by John Taylor
The world of music that the NME opened up was a revelation. From one week to the next it might be Miles Davis on the cover, or a report from Bowie’s New York concert, or a dispatch on Bob Marley from Jamaica.
For my little alienated self, not connecting at school, not connecting at church anymore, the NME allowed me to feel part of something. Part of a clique, with its own language, which I was learning to speak.
In a book review in the late nineties, the Guardian newspaper would write, “The NME in the ’70s was responsible for creating a generation of neurotic boy outsiders.”
I was one of those boys.
I was being drawn inexorably toward pop music and the culture around it. I had completely stopped going to school, but it never felt to me as if I was going off the rails. Music was nourishing me, and as long as I was getting my nourishment, what did it matter where it came from?
The music of the 1970s touched a lot of us teens, sitting in our suburban rooms, living with the claustrophobia of Dad’s wartime drama and Mom’s religious fanaticism.
• • •
Everywhere I went now, I was tapping my foot, drumming on the car dashboard, or playing keyboard on the kitchen table. But Mom and Dad were slow to get it, and it took ages until one of them said, “Maybe we need to put a musical instrument in front of him.”
The only instrument in my family ever, as far as I knew, was an out-of-tune piano at Nan’s house, which I used to love stomping on. Then, in 1975, my parents finally bought me a guitar, an all-black classic acoustic model that was a copy of something I had seen Bryan Ferry play, but I had no idea how to tune it, and it never occurred to anyone that a lesson or two might be helpful. A couple of strings got broken, and it was shoved to the back of the closet within a month.
I didn’t know I could be a “musician.” Musicians went to music school, became virtuosos, or plied their trade for years up and down the motorways in Transit vans. That’s how I imagined it, because the artists who were drawing my attention in the mid-seventies were “big” bands like Genesis and the Who, with extraordinary soloists, progressive rockers like Van der Graaf Generator or Queen. You didn’t just jump up onstage and begin to play like that. It took years of dedication.
But something happened in 1976 to change all that. The Sex Pistols released their first record. Only “Anarchy in the UK” wasn’t just a record, it was a revolution. A song that changed everything, not only for me, but for my entire generation.
I remember coming home after I bought it. I was sixteen. It was November. I charged up the stairs to my bedroom—Dad’s hi-fi had been relocated—carried the speakers to the windowsill, and faced them outward, opening the windows wide, playing the record as loud as the system could handle, out over the neighborhood, over and over and over again, on repeat as loud as the volume would go.
Fuck the neighbors. Fuck them all.
“I’m not who you think I am! This is me!”
After I had played the song a dozen times, I was seized by an urge.
“Where’s that fucking guitar? Where is that guitar?”
I dug it out and started banging away at it, two strings, out of tune, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, ting, to “Anarchy in the UK.”
And it fucking rocked.
The acoustic guitar salvaged from the closet wasn’t going to cut it. I needed an electric guitar and found a Fender Telecaster copy in a secondhand music store for fifteen pounds.
It had a tired “authentic” sunburst finish that did not suit my aesthetics. With Dad’s help, I sprayed the guitar body ermine white, a color Dad had knocking around in his garage, the color of his second Ford Cortina. I acknowledged that six strings was above my capabilities and decided, made a choice as it were, to use only five strings. In actual fact, I didn’t need all of those. On the Buzzcocks’ defining punk classic “Boredom,” Pete Shelley had played a guitar solo using only two notes. This was the mood of the times.
I was still best friends with David Twist, the kid who had introduced me to Nick. I loved spending time at the Twists’ house, because his parents allowed us, even encouraged us, to bang away at our instruments in his bedroom, David having a small amplifier his dad had built for him.
Nick was spending more and more time with his girlfriend, Jane. Whenever I visited Nick’s house, I felt like the third wheel. That was not the case at David’s, who was another single, solo loser like me. As cool as making music felt, the level that we were operating at was downright nerdy—no girls allowed, yet.
