Pre-Punk 1972-1976 Punk Britannia

This programme contains strong language

As you can all quite well imagine,

the letters that get themselves printed

are only the tip of an iceberg.

The iceberg in this case

seems to be one of a particularly threatening nature.

In fact, it is an iceberg that is drifting uncomfortably close

to the dazzlingly lit, wonderfully appointed Titanic that is big-time rock pop -

tax exile, jet-set show business.

Letter after letter repeats the same thing.

You all seem to have had it with The Who and Liz Taylor,

Rod Stewart and the Queen,

Jagger and Princess Margaret,

paying three quid to be bent, mutilated,

crushed, or seated behind a pillar,

all in the name of modern, '70s-style super rock.

The aforementioned iceberg cometh.

And that iceberg, dear readers, is you.

Everyone that was involved in punk was a child in the '60s.

So we grew up with rock music

at the centre of the universe, and as a medium for social change.

# It's all right now... #

And what we got, when it was our turn,

was the feeling that we had kind of missed the party.

We had grown up too late to be a part of that.

The whole country had this feeling that there's no innovation,

there's nothing happening, definitely not for us.

When you looked at all the great music that had happened,

you really felt, "Well, what are we going to do?"

You really didn't have a future.

No matter how well you achieved academically,

it's like, "Why bother? Know your place."

We didn't want any bullshit,

we didn't want to have an older generation's views

put upon our shoulders.

We didn't want to have to toe the line.

You've created somebody who has nothing.

And, out of nothing, I'm going to build a whole new suit of clothes.

Out of nothing, I'm going to look great.

Out of nothing, I'm going to terrify your children.

In London, it felt as if a great ashen cloud

had fallen over everything.

The great idealistic issues of the hippie era,

gender politics, issues of race,

issues of authority, were not listened to.

In fact, I had gone to the Home Office and said,

"We have been arguing with you, and if you don't listen to me,

"my generation, the next generation is going to come at you with knives."

This is the evolutionary story of the birth of British punk...

..the underground London scene that came before the fabled ground zero

of the Sex Pistols' Anarchy In The UK.

Over time, punk has been mythologized and reduced

to a barrage of swearing, spitting and safety pins.

The foundations of punk were actually forged

by a gateway generation

sandwiched between the '60s hippies and the '70s punks.

They were the big brothers of punk,

already themselves on a mission to take rock back from the jet set.

This generation paved the way

but would ultimately be wiped out by punk's new dawn.

And the very first stepping stone on the road to punk

was laid by a group of enterprising young American long-hairs

at the beginning of the '70s.

# Well, I'm riding on an airplane... #

One day, in May 1971,

a Californian honky-tonk trio, Eggs Over Easy,

knocked on the door of a north London boozer,

looking for a place to play.

I don't know what they were doing in England,

but they went to see the landlord. There was three of them.

And they said, "Could we play here?"

And the guy said, "We kind of play jazz. What do you play?"

And they said, "Kind of R&B and country and rock and pop. Everything."

He said, "Give us a lunchtime, and see how it goes."

And that's what they did.

And it took off.

# We're going to have a little party

# It's going to last for a week or two. #

They were authentic Americans, and we were really excited by that.

Draft dodgers, I think.

I'm not certain about that, maybe that was just a myth.

And they had a massive repertoire.

They were like a living jukebox.

It wasn't your regular rock crowd. I can remember

a Sikh bus conductor with his uniform on, dancing,

dancing with his wife or with someone else's wife, I don't know.

All kinds of people. It was really, really shaking.

The simple idea of a rock 'n' roll band playing in a pub

was something of a eureka moment for Nick Lowe's band Brinsley Schwarz

and their new manager, ex-Jimi Hendrix roadie, Dave Robinson.

Against the early '70s backdrop of super rock and prog,

rootsy country rock bands like the Brinsleys

had trouble finding places to play.

When I saw Eggs Over Easy, it was like,

"I've got the model. Come down and see -

"this is what I'm telling you you should be doing."

They were the kind of musicians we were aspiring to be.

So we started appropriating quite a lot of their act, you know.

And when they went back to America,

we're appropriated their gig as well.

# Falling in love again

# Falling in love again... #

Having seen the light,

the Brinsleys settled in to a residency at The Tally Ho

and their enterprising manager set out to make the most of his new opportunity.

Finding kindred spirits,

and finding kindred bar managers, became what I got up to.

MUSIC: "All Right Now" by Free

I'd been working for David Bowie in the very early '70s.

After the Ziggy Stardust tours were over,

there was no job for me then with David Bowie.

So round about the same time,

Dave Robinson and myself spent our evenings looking for venues.

We literally used to drive around London

in my old Morris 1000 traveller.

Every time we passed a big pub, we'd stop and go in

and ask the landlord if he had a big room he wanted to rent out.

It was a bit of a crusade, really.

# Now, don't you wait Don't hesitate

# Let's move before They raise the parking rate. #

PIANO PUB MUSIC

These pubs didn't always offer a warm welcome to new faces.

Pubs weren't very appealing to young people.

