Life After Dark

by Dave Haslam

  Viv Albertine, later of the Slits (Don Letts would briefly manage the band), was working at the beginning of December 1975 at Dingwalls, and dating Mick Jones of the Clash. She’d made friends with Rory Johnston, who told her that this band called the Sex Pistols managed by his mate Malcolm were playing at the Chelsea School of Art. ‘They were people like me,’ she told me just before the publication of her book Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. ‘They were in their ordinary north London clothes lounging about like all the north London boys I was at school with. There was no being what you’re not. And Johnny Rotten leaning on the microphone, talking and snarling.’

  Even though she says it’s a ‘corny’ thing to admit, it was seeing the Sex Pistols that inspired a first jump into music. She believes there was something about that band, and that time, that gave birth to a sense of empowerment. Johnny stood out. ‘Watching him, I could make that mental leap for the first time and imagine myself, how someone who couldn’t really play or do anything, could be onstage. That I could just be myself.’

  Four days after appearing at the Chelsea School of Art, the Sex Pistols played at Ravensbourne College, Chislehurst, Kent. This was the first Sex Pistols gig witnessed by eighteen-year-old Susan Ballion, who would later make her onstage debut at the 100 Club, take part in the infamous teatime Bill Grundy TV broadcast and release ten Top Thirty albums fronting Siouxsie and the Banshees. In 1975 Siouxsie was living in Bromley, another satellite town three miles from the gig in Chislehurst. She considered Bromley dull and conformist and hung out with a few artistic, exhibitionist types who felt the same way about their home town. Her little crew, which included Simon Barker, Berlin (real name Bertie Marshall) and Steve Spunker (aka Steve Severin), became known as the Bromley Contingent and would help shape and define punk – in its look, at least. On at least one occasion the Sex Pistols went over to Bromley to party at Berlin’s house. He lived just two doors down from where Bowie had grown up and was a devotee of amphetamine sulphate. Speed was favoured by lots of people on that scene, including Johnny Rotten: ‘I loved the stuff. I’m normally a very slow person and it made me more intense. I’m naturally paranoid and it made me feel better.’ In retrospect, though, he added a caveat: ‘You get bored with these things, the thrill wears off.’

  Speed was an integral part of Northern Soul in this same period – a scene, like punk, based on three-minute, fast-paced singles. In 1976 Britain generally was experiencing new highs in the amount of drug use. Amyl nitrate was new, barbiturate use was increasing, marijuana and cannabis were now endemic in youth culture, and it wasn’t just the hippies who were using pot and acid in 1975. John Lydon: ‘We used to take acid at Louise’s. It heightens the enjoyment.’

  Early punk life in London hadn’t revolved around a punk club, or regular venue, but for some the gap was filled by lesbian and gay clubs like Louise’s on Poland Street. They were discreet, transgressive – places the first punks could go without attracting hostility. This link between gay venues and early punks would also be evident when the scene spiralled off into other cities. The Hosteria, where some of Birmingham’s first punks hung out, was a wine bar with a gay clientele. In Manchester, a popular meeting spot for punks was the Ranch on Dale Street, a small basement room in Foo Foo’s Palace, a club owned and run by the transvestite performer Foo Foo Lammar.

  Once through the red door at Louise’s, it was £3 to become a member, and Madame Louise was happy to welcome Siouxsie and the Bromley Contingent, the Pistols and their friends, and Steve Strange too. There was a dancefloor downstairs where a DJ played Diana Ross, Frank Sinatra and Bryan Ferry records. As with similar venues, licensing laws required food had to be served if patrons wanted to order alcohol. So, in slightly surreal fashion, Siouxsie and Johnny Rotten would sit down in the club with a vodka and orange and a paper plate of Spam and gherkins. On acid.

  Meanwhile, struggling to find ways of gaining some profile and finding a label to release the Sex Pistols, McLaren’s strategy of avoiding pub rock was trimmed and the band’s name began appearing on adverts alongside pub-rock bands and at established venues. When the band supported Eddie & the Hot Rods at the Marquee on 12 February 1976, the Hot Rods claimed the Pistols had smashed up their gear and attacked their fans. The Marquee, unimpressed by the Pistols, never invited them back.