David sang, I bashed my guitar, and we created mock concert events, complete with “lights down,” “lights up,” and “intro music.” Songs were written, and John West and the Sardine Cans gave their inaugural performance to both sets of parents at Christmas. Classic stupid name. Meaningless.
Needing to expand the sound, I convinced one of my friends from school, Roy Highfield, who had a snare drum and a hi-hat, to buy a tom-tom, and then another friend emerged with a bass guitar. We were a band.
And that was it, man, that was it. It was like lighting the blue touch paper. This is what I wanted to do. I knew I didn’t want to play football in the park.
We moved our gear into Gareth’s, Gareth “the bass.” His family lived in a big house with a drive and space around it, so it was a suitable place for us to practice. Plus he had two sisters, Heidi and Debbie, who liked to sit and watch us, which was encouraging. Even Gaz’s mom was cute, so there were women in the house that you could play to, which was super important.
I believe it’s known as the muse.
12 Shock Treatment
David, Gareth, Roy, and I were on Punk-rock 101, and we renamed our band Shock Treatment, from the Ramones song “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment.”
We started writing songs. Simple, to the point, and very much of the time. “Freedom of Speech,” “I Can’t Help It,” and “UK Today” could have been written by almost any British teenager that week, although titles such as “Cover Girls” and “Striking Poses” suggest interests other than the political. There was nothing profound, though. It was almost all imitation, but they were songs, with verses and choruses and rudimentary guitar solos. A couple of cover songs were learned also; the Stooges’ three-chord dirge “I Wanna Be Your Dog” was a song anyone could get right, and The Who’s “Substitute,” which the Pistols had done.
I wasn’t the singer, the front man, but I knew what we had to do. I knew we needed a gig, so I got us one, sweet-talking the school committee into letting us play at the summer dance, a few weeks away in June 1977.
I had lost my taste for Top of the Pops and supergroups like Genesis. It was much more exciting and satisfying to see young bands perform in the clubs that would allow punk. Watch them grow over months.
The next step was to follow local groups around town. Watch them grow over weeks. There was an even greater sense of connection.
My friends and I would analyze the performances on the bus ride home—“Did you notice they had a new guitar amp?” “Did you like that new song they opened with?”—and we would also critique the posters and the flyers that had been handed out.
Hockley Heath Rugby Club was the venue that had been chosen by the Sixth Form Committee for the summer dance. A bar lined the back of the room, with a few tables and chairs laid out casually and a dance floor in front of them. There were floor-to-ceiling windows on both sides of the room so, being June, it was never properly dark in there. There was no stage, so we set up our meager collection of instruments on the floor, our onstage sound augmented by the loan of a genuine Carlsbro 100-watt Stingray combo amplifier from our friends in the Prefects.
I had never experienced anything quite like the thrill I got from plugging my Telecaster copy into that machine.
Standing in front of my classmates, holding this weapon, all the rules changed. I was no longer nerdy Nigel who never got the team call-up, who had eschewed prizes and attention and competition. Before toni
ght I was nobody, but now I was in charge.
I was the bomb.
I had taken no lessons and I was no virtuoso, that much was clear, but I had written a few songs, and despite my limited technique, when my guitar was fed through the Carlsbro and the Big Muff distortion box, it sounded big.
I wielded enough power and electricity with my £15 guitar and a borrowed amplifier to shake up everyone’s perception of who they thought I was. I could see it on all their faces. They didn’t quite understand it, but they all knew, boys and girls alike, that some substantial, chemical, hierarchical shift was taking place.