The vast majority of them were run by Irish men,

with an aggressive attitude!

Almost none of them served meals.

There wasn't a gastro... The word "gastropub" hadn't been invented then.

It was still the older guy

escaping from his wife,

the place they would brag and booze,

and talk about football.

Nothing had happened in pubs for about 30 years, really.

ROCK 'N' ROLL MUSIC

All of a sudden, London's pubs were happening.

Brinsley Schwarz were joined on the scene by groups like Ducks Deluxe

and Bees Make Honey,

and the capital's landlords warmed to what they now called pub rock,

and the thirsty crowds it attracted.

# Caledonia, Caledonia... #

A circuit gradually evolved.

The Tally Ho was the first one,

because Eggs Over Easy were playing there.

The Hope & Anchor became a bigger venue, round about 1972.

Also another pub in Hammersmith called The Red Cow.

Then this place, The Nashville, came along later.

It became the main means by which new acts were exposed to the public.

The great thing about the London pub rock scene was

you didn't need a huge PA system.

You didn't need a tour bus, and you didn't really need a road crew.

Four or five guys,

put it in the car, go down The Hope & Anchor or The Kensington,

set up on beer crates, virtually,

and play for an hour or two.

There were no bells and whistles at a pub rock show,

and this chimed with the bands' preferred style of stripped down music.

Not for them the pomp and peacocking

of the prevailing forms of rock in 1972.

It was a very strange time, that '71, '72 period.

# And I-I-I-I, I love you. #

In the pop world, you had glam.

T Rex and Slade, and those guys.

I went to see Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Please!

# Oh, honey, watch that man.

# Well, he talks like a jerk

# But he's only taking care of the room. #

COMMENTATOR: 'It is said Bowie will soon be the world's number one beat singer.

'He'd be the first superstar of pop to wear shorty dresses on stage.'

It was just too cosmetic for me.

I couldn't swallow that.

# Watch that man. #

You also had this appalling... HE LAUGHS

..this appalling thing called prog rock.

Yes, King Crimson, Family, Genesis.

Jethro Tull, Super Tramp.

You know, prog rock. I hated it.

SYNTHESISER SOLO

Too much light shows,

too much people playing keyboards like this,

and all of that business.

Not just the music that people played,

but how audiences reacted,

which was to sit on the floor, with their eyes shut

listening to this wondrously complicated music.

It had gone a long, long way from rock 'n' roll.

Humdrum daily life for youngsters in the early '70s,

played out to an extended soundtrack of earnest virtuosity

and mutton chop pop,

was in dire need of something new.

Pub rock's answer to this was to dig out something old.

The pub rock bands started looking back to Chuck Berry,

early blues artists, early soul and R&B artists.

# I'm going coast to coast

# I'm going coast to coast. #

Classic rock and R&B from the '50s and early '60s played fast,

and, washed down with generous amounts of ale,

was pub rock's response to boring Britain.

Unbeknownst to them, their retro leanings set British rock

on a course that would eventually lead

to the short sharp shock of punk.

ROCK GUITAR INTERLUDE

The Ducks were just crazy.

We just had so much energy.

We just piled it in there.

We played at 150 miles an hour.

Sean Tyla had a very aggressive, kind of rough attitude,

which I rather liked.

He was fabulously abusive to audiences, for one thing!

HE LAUGHS

And, you know, that was a bit of a mixed blessing.

# I'm going coast to coast. #

I often used to get people come up to me at the end of a gig,

and say, "You really pissed me off tonight."

I'd say, "What have I done now?"

He said, "You didn't tell me to fuck off!"

So I'm not coming to your gigs if you don't tell me to fuck off.

I said, "All right, OK. Fuck off!"

HE LAUGHS

Ducks Deluxe were like a punk rock group in the making.

But a few excess kilos and facial hair

was all that stood between Ducks Deluxe and punk rock legend, really.

By 1973, pub rock gigs had gained a reputation as a good night out

and were proving popular with legions of Londoners.

ROCK GUITAR

The crowds were coming. These pubs now suddenly were full.

The landlords were banging me on the back, saying,

"Dave, this is happening, what are you drinking?"

We understood it was fundamentally about entertainment.

Paul, our singer, very quickly adopted this persona of, like,

an Arthur Daley-type character.

You know, with a moustache and the cigarette

and the sort of sleazy patter.

# You know, I went to a party the other night

# This certain chick was out of sight

# Now, we got talking... #

One of the things that pub rock

is the fact that everybody is in the front row.

Because it's so small,

you are so close to the band.

You are all a part of it.

And the band gets that feeling as well.

# So I slapped a little cash down on the desk... #

It broke down the barriers between the audience and the artist.

If you went to the Hammersmith Odeon to see Mott The Hoople,

chances of bumping into Ian Hunter - extremely remote.

Come down The Hope & Anchor,

chances of bumping into Ian Dury - ten to one. You know?

# Pocket money, ooh, pocket money

# But you know it's true, baby. #

If Ian Dury was at the bar, he'd be hard to miss,

especially with his band Kilburn & The High Roads in tow.

The Kilburns were an entirely different phenomena.