  One advantage of playing established venues was that music journalists were more likely to attend. Neil Spencer was there at the Marquee, reporting for NME. He spoke to the Pistols afterwards and they gave him the classic quote: ‘We’re not into music, we’re into chaos.’ He reported that no one asked for an encore but they did one anyway. ‘The Pistols looked completely unique,’ he later recalled. ‘Big mohair sweaters and spiky hair – absolutely nobody else looked like that. People were shouting abuse but what was novel was that the band screamed right back.’

  Eight days later the Pistols supported Screaming Lord Sutch at the College of Art in High Wycombe; this was the show Ron Watts promoted, which led to their first 100 Club booking. Also in the High Wycombe audience were those two soon-to-be-Buzzcocks, Howard Trafford and Peter McNeish, and a former schoolmate of Howard’s, Richard Boon (later Buzzcocks’ manager) who was studying art at the University of Reading. When I interviewed him recently, Richard explained to me how the Sex Pistols came to his attention: ‘Howard rang me and said, “Did you read that?” and I said, “Don’t they sound interesting?”’

  The three went to the High Wycombe show and then on to see them play in Welwyn the following day. ‘Johnny was just utterly convincing in a remarkable way as a performer, like he almost hated performing, he hated the audience,’ says Richard. ‘There was a bunch of lads who sat across the front sneering and waving at their mates at the back and Johnny ran along the stage and tousled their hair at which point their mates at the back ran forward and pulled Johnny off the stage; there was a big scrum. Johnny crawled out and made his way back to the stage and said, “Well, that was no fun,” and then they played “No Fun”. It was astonishing and inspirational.’

  You instantly wanted to become producers of culture rather than just consumers?

  ‘Yes, it was a “let’s do it” moment.’

  Richard’s first contribution to the ongoing activity was to set up a gig for the Sex Pistols at Reading University in a painting studio in the art department where he was studying. He had a very sympathetic tutor who said he’d consider the event a piece of work Richard could include in his ongoing assessed studies. The performance in May 1976 was witnessed by twenty art students.

  The New York bands were gaining visibility; in April 1976 the Ramones released their debut album. The same month, the Sex Pistols were failing to fill a small, sleazy strip club called El Paradiso, on Brewer Street in London, a gig (dis) organised by Malcolm and Nils Stevenson. ‘Nils was on the door and he was literally letting everyone in and shouting all these promises about girls, girls, strippers,’ says Alan Jones. ‘And all these people were getting thrown in through the door; he would take any money from anybody, so the audience was a mixture of punks and this very straight raincoat brigade who thought they were there to see some hot action.’

  The Pistols continued playing a number of support slots, especially for Doctors of Madness, including two in the Northeast, at Middlesbrough Town Hall and Northallerton Sayers club. At the beginning of April 1976, the 101ers headlined the Nashville, the Pistols supported – and made an immediate impression on Joe Strummer. ‘They were light years ahead of us,’ he said later. When, after a gig the 101ers played at the Golden Lion on Fulham Road, Strummer was approached by Bernie Rhodes and Keith Levene and invited to meet a new band in the same orbit as the Sex Pistols, with a view to becoming the frontman, he accepted. The 101ers split after one last gig and within six weeks the new band, the Clash, were playing live. Having spent nine months at the Elgin playing Chuck Berry cover versions, Joe was now sporting a ‘Chuck Berry is Dead’ T-shirt.

  Raw public violence
was a feature of the mid-70s: trains were wrecked by football fans on the way to games on a Saturday afternoon, and provocative National Front marches often ended in battles between marchers and opponents, or between opponents and the police. The sorry history of racist attacks is described in my 2005 book Not Abba, as are the riots at the Notting Hill Carnival, political extremism, confrontations between police and pickets, and punk and anti-punk violence. One Tuesday at the 100 Club in June 1976 Sid Vicious got into a row with NME journalist Nick Kent, who’d worked with Malcolm when the Pistols were first coming together but had fallen out of favour, particularly with John Lydon. Sid was walking past him, each time accidentally on purpose kicking his shins. When Nick Kent challenged him, Sid pulled out a bike chain and slashed at his head with it, drawing blood. Ron Watts jumped in and took Sid away.

