Pop was old, boring and, above all, expensive. Young people who wanted to make a noise could not afford the couture costumes, the overblown banks of keyboards they saw Rick Wakeman and Keith Emerson playing, and the ostentatious twin-necked electric guitars. No one had the money: unemployment was at a post-war high thanks to the economic recession of 1973–1975. They could not afford the gongs and tubular bells favoured by Queen’s drummer Roger Taylor, nor could they buy (or did they want) the lights, smoke machines and other pyrotechnics that most of the bands they saw on TV or in concert employed. Punk was back-to-basics music that anybody could get involved in, played on cheap, inherited or (very often) stolen equipment. Punk looked for inspiration to the raw energy of the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop and the Ramones. It was a reaction against commercialism, against singles charts filled with novelty records. Punk rejected fashion and conformity, although that, in itself, became a fashion statement of sorts. Objectified and vilified in the media, punk’s halcyon days did not last long and the ‘movement’ (such as it was) quickly became commercialised, yet the reverberations are still being felt today.
‘Seeing the Sex Pistols live was just a wake-up call,’ says Tom Robinson. ‘I didn’t like it at the time; it was against everything that I believed about music, about how you had to be respectful to the audience and play in tune, sing in tune, and play your nice, melodic songs in time. But it was clear: it telegraphed a message that things were changing and it was time to wake up and smell the coffee.’
It seemed that wherever the Pistols played (when they were allowed to play, that is: many early shows were cancelled by local councils afraid of this new punk rock corrupting the local youth), they changed lives. Paul Rutherford explains:
We used to go to Eric’s, to watch Liverpool bands like The Deaf School. Then the Sex Pistols played and we went to see that gig and that was just amazing. I went with Pete Burns, Lynne his wife, Jayne Casey, and it was from there that the punk thing really took off. I was asked if I could sing. Budgie happened to be the drummer in this group [the Spitfire Boys]; they just said “come along, have a sing song with us” and that was it. That was the lead-in for me. I was just a teenage kid, just 17. I didn’t think I could be a musician until punk came along. The punk thing made it easy: it gave you the power to try these things you’d never tried before; to stand on a stage, to pick up an instrument or attempt to sing … you didn’t have to be good. That was how you discovered that you had an innate sense for making music.’
Tom Robinson found that being gay wasn’t an issue in the world of punk rock:
It was very gender-blurred and sexuality-blurred; everything was up for grabs … After about 1979 punk rock became like a uniform, where you had to have a Mohican haircut, you had to have a leather jacket, you had to have bondage strides, chains and dog collars around your neck, but in 1976 when I saw the Sex Pistols a lot of the audience were wearing ordinary clothes. The people who were obviously ‘punk’ were making their own uniforms … it was inventive: lots of ripped clothes, spattered with paint. It was much more DIY then, and along with the variety of clothes there was a variety of attitudes.
Handbag, described as ‘Britain’s first openly gay rock group,’ began playing together during the glam rock boom, but found more acceptance as part of the capital’s burgeoning punk scene. The trio built a steady following, playing a mix of punk gigs and Gay Lib benefits. ‘Handbag came together with my coming out,’ Paul Southwell, Handbag’s bassist, singer and chief songwriter recalls:
I moved to London in 1971 when I was 20 and I came out. I joined the London gay scene and took to it like a duck to water! In 1971 the big thing was Gay Liberation, with Gay Lib dances, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and that type of thing. We formed Handbag at about the same time. We didn’t form Handbag as an out gay band, it’s just that because we came out that was the tag we got. We didn’t form Handbag to say anything politically or break any stereotypes down, it just so happened that it all came together. It just seemed logical; there was nobody else. We did lots of gigs. Denis Lemon and Gay News got behind us and we got some decent press. I don’t know if it actually helped or hindered us in retrospect, but we did loads of gigs and then we got signed by Jet Records.