It was like seeing a kind of demented Gene Vincent,

you know, with a deformed drummer and a dwarf bass player,

and it was like the circus had come to town.

# Woke up this morning in a state of shock... #

Unlike the punks who would follow,

or the glam acts their younger sisters liked,

most pub rockers didn't believe in having a look.

Only the Kilburns, who met at Canterbury College of Art,

had their own unique aesthetic.

# And the cocktail rock

# They did the mumble rumble

# And the cocktail rock... #

It was a rather strange band.

It wasn't quite a rock 'n' roll band, that's what we thought.

It was like this... We were Kilburns.

# I climbed out of bed and I call a doc

# Don't need you, oh! Cocktail rock, whoo! #

Kilburn & The High Roads were just so far ahead of everybody else

in look and in...punk feel.

Ian Dury was wearing a razor blade in his ear

years before the punk movement.

# And the cocktail rock. #

All right, Keith, on the guitar, you want to play a little?

More important than his earrings, Ian Dury wrote songs

depicting real life on London's streets

at a time when most pub rockers sang songs about life south of the Mason-Dixon line.

# Mumble, mumble rumble

# And the cocktail rock. #

The Mumble Rumble.

He liked people like Max Wall, Norman Wisdom.

He was very much into the stagecraft of that kind of thing.

And he was almost like a Dickensian figure, as well. Very English.

And I think people loved that we were talking about

Kilburn High Road instead of Memphis.

The Kilburns used to come

to Hornsey College Of Art and do gigs.

Songs like Rough Kids by them - that was a great song.

I think Rough Kids was one of the first punking sounding songs.

You know, very London.

The Kilburns gave a glimmer of hope to the odd teenager

craving tunes that reflected their own lives.

But the pub rockers themselves didn't have youth on their side.

You'd have, like, a lead singer that looked really good.

You thought, he's got the slightly Bowie haircut, and a T-shirt,

but they were wearing flares, and the guitarist would have long hair.

It was really, you know, beery blokes playing Chuck Berry tunes.

Even the Whistle Test could see that pub rock

wasn't quite going to save rock 'n' roll.

Richard, how much impact do you think the pub rock circuit

is having or is going to have now on the musical situation?

If you go round and look at a lot of pub rock bands,

or a lot of bands playing in pubs,

you find that most of them are over 25.

It's really recreating the music of the '50s and the early '60s,

and out of that kind of thing a revolution is not going to come.

The next big influence on rock is going to come from 18-year-olds, 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds.

Pub rock established a live music scene and uncovered

the rock 'n' roll roots that would form the sonic template for punk.

This appetite for raiding the past in search of fresh sounds

was being passed down to even younger kids by two record traders,

Ted Carroll and Roger Armstrong.

We're in Golborne Road, we're outside number 93,

which in 1971 was a flea market.

I had a record stall in the back, and that's where I started my Rock On empire.

This place was the first place you could buy rock 'n' roll records

from the '50s, '60s, and even the '70s,

as well as rhythm & blues and soul,

so it used to attract a lot of journalists, musicians.

Joe Strummer bought a copy of Brand New Cadillac in here

and then recorded it with The Clash.

So there was all that kind of stuff happening all the time, you know?

Well, Ted Carroll and Roger Armstrong,

we liked them, because they were introducing us

to music that I hadn't heard before,

early blues and jazz and all that kind of stuff.

They were big instigators of having the product to turn people on.

Just down the road in Chelsea, rag trade maverick Malcolm McLaren

had also picked up on this revival of rock's teenage past.

Malcolm, he was selling '50s rock 'n' roll stuff

and I used to sell him a lot of records.

When everybody was walking around dressed in BacoFoil,

like Gary Glitter or Anthony Price,

he had a Teddy Boy shop.

If you had to begin in the '70s,

you had to begin your life with,

well, what was the culture that really moved you?

So we would dig up the ruins of what was the 1950s.

We were going to rescue these ruins, we were going to polish them,

dust them down, pull them up.

# Well, it's one for the money

# Two for the show... #

McLaren's shop kitted out a growing number of teenagers

who, fed up with the present, were looking for the future

in the depths of their parents' vinyl collection,

or the back of their wardrobe, for that matter.

American Graffiti was a very influential thing for a much younger age group.

-ARCHIVE:

-American Graffiti.

-Baby, what's that?

-It's a movie!

-Can you dig it? Can you dig it?

-Go back in time!

It's one of those great old movies about romance, racing and rock 'n' roll!

Those teenage kids, they used to call it graffiti music.

Graffiti music, they called it.

We were far enough away from the '50s, in a sense,

for it not to be just about nostalgia, in a way.

They were just listening to it, and it was great music,

and it was sort of simple and straightforward,

and it was the antithesis of the grandiose stadium rock kind of things.

Though, funnily enough, it was a stadium gig that, in a sense,

also helped trigger it, which was the Wembley Rock 'N' Roll Show.

# One, two, three o'clock, four o'clock rock

# five, six, seven o'clock, eight o'clock rock

# nine, ten, 11 o'clock, 12 o'clock rock,

# We're going to rock around the clock tonight... #

It was Bo Diddley, Chuck, Jerry Lee...