  Punk was continuing to sow seeds through the summer of 1976. On the day of her nineteenth birthday, 3 July 1976, Marianne Elliott-Said saw the Sex Pistols play at the Pier Pavilion in Hastings and the experience inspired her to become Poly Styrene and form X-Ray Spex. The following night in Sheffield approximately fifty people gathered to see the Pistols play in a pub on the corner of Snig Hill and Bank Street called the Black Swan (nicknamed the Mucky Duck by regulars and locals). On this occasion the Pistols were supported by the Clash (their first live appearance).

  Less than three weeks after Hastings and Sheffield, the Sex Pistols returned to Manchester for a second gig at the Free Trade Hall, the first proper Buzzcocks gig. One of the people energised by the Sex Pistols was Tony Wilson, who arranged for the band to premiere their ‘Anarchy in the UK’ single on their debut TV appearance on his Granada TV show So It Goes. The Pistols were up in the Granada TV region a few times in that period, including at the Lodestar Blackburn (18 August) and at Quaintways in Chester (13 September). Quaintways was a venue on two floors, occasionally with bands, but was mostly a standard disco, with big weekends of excessive barley wine, fast-flowing Watneys Red Barrel and lots of ‘Get Up and Boogie’.

  By this time the Sex Pistols had begun to attract the attention of one or two individuals at major record labels including Polydor and EMI. When the 100 Club hosted the two-day punk festival in mid-September, which included the Pistols on the Monday and the Damned and Buzzcocks on the Tuesday, Richard Boon could sense there was a commercial imperative at work for Malcolm. ‘It was a kind of shop-floor window for things that hadn’t yet been produced.’

  Those in attendance included Gaye Advert, Chrissie Hynde and Shane MacGowan. On the Monday Subway Sect made their onstage debut, and the Clash played, with a line-up that no longer included Keith Levene. On the second night Sid Vicious was carted off to Ashford Remand Centre. He still wasn’t a Sex Pistol at the time, although the day before he’d performed with Siouxsie Sioux and he’d also rehearsed intermittently in a band alongside Viv Albertine through the middle of 1976. The band in question, the Flowers of Romance, never performed, or even wrote a song.

  The profile of the Sex Pistols was on the rise. On 8 October they signed to EMI, a week later the Sun devoted a double-page spread to punk, and then BBC One’s news magazine Nationwide picked up on the new music phenomenon. It was then that the Sex Pistols played their one and only gig in Liverpool, and it came courtesy of Roger Eagle.

  By the beginning of 1976 Roger knew his time running shows at the Stadium were numbered, and was looking for a next move. There were dead spaces in city centres nationwide from Dean Street in Soho to Broad Street in Birmingham; acres and acres of derelict warehouses and workshops, the unloved debris of postindustrial Britain. You might find car repair workshops in old railway arches, but most of the dead spaces were usually only populated, if at all, by young and/or ex-hippy, pre-punk enterprises.

  In Liverpool Roger Eagle had dealings with the road manager of the band Deaf School, Ken Testi. Deaf School rehearsed on Mathew Street in a rambling old building known as the Liverpool School of Dream, Drama and Pun, inhabited by stall-holders and drop-outs. Ex-art college student Bill Drummond had a workshop underneath the building. Jayne Casey had a vintage clothes store on an upper floor. Close by on Mathew Street, the Cavern had closed and, at that time, there was no Beatles industry wooing the tourists. There were no tourists.

  Roger and Ken got together to create Eric’s over the road from the School of Dream etc., in a building belonging to one-time owner of the Cavern, Roy Adams, who had split the club into two, with a disco called Gatsby’s on the ground floor accessed from Victoria Street, and the rock club Revolution accessed from Mathew Street. Roger and Ken had a name and an aim. The name, Eric’s, was supposed to be a grumpy piss-take of the kind of names other club operators thought gave premises glamour: Annabel’s or Sinatra’s or, indeed, Gatsby’s. In contrast to the burgeoning number of chrome and sticky-carpeted discotheques, the aim at Eric’s was to present live music, with the hope they could nurture a curious, creative audience for new or outsider music, with Roger Eagle booking the bands. Then a third person came on board: Pete Fulwell.

  As any active promoter would, Roger talked up his project to people. One day he chanced upon Jayne Casey at her stall and thrust some invites in her hand. Jayne had worked in a few places earlier in her life, among them the hairdressing salon Cut Above the Rest. She had a little gang of friends, including Holly Johnson, Paul Rutherford and Pete Burns. In various ways they looked outlandish (Jayne shaved her head, Holly wore red tights, Pete wore high heels) and when they went into town they generally attracted hostility and very few clubs welcomed them. But here was Roger turning up with a bunch of tickets for the first night. ‘We couldn’t get into clubs. Nobody would let us in,’ says Jayne. ‘A guy inviting us into his club was just amazing; somebody wanted us in a club!’