David Arden had discovered the trio – Southwell, Dave Jenkins and Alan Jordan – playing at London’s Speakeasy and signed them to his father Don’s company, home to the Electric Light Orchestra and Ozzy Osbourne (David’s brother-in-law), in 1975. ‘Everybody was trying to sign us,’ says Paul, ‘but we went with Don Arden, which was the worst thing we could have done. Even then he had a reputation for being a bastard! But they were offering nice things and we wanted to believe that they were nice people; we were a bit naïve really!’ Their record label certainly wanted to make the most of the gay tag. ‘Once upon a time you couldn’t call a person black, but now they call themselves black people,’ David Arden told Beat Instrumental magazine. ‘Handbag are, well, queers! Queens! Call them homosexuals and they’d hit you with their handbags! Handbag are 100 percent gay. They are three “chaps” who look fabulous, whose music is outrageous … right out in the open. They slightly resemble Cockney Rebel and Roxy Music and they play all the right places, like the Gay Lib balls’.2 While it’s certainly true that both Roxy Music and Steve Harley’s Cockney Rebel made the most of glam’s camp aesthetic for their initial releases, by 1975 both bands had eschewed this for a more traditional rock look. Arden was looking backwards whilst everyone else was racing off in to the future. Southwell, thanks to his close association with the Gay Liberation Front, was becoming more and more political, and he wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. Playing what Paul described as ‘intelligent New Wave,’ Handbag recorded an album for Jet, but the company dropped them and the record remains unreleased to this day.
‘That was really disappointing,’ Southwell notes:
One minute you’re being told that you’re going to be launched and that you’re going to be a star, and then suddenly it’s “you’ve lost all your songs, we’re not going to release you, goodbye!” We were back to square one. That put us back another two years, because to write an album, to actually get 10 or 15 songs together takes ages. It was incredibly disappointing. If Jet had gone with Handbag and put that album out there would have been so much publicity that even if it only sold 5,000 copies it still would have broken ground. Why go to all that trouble, spend all that money and then do nothing? I tried to find out why they wouldn’t do it, but of course nobody would ever tell me. You would hear rumours, whispers, but I never found out why they wouldn’t put it out.
Several venues refused to book the band because they were unashamedly gay. ‘The initial idea was just to be outrageous,’ says Southwell. ‘We were kids; we were kind of punks if you will, and we just wanted to be a bit outrageous. We’d seen The Rocky Horror Show which had just opened in London, and thought, “oh, that’s interesting,” and we began to dress outrageously at gigs and of course that got us more attention and it also gained us some notoriety, which was a good thing and a bad thing because a lot of places wouldn’t have us. A lot of venues didn’t want to know’. Back in America another group, Mickey’s 7, had also been inspired by The Rocky Horror Show, issuing Rocket to Stardom (which was marketed as ‘the first gay sex rock LP’) in 1975. The five members of the band were pictured on the cover flying through the air on a giant phallus. Mickey had his own fan club which promised, among other delights, ‘intimate fotos and movies’ for your bucks: the 7 in their name stood for seven inches …
Ronnie Scott’s, a club better known for live jazz but which was looking to diversify, turned down a booking from Handbag because their manager, Jennifer Bell, was female. ‘That’s what it was like then. Eventually we did get a gig at Ronnie Scott’s, so we did eventually break the doors down.’ They played London’s regular punk venues: the Roxy, Dingwalls, the Marquee and the Hope and Anchor, as well as hundreds of other paid gigs and just about every benefit they were asked to. Handbag ente
rtained the inmates at HMP Wandsworth on two occasions; in 1975 they became the first out-gay band ever to perform in a British prison.
‘I don’t know if I ever really saw us as punk, but once the Sex Pistols had taken over the world if you weren’t punk then you didn’t get any work. So Handbag had to be punk, and that’s when we started playing the Roxy and all the punk venues.’
Then, in 1978, an album appeared. ‘That had nothing to do with me,’ Southwell laughs. ‘We’d signed to Jet, we’d done the album, we’d been released from the contract and lost everything, then about two years later we got another offer of a recording contract with a company called Circle International, which was owned by a guy called Reg McLean.’ McLean also ran another label, Safari Records (a different company to the one that later signed Toyah and Wayne County and the Electric Chairs) and a publishing company, Voyage Songs. ‘Reg said, “I’ve got a record label, would you like to do an album for me?” We didn’t sign anything … and then suddenly this record came out in Italy! It should have been called Handbag: Snatchin’, but it came out as Snatchin’ by Handbag, they got it wrong … and they were the demos. They weren’t supposed to be released … but anyway it came out and then, lo and behold, about a year later it was re-released under the title The Aggressive Style Punk Rock – punk had taken over the world, and the Italians must have thought, “this is a bit punky, we’ll market this”! I would never have let that go out, with someone on the cover with a swastika on his face, but I had no control over it.’