-Bill Haley.

-Bill Haley.

-Little Richard.

-Little Richard.

And guess who was also there, with a job lot of retro T-shirts to sell?

ARCHIVE: Bill Haley large?

It's Malcolm McLaren with a pop-up version of his Kings Road store.

-Why is rock coming back?

-What?

-Why is rock coming back?

Well, it never really went away, did it? No, definitely not.

Large Jerry Lee Lewis.

Revisiting the teen tribes

and three-minute hits of the '50s was a signpost on the road to punk.

But, 40 miles south, down the A13,

those pioneering days of rock 'n' roll had definitely never gone away.

In Southend, of course, we had the famous seafront

and the Kursaal Amusement Park,

and the longest pier in the world,

and so there was a bit of a fairground atmosphere.

All the amusement arcades and the piers and so forth had jukeboxes,

and it seemed like rock 'n' roll records were for ever spinning.

MUSIC: "Boogie Chillen" by John Lee Hooker

Canvey was a bit of a backwater, and I'd got into this

rhythm & blues music and that, and naturally I'm thinking,

"Oh, man, I wish I lived in the Mississippi Delta."

And of course - a jolly obvious thing -

you do live in a delta, actually,

and you do live where there are people living in shacks.

# Well, my momma didn't allow me

# To stay out all night long... #

So you could indulge these kind of fantasies, and the whole thing

lit up by the lights and fires of the oil refinery.

# I didn't care what she didn't allow

# I would boogie-woogie anyhow... #

Yes! Got the blues.

Wilko was joined in his fantasy by three other local lads

in a group they called Dr Feelgood.

# If there's something that I like

# It's the way that woman walks

# And if there's something I like better

# It's the way she baby talks

# She does it right

# She does it right... #

Actually, what we were doing was slightly old-fashioned or something.

The local rival bands used to look down on us a little bit,

you know, because we weren't wearing frocks

and singing about going to Mars.

# And when she gets back to her seat

# Mmm, all the people cry for more #

# She does it right... #

Rock 'n' roll's not about The Hobbit and things like that,

that's for girls, you know.

Children's music.

This is for people who want to have a good time.

Having shown the pubs and clubs of the Thames delta a good time,

before long, the Feelgoods set their sights

on the London pub rock scene.

We went up to town to The Torrington to see a couple of bands.

I was there with my brother, and we got in there,

and this band were... I remember saying to my bruv,

"If this is the top band in London...

"..we've got it made."

# I wonder who it could be.

# It was so dark I couldn't see

# But I know it wasn't me

# When I tell you it ain't right

# I know you've got to agree... #

Suddenly, these oiks come from Canvey Island,

just going berserk up there, and people were loving it.

# Roxette

# I didn't need to seek you out

# You know the music played so loud

# But I could hear you through the crowd

# You was telling everyone

# About a new guy you'd found... #

The combination of the Feelgoods' musical assault and their working-class geezer image

grabbed the pub scene by the throat and, crucially,

also grabbed the attention of a younger crowd.

Lee Brilleaux looked like he would

punch your head in given a moment's notice,

and Wilko Johnson was just this mad, speed-freak looking kind of guy.

Wilko, for me, was the first sort of guitar hero of the '70s,

the first person I could really relate to. Didn't like all the widdly-diddly...

The sort of poodle-cut American stadium rockers didn't mean nothing to me.

They're slightly forgotten in the roots of punk,

but, actually, they are the British roots of punk,

they're sort of the first British punk rock group.

I think the line between pub rock and punk rock is straddled by,

not only Dr Feelgood, but by Eddie & The Hot Rods.

Get Out Of Denver, baby!

It was fast, and it was urgent.

# Still remember it was autumn and the moon was shining

# 60 Cadillac was roaring through Nebraska whining

# To hit 120, Man, the fields was bending over

# Heading for the mountains Knowing we was trailin' further

# The pipes were blazin' and the screamin' wheels turnin', turnin'

# Had my girl beside me, brother, she was burnin', burnin'... #

Hailing from Canvey Island,

Eddie & The Hot Rods were direct descendants of Dr Feelgood.

They were steeped in the same R&B roots,

but were a few, crucial years younger than their Essex elders.

The Feelgoods are now, not at the peak of their career,

but they're really about as big as it can get.

Eddie & The Hot Rods kind of came and snuck in under that.

They were younger, and they had a younger following,

and they were a very high energy band.

And they went straight into pub gigs that were ready-made.

They had an almost meteoric rise.

The other bands in the early days, like Ducks Deluxe, Brinsleys

and bands like that, were fantastic in their right.

We put a burst of energy into it.

I was quite fit in those days, so it was just...

To let go of the energy I used to go mad on stage,

running around, swinging from the rafters.

There was no-one else like us at the time.

The punk generation had reached the legal age and begun to infiltrate the pub scene.

Faced with a front man of their own age,

they adopted Eddie & The Hot Rods as one of their own.

You went to see people like Eddie & The Hot Rods, '75, '76,

because they were playing a very basic, punky type of R&B.

