Punk Year Zero 1976
In 1976 I am fifteen years old, not a child but not an adult. Days at home during the holidays were punctuated with me playing football at the rec or sitting at home watching Crown Court at lunchtime and Magpie or some cartoons in the afternoon, remember Top Cat at the time was renamed Boss Cat as there was a cat food called Top Cat. Evenings found me in front of the goggle box, British TV was getting grittier with shows like The Sweeney and scantily clad and topless ladies seemed to be everywhere from Benny Hill to the 9pm dramas, at 15 this was great but also highly embarrassing if your parents were in the room. BBC was showing a regular U.S. detective show on Saturday (Cannon/Streets of San Fransico/McCloud) which followed an 8pm comedy slot Yarwood/Two Ronnies, the evening was followed by Match of the Day with one on-screen presenter, Jimmy Hill, and only two games.
Music was going through a time of change. Luckily for me my friend Andrew lived in Chiswick, he was uber cool and knew all about both music and clothes…….helped by the fact that his very glamorous ex-model mother Beatrice had a name that her older sister couldn’t pronounce as a 3-year-old so she called her BIBA…..and eventually named her shop after her. So for many weekends, I would stay at my aunties in Acton Town spending the day with Andrew listening to music and then the pair of us would catch the tube for the short ride to Hammersmith to see a band at the Odeon which at the time was Britian’s premier music venue. Cockney Rebel, Queen and Alex Harvey being standouts. However, by -76 the wind of change was in the air……big bands were going ultra-theatrical with purpose build stage setting as well as playing the larger venues like Earls Court and Wembley.
We were also experiencing the end of the GLAM ROCK era……Slade had started writing slow songs, Sweet had split with Chin n Chap and Gary Glitter had become a caricature of himself. Bowie had moved from Technicolor to black and white whilst Ferry was busy reinventing himself as a lounge lizard. And Marc Bolan had hit a slump, when you hit the heights of pop stardom with screaming girls and being the face on every teenage girl’s wall it is difficult or near impossible to vault back to your original audience who took you seriously as an artist.
However, there was something in the air……Andrew and I were, along with every other teenager in the country, searching for the next big thing…..was it going to be Burlesque with their zany Roxy Musiceness or Deaf School which followed a similar route……..so one night in January off the two of us went to see Dr Feelgood at Hammersmith Odeon on the strength of seeing them on The Old Grey Whistle Test the month before….short sharp songs that drew on the British blues for influence, four guys on stage not dressed like psychedelic drag artists but looking like someone you might see in the line at your chip shop. This opened the door to pub rock for me and many others, not that the 4000-seat Odeon was much of a pub. However reading NME there seemed to be a plethora of other like-minded bands. So as I turned 16 not long after that gig, Andrew and I were starting to “sneak” into pubs in west London to catch Eddie & the Hot Rods, The Gorillas, The Pirates and The Motors…..it was a different audience than before, gone were the loon trouser with six buttons and the sweaters with a star on, no one was wearing gold satin flairs or kimono tops (actually that was my outfit to Queen 1975). This crowd had shorter hair, some of them were Teds, others Bikers and the cut of the strides had become drain pipe. The music was fast, the songs were short and the crowd ranged from young lads like me to old duffers in there 40’s who remembered seeing the Stones at the Crawdaddy Club.
Halfway through the year the music papers started talking about this new thing called punk rock and The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned appeared on my radar. The Ramones were already on my scope as a mate of mine Bruce lived in New York, in 75 he was into Aerosmith, Stooges but in April 76 he got hold of The Ramones’ first album and started going to CBGBs Club. It was strange as all things seemed to come together at once, fashion amongst the pub rockers had started to resemble the 60’s beat groups, we had cut off our long hair and started wearing straight-leg trousers and jackets mimicking the Feelgoods attire. So when a cadre of young bands jumped up on stage with short hair and fast songs we were quick to recognise that this was our music
The John Peel Show on Radio 1 10pm to Midnight every Monday to Friday had become the only way to hear any of these emerging tunes, mostly released on small independent labels as the “music industry” didn’t like our three-chord wonders. It was here that I first heard the Buzzcocks from their “in session” Oct 76…….DJs on London’s Capital Radio were openly saying they wouldn’t play punk……..small venues around me started to put on punk bands, The Clarendon and Red Cow in Hammersmith where my first visit was to see The Damned. The Greyhound in Fulham and The Nashville in West Kensington …..The Red Lion on the Fulham Road and Putney’s Half Moon seemed to shun the new movement. Going up town The Roxy in Covent Garden where my school band played our second gig supporting The Spotty Dogs, and of course the 100 Club until the “incident” at the Punk Festival put an end to punk bands appearing there.
For Attire there was no real dress code, except you couldn’t wear long hair or flairs……boys either raided their dad’s wardrobe for that pair of 30-inch trousers he was going to wear again once he lost the beer belly he had spent 20 years developing, or found something at a secondhand store. Punks were wearing old suit jackets which we ripped and held together with safety pins, we made our own T shirts by doing the same and writing the names of bands on them……at most gigs you would see blokes wearing their school white shirts and school ties, strangely these were very thin in 76 mainly because the fashion was for wide ties and school always did the opposite….so rather than making the tie as thick as possible and only have about 3 inches to stick in your jumper (you know what I mean) punks wore their ties 60’s slim and long. Others opted for overalls, I had my dad’s green ones with paint and band names written all over them, very Clash……Girls were also much more visible on the gig scene in 76 than 78……dress code was very Rocky Horror in 76 with lots of stockings worn visable under a school shirt-dress, I remember PVC was all over the place as were school blazers.
By the Christmas Term things had really started to roll, news papers were starting to run features on this new cult…..Janet Street Porter ran a feature on Punk for London ITV’s current affairs show The London Weekend Show. My local record shop didn’t stock punk but had been taking orders from me, by November each week I would put together a request and the manager was ordering five copies of each……I think his biggest hit that year was “Pogo Dancing”…….we all have a skeleton in our collection!
Fanzines were starting to appear at the gigs, magazines typed up and photocopied on standard Zerox A4 paper which documented the scene at street level, in November I picked up my first copy of Sniffin Glue fanzine with Eddie & the Hot Rods on the cover, I remember cutting the pictures out and sticking them to my bedroom wall under the Bowie poster with him in some strange one armed, one legged avand garde knitware!
Then suddenly at tea time on the 1st December 1976 the world blew up………as Londoners sat in front of the box with their sausage, chips n beans up popped a new band being interviewed by veteran presenter Bill Grundy…..following a goading from an inebriated Bill and some creepy salacious remarks to one of the group’s followers, a girl called Siouxsie….London’s newest hitmakers let loose on the presenter which ended with Steve Jones using the F word………..The world went mad, with thousands of complaints, and headlines across the nation on every national newspaper.
In five minutes Punk had gone from a youth cult to public enemy number one….suddenly we were the bad boys in town, our flag had been planted and in the next few years Britian’s disaffected youth rallied to the cause. Councils cancelled any event associated with punk and my plans to catch the Anarchy tour in Guildford were scuppered Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned all on one bill was going to be a night in punk heaven but turned into hell for Johnny and the boys.
