy of Kraftwerk, plus whatever it was David Bowie had decided to create and become this week. Not bad for seven years – particularly when you look at the pop decades since. No wonder then, that with no fresh musical innovations since Christmas, we all now professed to be ‘bored’.

‘Bored’ soon became the mantra, but nobody really was. Bored and boring simply existed as the buzz words they always are in new movements, designed to frostily condemn anyone who isn’t onside while, at a sweep, declaring what you are doing, no matter how vague and unfocused, to be new, radical and brave.

A truer description of what was happening was to be found in another popular concept that took flight: the idea of chaos. Chaos soon became employed to describe the methods of punk, but it actually betokens what the ‘movement’ could have collapsed into at any moment – with the result it would simply have become another marginalized music trend.

The chance moment that lifted punk rock out of the fanzines and into history happened on 1 December 1976 when, because the pop band originally booked to appear on Thames Television’s
Today
show had pulled out, the Sex Pistols were asked to step in at the last minute. The resulting notorious, if mumbled, swear-fest acted upon the nation like an anvil dropped on to a greenhouse. I didn’t actually see it. I don’t know where I was, but I didn’t catch up with the Pistolson-TV clip until about 1985. I felt it, however. Suddenly, in the face of the media maelstrom unleashed, there was a rallying point, a cause, a purpose to it all – there was Punk. Only very rarely across the generations does a youth movement get lucky enough that the whole of society comes out against it, and here we were. It was in those few turbulent weeks following the Sex Pistols swearing on TV that entire philosophies were formed about what punk was about, who our targets might be and what we were going to do once we came to power. We were nihilist, anarchist and out of control. Apparently. Groucho Marx had put it best in a song from the 1932 film
Horse Feathers
.

I don’t care what you’ve got to say

It makes no difference anyway

Whatever it is – I’m against it!

Punks became, or were cornered into becoming, political, philosophical and deep. It was a reaction to the government. To unemployment. To apathy. To society. To Teddy boys. To Pink Floyd. To that bloke over there. There wasn’t a reporter’s microphone into which something provocative couldn’t be spouted, all nicely seasoned with the right amount of random invective about any number of institutions. I know that I gave several hollow outbursts to goggle-eyed journos railing against the government or the rich and invoking images of starving pensioners in this so-called land of plenty. I had no idea what I was talking about. I can recall one outburst in which I pretended to feel disgusted that Zandra Rhodes’ latest ‘punk’ dress collection cost thousands of pounds. Seriously, what did I care about haute couture? A year earlier I’d been saying ‘Hello, dear!’ to Robert Forrest of megabucks Brown’s, but expensive frocks seemed typical of something and all parties were happy with my sound bite. The game was afoot.

In every documentary made about punk since 1976 images of the groups and followers are always intercut with the state of the nation at that point – usually union unrest, three-day weeks and London swamped in piles of rubbish and unburied dead. Well, I have no real recollection of that, and not once, not ever, did I hear anyone among us talk about what was happening being a reaction to the political situation. God forbid we should do something about it, like the hippies did in 1968 when rioting broke out in cities all over the world. You certainly won’t find any politics in
Sniffin’ Glue
, nor nine out of ten punk records. Those that do will crowbar in a few slogans, but it’s all a bit perfunctory and second hand. The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’? It’s a rock record, a commercial hard-rock record with lyrics specifically designed to provoke. It may as well have been called ‘Lock Up Your Daughters’. Their first 45, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ is a more honest reflection of what was going on in Johnny Rotten’s head. The song is a naked manifesto for fame at any price.

We were all first and foremost music geeks. Record buyers who simply wanted to get in on the action before it spiralled away. That’s why the targets in period interviews are chiefly other pop artists. Not once did anyone truly let on that we were actually and quite suddenly having the raucous time of our lives. This was the most tremendous fun, but in order to exploit much of the polemic being churned out to explain punk we had to play along and act as though we’d been planning this coup for some time. I think we even convinced ourselves of it. Plus, there always remained the option of when in doubt, pull a face.