You know, it was music that you felt you could identify with.

Their eyes were bulging, they looked the part,

they were playing at a tempo that no-one in LA was playing at.

And they were ours.

The Rods cranked up the energy on stage,

but their set still relied on American rock covers.

What would soon set punk apart was a voice with a vision of Britain

as it felt and smelled to the kids it had set adrift.

# I was saying let me out of here before I was even born

# It's such a gamble when you get a face

# I belong to the generation but

# I can take it or leave it each time... #

It was still that sort of hangover from the '60s

that went on into the mid '70s,

where people were still walking around in massive great big flairs this big,

and your dad wearing pasty kipper ties and matching shirts

and all that sort of gear from C&A's.

# Kisses for me

# Save all your kisses for me... #

They were getting into the flower power thing,

but like six years later or something.

# Don't cry, honey, don't cry... #

And if it wasn't bad enough having to suffer

the bad taste hangover from the '60s,

the Britain this generation had inherited was also looking worse for wear.

I can only give you one gallon, sir.

That'll get you to your nearest garage.

So the South Wales miners have decided to turn the screw further.

-Their latest action...

-Huge piles of rubbish after the demonstration...

CROWD SHOUTING

-Ferguson?

-Here.

-Gottley?

-Sir.

-Green?

-Sir.

-Chambers?

-Sir.

-Londale.

-Sir.

Linda Ayre?

Anyone seen Linda Ayre?

Because of that attitude absolutely rampant in the education system

of telling you you really didn't have a future,

that you had no job prospects,

no matter how well you achieved academically.

It's like, "Why bother? Know your place."

The situation in Britain sort of produced us.

It sort of give us a place, in a way,

because that lack of things meant that you had to do something for yourself.

For me, that was music.

Music was just as important to the punk generation

as it had been to their parents in the '60s.

But the characters they would become had been nurtured

by a very different set of sounds and images.

# She's faster than most

# And she lives on the coast Uh-huh... #

There would be no punk without glam.

Bolan was this outright, straight-in-your-face

"I'm going to be a pop star, I'm going to have all your money,

"all your girlfriends, you've had it."

And I remember watching Top Of The Pops

and Bolan was doing Hot Love, and I'd never seen anything like it,

these girls were just, like, whacking off.

And I thought, "That's what I want to get stuck into."

The flamboyant gods of glam divided Britain's male population.

The blokes, who inhabited the pub rock scene,

were wary of their gender bending ways.

But for the younger generation,

Ziggy Stardust was an exotic beacon of hope.

# Poor Jean Genie

# Snuck into the city

# Strung out on lasers

# And slash back blazers... #

It was the first thing that had appeared

on Top Of The Pops for years that your dad didn't like.

It was shocking and it was sexually ambiguous,

and he was thin and he was charismatic...

# Jean Genie loves chimney stacks

# He's outrageous He screams and he bawls

# Jean Genie, let yourself go... #

Rock music still had the power

to flaunt the gap between the generations.

And another potent new ingredient in the mix

had swaggered across the Atlantic in 1973

in the form of the New York Dolls.

# Jet boys fly Jet boys gone

# Jet boys stole my baby... #

The New York Dolls appearing on Whistle Test,

that for me was like,

"Whoa, I'm not going to go to work in that fucking factory."

It was like, "Whoa! I want to be that."

# My baby... #

New York Dolls were the first band

to be insulted on The Old Grey Whistle Test.

An American group who are to the Stones

what The Monkees were to The Beatles

a pale and amusing derivative.

Bob Harris said afterwards, "Mock rock,"

as though, "This is just a joke, we can't take this seriously."

Mock rock.

One man in particular begged to differ with Bob Harris.

By the mid '70s, Malcolm McLaren had begun to lose interest

in the Ted revival and the Dolls became his new obsession.

New York Dolls were in town and they went into Let It Rock

and Malcolm kind of fell in love with them.

He went to New York to manage them for a while,

and that all fell apart.

He came back and decided he'd do a UK band

that were confrontational and rocking in the same way.

In 1974, McLaren overhauled his Kings Road shop, Let It Rock.

Sex would be its provocative new name.

The new thing we decided to do was far more subversive

and far more overtly sexual for us,

and something that we felt we had suddenly arrived in the '70s.

Sex, and McLaren's British take on the Dolls,

would be fresh, new and shocking.

I used to go in there when it was Let It Rock, which was basically a second-hand Teddy Boy shop.

Then it was Sex, and Sex was a scary shop.

You wouldn't just go in Sex, it was rubber and leather,

and Jordan was in there and she was very intimidating. That was the idea of it.

Alongside Jordan, and in amongst the gimp masks,

was Saturday boy and aspiring rock star Glen Matlock.

The shop was at the wrong end of the Kings Road and it attracted

all these nut-case weirdos and Steve and Paul would come in as well.

I think it was to try and nick stuff and it was my job to stop them.

Steve Jones and Paul Cook also shared Glen's ambition

to form a band.

I guess we were looking for something

that kids like us could go and see, cos there was nothing like that.