At the end of the night, there were two new facts that I knew for certain:
1. Shock Treatment were awful.
2. I couldn’t wait to do it again.
Shock Treatment played a handful of gigs—we even got a review in local music fanzine Brumbeat—and then morphed into the Assassins. I have flyers for both bands at the Golden Eagle on Hill Street, both times supporting the Prefects. Then David and I met Mark Wilson, a DJ on the scene, who asked us to join the band in which he sang and played guitar—Dada. Dada was a much more inventive musical concoction than Shock Treatment. Boutique owner John Brocklesby played a pink Vox bass and sang his own songs. We brought in Roxy fan Marcus to play Stylophone, mounted on an ironing board (very Dada), and David switched from voice to drums. How crazy is that?
John’s wife, Heather, made us some beautiful clothes—a white jacket with a leather collar, beautifully tailored, the kind of stuff they’d be selling in the shop—that gave us a certain classical flamboyance.
The Dada songbook opened with “Toyroom,” Mark Wilson’s off-kilter paean to the joys of childhood, sung over a stuttering disco beat. The chords were DA/DA and it was seven minutes long. This was not intended to be mainstream music.
We went to the Crown on Hill Street and asked them if we could have the use of their upstairs room on Tuesdays. So in May of 1978 we began a residency there.
I am a big believer in residencies—getting to play in the same venue, the same night, week in, week out, you really get to develop a sense of what you are and where you are going. You have an objective—to improve—and each week you get feedback from anyone who chooses to come along. At first, the audience will almost always consist of friends and family, but after a while, if you have anything to offer, word will spread and people you have never met or don’t know will show up at the door and pay money to hear what you play.
That summer, after telling a skeptical high school careers officer that I wanted to be a “pop star,” I enrolled at Birmingham Polytechnic’s College of Art and Design for a twelve-month foundation course. I had never stopped drawing at home and had filled up books with ideas for posters and band logos. This work, and my enthusiasm, was enough to get me a place, in spite of my underperforming at the grammar school.
A foundation course offers a fantastic buffet of basic art training in graphics, fashion and textiles, fine art, and photography all in one year, with the aim of helping you decide which area you want to specialize in for your degree.
For me, however, the decision to go to art school was inspired more by musical heroes—John Lennon, Keith Richards, Bryan Ferry—who had gone to art school. I hoped to hook up with other like-minded souls, just as they had.
Which I did.
The student that I was most drawn to was Stephen Duffy, the future founder of the band the Lilac Time. In drawing class, when the rest of us were striving to reproduce each detail of the subject as accurately as possible, Stephen would grab a stick of charcoal and violently maul his paper with three or four rough strokes, handing it to the teacher as if to say, “I don’t care about any of this.” The teacher would invariably announce, “You see, everybody! Stephen gets it!”
What’s more, Stephen was a songwriter and he played bass. Fretless bass. He was way ahead of me. He wore the signature chiffon and makeup to college and spoke knowingly of Kerouac and Zimmerman. One of his songs bore the enigmatic title “Newhaven to Dieppe (And No Wonder).”
Dada had hit a wall and would go no further. Now I wanted to be in a band with Steve, but I was going to need reinforcements.
I suggested Steve meet Nick Bates.
Like everyone else that year, Nick had wanted to play guitar, and I was supposed to be showing him how. Talk about the deaf leading the blind.
13 Barbarella’s
We walk through the double doors. The music is louder inside, the smell of beer and cigarettes. Pay the entrance fee to the girl at the table. One pound thirty. We fumble to count out our money, mine earned at a local supermarket, Nick’s working weekends at his mother’s toy shop. Get the look-over from the bouncers. Be cool and don’t attract attention, like that scene in Saturday Night Fever. The age limit at nightclubs in England is eighteen. I’m seventeen and Nick is fifteen, but we’ve been here often enough to know we can get away with it. We walk down the carpeted hallway, the music ahead already at an impressive volume. At eye level, on the wall to our left, the place announces itself: “The biggest nightclub in Europe, Barbarella’s.”