Punk had arrived quite literally overnight and the whole nation was talking about it. Whether it would have happened had that group originally booked to appear on the teatime
Today
show not broken their commitment is anyone’s guess. You won’t be surprised to learn that that group was Queen. It really is such a shame I can’t stand the racket they make – I owe them so much.

Street-Fighting Man

T
wo images from the early pre-Pistols days of my life as a punk rocker endure – and both of them are suitably mundane. The first takes place in my oldest friend Stephen Micalef’s bedroom. Steve still lived a couple of doors along at Debnams Rd and his personal lair therein occupied the same tiny space as my sister’s room at number 11. This was the smallest berth in the house, but Steve’s made Sharon’s seem like the interior of the Tardis. Today I suspect Steve’s room would be on one of those TV shows called
Help – I Can’t Throw Anything Away!
in which nobody, not the subjects, the makers or the viewers come away from the project with any dignity. It was however a quite magnificent space where, in terms of importance, his single bed and thin wardrobe seemed to lag way behind piles upon piles of old
Melody Maker
and
Sounds
music weeklies, hundreds of experimental German LPs stacked up into tottering towers, and various chemistry sets, musical instruments, fish tanks and Romanian folk masks. It was in this claustrophobic retreat that he and I had made a batch of laughing gas a few years previously, simply to find out if the stuff was a myth perpetuated by the
Beano
and TV’s campy
Batman
show. The first two attempts to cook up the gas didn’t work, but the third brew sent us straight on to the tiny section of floor space available where we exhausted ourselves in mystifying fits. We later learned it could have killed us, but I must say I have never known such a freaky sensation.

Anyway, Steve had joined forces with Mark Perry on
Sniffin’ Glue
around issue three and his exotic looks, unapologetic long hair and absolutely eccentric attitude to anything approaching conventional thought rather wrong-footed most punks and made him kind of fascinating. I remember calling round one day to find some of this new crowd had already squashed themselves into his bedroom. It must have been September ’76. Somehow there were five of us in there, cheek by jowl and getting on like a house on fire playing tracks by Hawkwind, Amon Düül and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. I could tell these must be part of Mark’s punk mob though, because a couple had very short hair, one a revolting old belted mac that just HAD to be ironic, and another had had a go with some eye make-up. They were Chris, Ray and Dave. Collectively they made up three-quarters of The Damned and amazingly, in a couple of days, they were going to make the very first proper UK punk rock record –
an actual record
– for sale in shops and everything! They seemed as surprised as we were that such an unlikely thing could be about to happen, but naturally any disbelief and joy at the giddy prospect would be keenly hidden to the outside world. Remember, these were soldiers on the front line of a modern music movement and thus they knew exactly what they were doing . . . sort of.

I do however remember the gales of (naturally induced) laughter that afternoon in Steve’s bedroom as all of us thrilled at the sheer liberty that crashing the rock establishment with our little game entailed. Why, The Damned even had some anti-showbiz alter egos on the go. Outside of Steve’s cave, Chris was Rat Scabies, Ray became Captain Sensible and Dave, rather half-heartedly I always thought, merely swapped his surname Letts for Vanian – which meant nothing to most of us. He did though work up a vampire/voodoo shtick in his appearance that both saluted Jay Hawkins and Lord Sutch while prefiguring the coming Goth craze. He still does – and good for Dave.

The other keen memory stems from probably that same week. The punk scene now had about enough groups to stage a festival. Not a full-blown Reading or Glastonbury mind, but a couple of consecutive nights in the bijou 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street. The bill included the Pistols, the Clash, The Damned, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and also Siouxsie and the Banshees – a ramshackle gaggle of a ‘group’ who had only been together about twenty minutes and had just two songs, one of which was a half-hour caterwauling version of the Lord’s Prayer. There was also Stinky Toys from France and the Vibrators (who everyone suspected, but was too scared to point out, seemed to be already in their forties). These two nights of punk were going to be the first proper roll call of who was now on board and who was as yet unaware of the hottest game in town. All present under the low smoky ceiling of the bubbling 100 Club that Monday and Tuesday knew, in terms of sheer happening vibes, that they were the little aniseed right at the centre of London’s cultural gobstopper.