There was a kind of pub rock scene going around at the time,

which was the only thing happening

and we thought we could jump in on the back of that

and make our own scene, if you like.

Encouraged by McLaren,

keen to extend his new brand to the music business,

all they needed now was a frontman.

Everybody had long hair -

your bank manager, your milkman, they had long hair,

slightly over the ears, and flared trousers.

If we saw somebody in the street who had short hair and tight trousers

we would just say, "Do you fancy yourself as a singer?"

Up until that point of joining the Pistols,

I'd never even conceived of singing.

So unsinging became kind of oddly enough

the most appropriate approach to the Pistols.

We invited him back to audition in front of the jukebox

and we put a couple of records on,

one of them being Eighteen by Alice Cooper.

He liked Alice Cooper. He just sort of took the piss out of it,

but the way he took the piss out of it,

there was something about him.

In 19-year-old John Lydon

the fledgling Sex Pistols had happened upon a kind of visionary.

He shared their interest in music,

but also had a burning desire to tell the truth of his generation.

I couldn't play an instrument,

so the boys were great there.

But they couldn't actually write songs, any of them.

If they were going be the songwriters in that respect,

it would end up being versions of other things

and Johnny came in with a completely different attitude to that.

There was a bit of tension about that,

but I think I proved my point.

You know, the written word, you know,

it's an incredibly important thing

and I think up until the Sex Pistols, everything was a lie.

Alongside Johnny Rotten,

one other man would become known as the voice of the punk generation.

But in 1975, Joe Strummer was just one member

in a band of refusenik post-hippies

taking refuge from '70s Britain in a West London squat.

# Johnny is a wanderer tied to a guitar

# Thinks he's going to change the world... #

There wasn't much money about

and a lot of people just needed a place to live, very much like today!

The 101ers was a squatting band. They came from the squatters.

It was named, not after the George Orwell room,

but 101 Walterton Road where they were squatting.

# Johnny had a temperature Saw a pretty face

# Tried to walk it on a lead

# Counted out his money, Charged them to his health...

I think the seeds of what we would now term punk mentality

were there in that house.

You know, you could be on your way to the kitchen

and suddenly become the bass player.

Having started out playing for the amusement of their fellow squatters,

the 101ers soon graduated to their local pub, The Elgin in Ladbroke Grove.

At the time the 101ers still had their goal -

being a band like the Feelgoods

and being one of the, if you like, top pub rock bands.

Almost overnight, this modest ambition was realised

and it was the lead singer Joe Strummer

and his high octane performance that people came out to see.

You came into the store and said,

"Saw this band at Dingwalls last night.

"The lead singer's an absolute star. We've got to do something with them."

And so, we then, a couple of nights later, went out.

-Remember it was one of those student gigs...?

-South London.

-Barely a stage.

He played like he was playing in front of 20,000 people, you know?

The guy's energy was just ferocious.

Watching him, he was like amphetamine person,

just going completely crazy.

It was just like veins bulging out of the neck.

There was an anger there.

It was clear that Strummer's charisma and conviction were set to outgrow the 101ers.

One night at The Nashville,

a new support act would set him on his road to Damascus.

I was working with the 101ers and the next night,

they were playing The Nashville and the Sex Pistols were the support act.

I walked into Nashville

and I got to the back and Joe was watching the Sex Pistols.

I kind of felt this atmosphere when I walked in there, really different.

I remember putting my hand up like that and going to him,

"Do you feel that?"

And he went, "Yeah." I said, "There's something different in the air."

There was a magical time, from maybe the beginning of '76

through to late '76,

where you genuinely felt something was going on.

You could feel something like punk coming.

You could feel a change coming.

You weren't quite sure what it was.

April, 1975.

The Americans evacuate Saigon.

For me, the end of the '60s.

Although it's 1975, Vietnam was the...

central rallying point of the 1960s.

It's what we protested against.

We went to Grosvenor Square, shook our fists.

It was Beatles and Stones,

Mick Jagger and Tariq Ali and Vanessa Redgrave.

We were angry about Vietnam.

Vietnam finished with the American surrender - sorry, guys -

in 1975, April,

evacuated by helicopter from the Embassy in Saigon.

November '75, a band called the Sex Pistols

did their first gig at St Martin's art school.

So somewhere between April and November

was where that generational baton was handed on.

Richard "Kid" Strange was the cosmic leader

of psychedelic proto-punks, the Doctors Of Madness.

They had many of the hallmarks of what became punk

and were on the road to success by 1976.

We got a call from our agent, this must have been May, '76,

saying, "There's a band you might have heard of, they've caused a bit of trouble.

"You know who I'm going to say. It's the Sex Pistols.

"They want to support you. Is that OK?"

I thought, "Yeah, fine, bring it on," you know.

We arrived and the Pistols were sitting in the auditorium.

They were naughty, but not excessively so.

They looked like they were kids bunking off school, you know?

They were that bit younger than us.

We'd sort of been led to believe that they might be armed, you know!

As harmless as they may have appeared,

the Pistols were armed with something so violently new

that any act with so much as a whiff of the old regime about them

could now consider themselves the enemy.