Feeling that the band’s name was holding them back, Handbag became Dino, Daz and the Machine, and continued to play the occasional benefit before splitting after five years at the coalface. ‘We did about half a dozen gigs as Dino, Daz and the Machine,’ Southwell explains, ‘And then Dave and I did a handful of solo gigs at places like the Gay’s the Word bookshop as a duo just to make some money … then it slowly faded out’. Southwell donated two Handbag songs to be used on the soundtrack for a movie, David is Homosexual, and he issued a self-financed solo EP, but with little promotion and even less availability (you could buy a copy from Gay’s the Word or from Paul himself) it, too, went nowhere. ‘By this time it was the early 1980s,’ says Paul ruefully. ‘I was coming up to 30 … Tom Robinson had had a hit, loads of my contemporaries were making money, and we weren’t … so I decided to call it a day.’ Southwell, now 65, now lives with his husband in Australia. Although officially retired, he still plays bass and sings with his current band, Timeslider. ‘Looking back, I don’t suppose that any of the gay songs would have been hits,’ he says. ‘However, we shall never know. I do think that Handbag did break down some barriers and I do think that we would have been remembered as the first gay rock band had they had the guts to launch us. But we shall never know. It might have just died a death like Jobriath. I think one of the problems was that because we were gay, gay people were coming to see us expecting us to play disco music. We didn’t; we weren’t really playing the right kind of music for a gay audience.’
Handbag may have been the only gay punk band in London at the time, but several other acts had LGBT members in their ranks, some out, some of them stubbornly closeted. Still gigging today, Chelsea were one of the many ‘also-rans’ of the British punk scene, never quite hitting the big time but building up a respectable following which has continued to support them for the last 40 years. Formed in August 1976 after former gay porn actor Gene October placed an advert in Melody Maker, they made their live debut two months later, supporting Throbbing Gristle (led by the genderfluid Genesis P-Orridge) under the name LSD. That incarnation didn’t last out the year, but October’s band mates went on to form Generation X, guitarist William Broad changing his name to Billy Idol in the process. Gene put together a new line-up, and convinced René Albert, the manager of Chaguaramas (better known as shagger-amas), a gay club in London’s Covent Garden, to convert the venue into the capital’s first live punk rock venue, The Roxy. Ironically, the headline band on the opening night was Generation X. The Roxy quickly became a favourite haunt of the city’s punk and new wave musicians and fans. Chelsea made their recording debut in 1977, issuing two singles on the independent Step Forward label; their eponymous album followed in 1979. Kit Lambert, formerly co-manager of the Who, produced their third single, ‘Urban Kids’. Henry Rollins, who cited October as an early influence, wrote about his less-than-friendly encounters with his idol in his 2004 book Get In the Van. Chelsea’s line-up has changed constantly over the years, with October the band’s only permanent member.