  The first few gigs at Eric’s were in the part of the building housing Gatsby’s, the disco, so that’s where the Runaways, the Stranglers and the Sex Pistols all played. The Sex Pistols at Gatsby’s/Eric’s on 15 October 1976 was a low-key event with a tiny unimpressed audience which, on this occasion, left no impression, and certainly lacked the incendiary impact of the Manchester shows. A few days later the Eric’s team took possession of the former Revolution in the basement space, decorated it with Roger’s favourite colours (red and black) and gave Eric’s a permanent home. The Stadium, which had hosted big gigs – among them a number of avant-garde and progressive acts – went back to hosting boxing bouts after Roger Eagle moved on. Eric’s, meanwhile, would last three and a half years, and would become so loved in Liverpool that its closure precipitated a march through the city centre.

  Eric’s wasn’t specifically conceived as a punk venue but its size and situation perfectly fitted the ethos of the new emerging scene. The programming wasn’t exclusively punk either, and Roger’s enthusiasm for reggae was reflected in shows featuring, for example, Dillinger in February 1978 and Tapper Zukie in April the same year. There had been a juke box at the Magic Village and he installed one at Eric’s too, stocked with the records he was passionate about. The Damned weren’t on the juke box, but ‘Goin’ to a Go Go’ by Smokey Robinson and the Miracles was. Mick Hucknall played Eric’s with his band Frantic Elevators (and recorded for the briefly flowering Eric’s label); Hucknall remembers the juke box included ‘A Night in Tunisia’ by Charlie Parker.

  Less than two months after their uncelebrated Liverpool debut, the Sex Pistols rise overground was complete after an appearance on the Today show on 1 December 1976 broadcast at peak family viewing time in the Thames TV region. The show was hosted by the Manchester-born former geologist Bill Grundy and hit tabloid front pages after a barrage of swearing from the Pistols. As a result of this and other sensationalised headlines, shows on the ‘Anarchy’ tour that didn’t happen include those at the Top Rank in Cardiff, Birmingham Town Hall, and the City Hall in Sheffield. In Caerphilly two Labour councillors failed in their attempt to ban the concert, but Christians and other concerned citizens picketed the venue (the Castle Cinema) and were said to exceed in number
those who had paid to see the show; one of the attendees, however, was local boy Stephen Harrington, who would one day be better known as Steve Strange. The Lord Provost in Scotland banned the Sex Pistols, declaring, so legend has it, ‘We have enough hooligans of our own in Glasgow without importing them from south of the border.’

  Liverpool Council pulled the plug on the Pistols playing at the Stadium on 11 December after a campaign led by Councillor Doreen Jones, who told the Liverpool Echo, ‘This is just the sort of thing from which the public needs to be protected.’ A plan was hatched to put the show on at Eric’s instead, but Roger and his colleagues were given no option but to abandon their plan after intense police pressure.

  Buzzcocks were close to the centre of the growing activity in Manchester, and on 8 November played Band on the Wall, a former pub on the edge of what is now known as the Northern Quarter, which, as we learned in Chapter Two, was a thriving music venue by the 1930s. It was a venue favoured by bands connected with the Music Force collective of musicians and gig organisers in the early 1970s, by which time the platform had gone and a stage had been built. The Buzzcocks gig was reviewed in NME. ‘They’re producing the most significant musical output of any new British rock band,’ the journalist declared. ‘Where they’re going to next is anyone’s guess!’

  Two days later, Buzzcocks played at the Electric Circus, a jump from one of Manchester’s most historic venues to one of the scuzziest. Manchester’s underground paper Grass Eye had organised nights in the early 1970s under the banner ‘Electric Circus’ at the Magic Village and Mr Smiths (booking the likes of Van der Graaf Generator and the Groundhogs). This new Electric Circus was at the former Palladium variety club in Collyhurst and was run by progressive rock fans Allan Robinson and Graham Brooks as ‘Manchester’s latest and greatest rock venue’ (or so it said on the logo on their letterhead).