They opened the show and I was watching from the wings

and I thought, "It's all over for us."

The reaction that they garnered was just extraordinary -

devotion to the point of evangelical prostration in front of the stage.

# We're so pretty

# Oh, so pretty... #

Or, "What is this abomination? It's not music." You know?

And, of course, in a way, that was the point.

It was much better than music, it was something to upset your parents.

# We're so pretty Oh, so pretty

# Vacant... #

You just thought...

"I'm two years too old."

And then, to compound the whole thing,

by the time we came off and got back into the dressing room,

the Pistols had been through our pockets and nicked our money as well!

# And we don't care. #

Punk's time had come.

The iceberg had cometh

as Britain basked in record temperatures in the summer of '76.

Its roots run deep and a diverse cast had played their part in setting the scene,

but British punk's true birth,

the spawning of this visceral, ugly, enticing beast

to be loved or hated but impossible to ignore

can only be traced to your first time -

the first time you saw the Sex Pistols.

These four characters stumbled onto the stage

and they played these songs

and they were just like nothing else I've ever seen or heard before.

Wow. They played a Stooges song, they played No Fun,

and they played Watcha Gonna Do About It,

the old Small Faces song, but instead of,

"I want you to know that I love you, baby," it was,

"I want you to know that I fucking hate you, baby."

I thought, "That is cool."

Actually, they were sort of...very beautiful.

They were like fairies, really.

Fuck me. It's the only language I can use.

I mean, it was a cultural ground zero.

You know, the sort of fairies at the bottom of one's garden. And young.

I mean, I actually couldn't hear what John was singing

but there was an energy and an intensity that you could not deny.

What was so different about the Sex Pistols early on

was they were quite aggressive to the audience.

It was the eyes, it was just the eyes, looking at the audience.

He'd look at them with such hatred.

He was sat there, scowling, and I felt really drawn to that.

I just loved the contradiction and I just had never seen anything like it.

It just inspired me to leave college,

split up with my missus and go for it.

It was an event. Not so much a musical event, but a cultural event.

Even then, you could see this was different, this was important.

The electrifying message of the Pistols was spreading fast

and Johnny Rotten was becoming the oracle of the punk generation.

I knew that it would catch on

because I knew the minute I saw Johnny Rotten

that he was exactly the kind of poetic figure

that was going to inspire a whole generation of kids.

The word "punk" is as old as Shakespeare.

Although I knew that none of the musicians of that generation

would particularly like to be called punks,

when you're spreading the word

and writing it down, you had to have this term.

Suddenly, Caroline Coon labels the Sex Pistols punk

and me the king of punk.

King Johnny went forth to address his subjects

and declared war on his enemies.

-What's this thing you've got against hippies?

-They're complacent.

We're not supposed to know nothing, us.

But it's them what did not know a thing. How ludicrous!

And that was their revolution, you know,

they were the hangovers from the '60s.

I always knew the '60s wasn't a revolution.

It really just was a bunch of university students,

with somewhat wealthy parents, having fun.

Condemned for their lack of ambition,

overnight, the long-haired older brothers of Britain,

including those pioneering pub rockers, were yesterday's men.

The Pistols inspired their generation

to write their own future.

You wanted to get involved, man. You didn't want to be just a fan.

And it was about that kind of empowerment and reinventing yourself.

I mean, Strummer told me as much.

He said after he saw the Pistols,

101ers was like yesterday's newspaper.

Joe Strummer had been courted

by guitarist Mick Jones on the hunt for a lead singer for his new band.

Struck by the Sex Pistols, Strummer realised he was, in fact,

a punk trapped in an pub rock band.

He ditched the 101ers, jumped a generation

and signed up to The Clash.

In those days, it was very quick.

You'd be in a group for two weeks

and then you wouldn't again, or you may be.

-Sounds like a load of shit.

-Sounds great to me.

'I think you're really lucky'

if you find the right people, you know what I mean?

Then it just becomes more than just the individual,

it becomes the chemistry between...

You're very lucky to find that, the right people and the right time.

It comes along once in a while.

We didn't have any agenda, real agenda, it was just like,

we just want to play some tunes and have a good time, you know.

-The Clash didn't have an agenda?

-Well, I didn't.

I mustn't speak for the others.

-What sort of things do you write about?

-What's going on at the moment.

Like what?

Like what? Career opportunities.

They're sort of like...

all the kids are supposed to be like factory fodder, you know?

You don't learn nothing. All you're working for

is just to go into a factory

which is round the corner, or something like that.

# Police and thieves in the street... #

What the new generation did so successfully

was to create a new British identity

where artists as musicians

are writing about their own experience from the streets,

their own tragedies, their own splendours,

in an English, British voice.

# White riot I wanna riot

# White riot I wanna riot... #

-Tell me about White Riot, what's it about?

-Notting Hill Gate.

You know that riot they had? We was down there, me and him.

And we got searched by policemen looking for bricks.

Later on we got searched by a Rasta

looking for pound notes in our pockets.

All we had was bricks and bottles!