Everything is shades of dimly lit red. It feels red. It smells red. The carpet is orange-dark, and it’s nice and warm inside after our twenty-minute walk through the city center to get here. Walk another twenty feet or so past the entrance to a small bar into which I have never been—and don’t remember ever being open—past the loos (avoid if possible: One is always vulnerable standing there, open to attack, especially after the alcohol has had its way with the more violently minded punters). At the end of the red tunnel, Nick and I turn into the main club room.
The music is now so loud that everyone has to shout to have an outside chance of getting heard. Communication adjusts to a new level of minimalism. Instincts surge. The DJ, Wayne “the Plastic Poser,” is playing reggae—“Cocaine in My Brain” by Dillinger, music that is dark and black and dangerous.
Music has never sounded better than it sounds in this room.
Beneath the DJ booth there is a dance floor the size of a double-width garage, filled with punks and new-wavers. Nick and I definitely qualify as the latter. We both still wear our hair quite long, and I’m still in glasses, a punk no-no. No more glam-rock duds. He has on a plain white shirt and skinny black tie, I have a black shirt on which I have stenciled “1977” across my heart, in homage to the Clash.
To the right of the dance floor are a few tables and chairs, and immediately in front of us are three dimly lit steps that lead up to a long, bright bar packed with kids aged between eighteen and twenty-five, all trying to get served. Looking across the dance floor from where we now stand is the stage, about three feet off the ground, where tonight’s band will be appearing. Already there is a group of punks gathered at the stage, waiting. They are taking up valuable dance floor space ’cos they ain’t dancing. They are here to see and hear live music. They check every action from the side and rear of the stage, looking down to inspect their watches.
It’s after eleven, and this is a school night for Nick. I am in my first year at college and wonder how many nights I have had to lie to my parents, who think I’m doing work at Nick’s house. On the stage, roadies check mics, keyboards, amps. We go up the steps to the bar, order two Cokes, and I light a cigarette. A Player’s No. 6, “The Schoolboy’s Choice.” This is the best view of the stage and there’s no danger of getting showered in spittle, which has happened to me a few times watching the Clash and Generation X.
Tonight the club is as full as I’ve ever seen it. It’s Blondie’s first headline show in Birmingham, and they are about to explode. This is February 1978, and tomorrow they’ll film their new single “Denis” for a spot on Top of the Pops. Debbie Harry will become an overnight sensation.
Time ticks by slowly. We are making these Cokes last. More cigs get smoked. Both of us secretly hope the band won’t be on too late, that we can maybe make the one o’clock night bus. The opening act has been and gone. The night now belongs to the headliner
s. The crowd has grown and no one is interested anymore in what DJ Wayne is playing. Every new song just means another three minutes before the lights go down and the band hits the stage. The kids down front are chanting, “Blondie, Blondie, Blondie . . .”
Nick and I smile to each other.
We’ve made it.
14 Ballroom Blitz with Synthesizers
I don’t know whether it was the times we were living in or if that’s just what it is like being seventeen, but it seemed to us there was so much music happening at that moment; punk rock had transitioned into new wave, which was a catchall phrase that seemed to embrace just about anything made by anyone under the age of twenty-two. There were so many new forms of music that were inspiring us. Siouxsie and the Banshees were a favorite, and I felt I had a stake in them because I had watched them play to sixty people, then to a loud hundred, then to a thousand, then they got a record deal, which put them on Top of the Pops.
Another band I loved to follow was the Heartbreakers, formed by ex–New York Doll Johnny Thunders. Malcolm McLaren flew the Heartbreakers over to the United Kingdom to play with the Sex Pistols on their Anarchy in the UK tour, and they never really went home. They connected with the British punks and found they could play to much bigger audiences than in the States. There was something about Thunders onstage that was thrilling, dangerous, and unpredictable. That New York attitude. Maybe it was his heroin habit. He came over as the real thing.
Steve Jones is open about the influence Thunders’s playing style had on him. In the documentary The Filth and the Fury, there is a hilarious sequence where film of the two guitarists is intercut, showing quite clearly just how much of Thunders’s attitude Steve knocked off.