Paul Southwell and Handbag may have been denied the chance of fame, but Pete Shelley would become the face of LGBT punk as the country’s first out-bisexual rock star. Shelley met Howard Devoto at Bolton Institute of Technology in autumn 1975 after Devoto advertised for like-minded musicians to join him in a new group which became the Buzzcocks (from the phrase ‘it’s the buzz, cock!’) The band played their first gig in July 1976 at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall; a few weeks before the pair had been the promoters of the Sex Pistols’ epoch-defining but poorly attended gig at the same venue. Rather fittingly, this was the venue that had witnessed the newly electrified Bob Dylan being called ‘Judas’ by a disgruntled folk music fan. The Buzzcocks’ debut release, the Spiral Scratch EP, was issued in early 1977, but singer Devoto left immediately afterwards, forming the band Magazine. Shelley stepped up as main vocalist and he and his cohorts signed to United Artists, issuing ‘Orgasm Addict’ as their debut major label release. Openly bisexual, (the single was reviewed in Gay News in November 1977, with the writer making reference to Shelley’s sexuality), he saw punk as a leveller. ‘It’s a climate where people are accepting that everybody’s different,’ he told Gay News. ‘Everyone wants to express themselves in that way that suits them best. And they are questioning things like the family and love.’3
The punk scene had rubbed along with London’s LGBT crowd since its inception. SEX, the shop run by soon-to-be Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren (the group’s name was dreamed up by McLaren to help promote the boutique), sold fetish and bondage wear to London’s gay rubber and leather scene for years before it became the favoured hangout of Chrissie Hynde (who also worked the cash register), Adam Ant, Siouxsie Sioux and the rest. Before the Roxy there were no ‘punk’ clubs for the bands to play, but haunts such as the predominantly lesbian Louise’s in Soho provided an early home for Siouxsie, the Sex Pistols and members of the Clash and the Slits. Boy George was a regular at Louise’s, often joined by the openly bisexual Steve Strange; the pair – disaffected punks still in their teens who left the scene when they became sick of being gobbed on – would go on to reign supreme at the Blitz Club and introduce the world to the New Romantics. Strange (born Steven John Harrington on 28 May 1959 in Caerphilly, South Wales) began his performing career in the Malcolm McLaren-managed punk band the Moors Murderers, before forming Visage with members of the Rich Kids and Magazine. He and fellow Visage member Rusty Egan began organising ‘Bowie nights’ at Billy’s, a subterranean nightclub in Soho, before moving to the Blitz in Covent Garden in 1979, where the soundtrack was a mix of glam rock, punk and electronica – and you were not coming in unless Steve liked the look of you. Many of the Blitz Kids formed their own bands, including Boy George, Steve Strange, Tony James (London SS, Chelsea, Generation X and Sigue Sigue Sputnik amongst others), Martin Degville (Sigue Sigue Sputnik), Jeremy Healy (Haysi Fantayzee) and all of the founding members of Spandau Ballet. Prior to scoring several chart hits with Visage, Strange and several other Blitz Kids (sadly not George) appeared in the iconic video for David Bowie’s Number One hit ‘Ashes to Ashes’.
London’s gay and lesbian pub and club scene provided LGBT musicians with places to both perform and meet like-minded artists. The Coleherne, regular haunt of Tom Robinson and Paul Southwell, was also a favourite of Faebhean Kwest, guitarist with the London-based punk band Raped: ‘I go to the Coleherne a lot but I’m bisexual and being bisexual means you have a 100 percent pick
of people to take home,’ he told Gay News.4 Raped, who issued the EP Pretty Paedophiles, courted a gay image but despite songs detailing their experiences on the capital’s gay scene, the group didn’t go down well with LGBT audiences or with feminists, who objected to the name. In 1979 the band morphed into the more acceptable Cuddly Toys; their first single, ‘Madman’ was a cover of a song written by David Bowie and Marc Bolan shortly before Bolan’s death in September 1977. Originating in Hull, and named after a William S. Burroughs novel, Dead Fingers Talk were led by a singer glorifying in the ridiculous name Bobo Phoenix, but born the slightly more prosaic Robert Eunson. Legend has it that the moniker was gifted to Rob by Genesis P-Orridge when they were both at Hull University. Dead Fingers Talk’s regular live set featured the songs ‘Nobody Loves You When You’re Old And Gay’, ‘Can’t Think Straight’ and ‘Harry’, the tale of a particularly vicious attack on a gay man with a pair of garden shears which, guitarist Jeff Parsons explains, was ‘like a piece of theatre. It was a comment on the anti-gay attitude which we didn’t understand or agree with. Our way to tackle it was to satirise it. But a lot of people took it the wrong way. We had a good gay following who understood it but a lot of writers and audience thought we were advocating queer-bashing.’5
Raped and Dead Fingers Talk’s sets were full of anger and violence, but Pete Shelley’s songs were spiky, honest and usually sexually ambiguous; the band’s biggest hit, ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)’, was purposefully, pointedly non-gender-specific (the earlier ‘Love You More’ was about a girl Shelley fell for who worked in Woolworth’s). In February 1978, he announced that he was working on a gay opera which ‘will last about 12 hours’6 When the band split in 1981 after three Top 30 albums and 10 hit singles (they would reform in 1989), Shelley embarked on a solo career, issuing the completely unambiguous single ‘Homosapien’ which, of course, was banned by the BBC for containing an ‘explicit reference to gay sex’.
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