# White riot I wanna riot... #

The Pistols and The Clash spearheaded the nascent punk movement

with a two-pronged insurgency aimed at the powers that be.

They tapped the mood of violence

simmering under the surface of boring '70s Britain

and would bear witness when it spilled over.

Without this conflict at its heart,

punk would have been little more than noisy pop music.

But almost as important in defining this new art form

was the chaotic and often comical theatrics

surrounding life in a fledgling punk band.

The Damned led the way in this department.

# A distant man can't sympathise

# He can't uphold his distant laws

# Due to form on that today

# I got a feeling then I hear this call

# I said neat, neat, neat She can't afford a cannon

# Neat, neat, neat She can't afford a gun... #

You had Vanian looking like some fucking vampire,

Captain, once he got called Captain,

he changed from being quite a meek Ray Burns

into this clown-cum-raving idiot,

where you didn't know what he was going to dress in next.

It could be a bloody tutu,

a ballerina's tutu, or a nurse's outfit, or whatever.

Yeah, I've always liked dressing up, it has to be said.

The back of the first album cover, I wore a nurse's uniform.

The funny thing was, I actually found I was quite enjoying wearing it.

# Neat, neat, neat She can't afford a cannon... #

It allowed everyone to live their fantasies,

which is a wonderful thing.

The Damned taught a generation that they weren't stuck with their lot.

They called themselves names and revelled in their grotesque image.

They WERE the damned.

Punk was reflecting the ugliness of Britain back at itself

and if you didn't get this, you'd be left behind.

What was marvellous about it all, what was so hilarious

was that, of course, the major record companies thought,

"This can't be real! This... What?

"We're going to have to put this music out shortly?

"What? This is going to be in the charts?

"I hate it, it's disgusting!"

It was said at the time

that you could hear the sound of record company executives' bodies

hitting the pavement from the high buildings.

Having transformed London's live music scene a few years earlier,

the entrepreneurs behind pub rock now saw an opportunity

to embrace and enable the punk generation.

Here is a musical movement. All these kids want to buy something.

They can buy a few one-off little bits

but they want to buy something big to show their badge of credibility.

Stiff put the records out quicker.

We were quicker, we were faster, we were brasher,

we were noisier and we were the best.

There was a real vibe to it. There was no big office for them,

they were just in an old shopfront on Alexander Street.

And it was like, everyone was bagging records and doing it -

everyone was mucking in doing stuff.

It had Nick Lowe as a house producer.

It had Dave and Jake, who knew how to market records

in an original, innovative way.

A band like The Damned was almost tailor-made for them, really.

Stiff signed The Damned in late '76

and put them straight in the studio with house producer Nick Lowe,

of pub rockers Brinsley Schwarz fame.

I made quite a lot of records up there in that little place.

Occasionally - and I can think of on one hand -

we did something in there which you could not believe.

It was the first time I'd ever been in a recording studio.

I'd seen Let It Be and I thought, "This is going to be great."

And then we got into this sort of cupboard with a tape recorder.

What they created that day in those modest surroundings

would encapsulate the pure essence of punk

and become the very first punk single to be released in Britain.

We could not believe it. We could not believe it.

It seemed like it was almost unsettling.

It's a cracking riff, yeah, it's a cracking riff. Absolutely watertight.

He played it back and there was something that was just totally exciting.

It was like a genuine rush.

You know when you're walking out in the country somewhere

and suddenly an F1 jetfighter screams above you

and it just whaaaa...

# I got a feeling inside me

# It's kind of strange like a stormy sea... #

There's something so fundamental about it.

That's what made it startlingly original.

It's an ancient story somehow told in a brand-new way.

You've got to be made of bloomin' wood not be touched by it.

# I never thought this could happen to me

# Something strange Oh, what should it be?

Another first in true Stiff Records style

was the DIY filming of this video for New Rose

at the bastion of pub rock, The Hope & Anchor,

drawing a direct line to punk's humble roots.

I mean, that was two run-throughs

with a camera at two different angles,

maybe three, and that was it.

Edited that night and we had the video in the morning.

# I've got a new rose I've got her good

# Guess I knew that I always would... #

People have asked me over the years, "What's New Rose about?

"Is it like a love story?"

I've got a feeling that it's probably, as much as anything,

about what was happening with the punk scene.

The New Rose was this developing thing.

I've never been that much into lyrics,

I'm more of a guitar player, you know.

The same month The Damned's New Rose was released,

the Sex Pistols inked a deal with music business old farts, EMI.

And their debut signal, Anarchy In The UK,

hit the streets in November '76.

It was time for punk to go above ground

and into direct contact with those it was designed to offend.

I've done everything humanly possible to ban this thing and to stop it.

1977, the year of punk, was just around the corner.

Go on, you've got another five seconds. Say something outrageous.

-You dirty bastard.

-Go on, again.

-You dirty fucker.

-What a clever boy(!)

-What a fucking rotter.

Well, that's it for tonight.

# I am an antichrist

# I am an anarchist

# Don't know what I want But I know how to get it

# I wanna destroy the passer-by

# Cos I wanna be

# Anarchy... #

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