Punk London
[Published in "Punk: No One Is Innocent", Kunsthalle Vien 2008]
‘To complete my sensation of dislocation, alienation perhaps, a solitary laser beam hung flickerless over London, like a single wire of an imprisoning mesh. Didn’t they feel it too? I asked my friends. Didn’t they sense, in the condition of their city that night, symptoms of disintegration? It was like someone who had suffered a breakdown, I said, whose personality is split, splintered or possibly in abeyance’.
Jan Morris: “London Intermezzo: The Precarious Rituals of a City Between Performances”, Rolling Stone 263, April 20 1978
‘The wind howls through the empty stones looking for a home
I run through the empty stone because I’m all alone’Joe Strummer for the Clash, “London’s Burning”, 1976
The London within which punk rock flourished – for two short years: 1976 and 1977 – was a world away from today’s global megalopolis. Major cities change very rapidly, of course, but punk rock happened during a time of turmoil in London’s history, a crisis of confidence, of money, and of extremist politics. Of course some areas, like the West End, haven’t changed that much: but they were not where the focus was or where the culture was made.
London felt very threatening during the late seventies: violent, under siege and paranoid. When I think of my home city in that period, it’s in images of streets and streets of corrugated iron; line upon line of policemen; rows of derelict buildings awaiting demolition; the buddleia blooming in the bomb sites. And in the background, looming like primeval monsters, the tower blocks that would soon become a social realist cliché.
This was caused by very real deprivation. In common with other major cities in America and Europe, London was suffering the effects of a deepening recession that, among other things, had a direct impact on the urban fabric. During the 60′s and 70′s, whole areas had been emptied or razed in preparation for newbuilds but, as the money ran out, so was London caught between destruction and regeneration.
The relationship of Punk to urbanism was intense and integral. At its very beginnings, Punk was an international movement, a creative and emotional response to the situation that young dissidents and outcasts found themselves in the mid seventies. The hippies had advocated removing themselves to the country: the very early punks celebrated the dead cities that they would revive through the force of their vision.[1]
The new generation celebrated decay and vacancy. Dereliction offered an opportunity to live cheaply near the city centre, in cheap flats and squats. In the empty spaces and blank spaces, the imagination could run riot. The metropolis was no longer seen as the source of all evil, but as a playground that, for the overstimulated and undernourished young, allowed community at the same time as it gave up unexpected illuminations. The city was wide open.
London Punk was zoned by its two major groups, the Sex Pistols (Chelsea+World’s End/ Soho) and the Clash (North Kensington/ Ladbroke Grove). At the same time, Throbbing Gristle (Hackney/ London Fields) offered a complementary and contemporary dissonance. All three drew their energy and their character from their surroundings that, in each case, are barely recognisable today. Maybe the buildings are the same, but the atmosphere isn’t.
An unstable mixture of Mod West London and Irish Finsbury Park, the Sex Pistols were put together in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop at 430 King’s Road. Now that it has become an international tourist site, it’s hard to remember that the World’s End once was that: at the very wrong end of Chelsea, a corner too far for the fashion victims[2]. It demanded some commitment, just to get there, because there was nothing else.
Once the Sex Pistols got going, McLaren found them a rehearsal room at the back of number 6, Denmark Street – on the edge of Soho. The space was both practical – at various points one or two of the band lived there – and highly symbolic, in the heart of London’s Tin Pan Alley: the area that Laurence Harvey had made his beat in the 1960 film “Expresso Bongo” – a classic British rock film and a major influence on McLaren’s relentless hustler persona.
Early Sex Pistols’ shows oscillated between satellite towns like St. Albans or Welwyn Garden City, outer suburbs like Chislehurst, and central London venues like art schools and, infamously, a Soho strip club called El Paradise. Occasionally, they were forced to use existing venues on the pub rock circuit but they continued to play out of the way places while developing a residency at the 100 Club, on the North side of Oxford Street.
A stalwart of the postwar Trad Revival Jazz scene, this long-standing venue was directly plugged into the Soho underworld – the subculture investigated in Raymond Thorp’s “Viper”, the most notorious British drug memoir of the 1950′s. In autumn 1976, Malcolm McLaren found an office for the Sex Pistols’ management company, Glitterbest, in an old Victorian building (now demolished) called Dryden Chambers, a few hundred yards from the venue.
McLaren had long had a fascination with this thoroughfare. In the early 1970′s he planned a film about the changing patterns of consumerism as reflected the street’s chain stores. Oxford Street runs from Marble Arch – close to the site of Tyburn, where public hangings were held until the late 18th century – and narrows as it goes eastwards towards Holborn: McLaren insisted that this was a piece of crowd control constructed after the 1780 Gordon Riots.[3]
Down a side street a few hundred yards away from the 100 Club was the lesbian club, Louise’s, that became an inner circle punk hangout in the autumn of 1976. There the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the groups that would soon follow them into the spotlight mingled with members of the disaffected, flamboyant suburbanites who would become known as the Bromley Contingent. Oh, and a few ‘very very resentful middle-aged, middle class dykes’[4].
The Bromley Contingent – Siouxsie Sue, Steve Severin, Billy Idol, Berlin and others – all came from London’s South East quadrant. Former Bowie and Roxy fans, obsessed with the film “Cabaret”, they were most at home in the gay bars of the period, the Sombrero, the Masquerade, Rob’s and Louises: only there would they would not be hassled. As did, in the early days, the Sex Pistols and the Clash: for they were outrageous for the time.
This link-up between another outcast subculture has been ill-reckoned in many punk histories[5]. Although it was nearly a decade since its partial decriminalisation, homosexuality was still misunderstood and demonised – too often forced to live in the shadows. The gay clubs were often situated in forgotten part of the city, and thus – apart from the freedom of dress and behaviour that they offered – were part of the punk remapping of London.
The most celebrated example of this was in the way that a former gay bar became the hottest punk club in London. Chaugeramas was, in Berlin’s words, ‘a dingy dive where the worst transvestites in the world went, and all these businessmen’. After the national scandal caused by the Sex Pistols’ appearance on television, punk was shut out of most venues, and this basement club in a decayed part of London was its home for a season.
Chaugeramas was sourced by Gene October, the singer of Chelsea, who had contacts in the gay underworld of the time. In 1976, when the Roxy opened, Covent Garden was derelict: the fruit and veg market that had been the area’s raison d’etre had shut in 1974. Into this interzone poured the punks, their confrontational dress finding its perfect setting: the brick walls and smashed windows that would become an iconic cliché in 1977.
There was another aspect to this dynamic. The Bromley Contingent had a heightened view of the inner London. ‘I always gravitated towards the city,’ Siouxsie remembered; ‘I hated suburbia. Some people stuck to their local town, like Bromley. You could hang out there and feel pretty grown up, but I hated it. I thought it was small and narrow minded.’ From 1976 on, London became a glamour magnet for a whole generation of young suburbanites.
At the same time, the Sex Pistols’ origin in number 430 helped to transform the Kings Road. As the name changed from “Sex” to “Seditionaries” at the end of 1976, the group became nationally infamous and the shop became a place of pilgrimage. The Kings Road strip now stretched for a good mile from Sloane Square in the East to World’s End in the West and, as well as “Boy”, a whole selection of outlets arose to cater to the burgeoning punk trade.
Many of these were concentrated at the World’s End bend: Johnson’s and American Classics were already there, but in spring 1977 the Beaufort Market opened – with a stall run by Poly Styrene (X Ray Spex) among others. Just on the other side of the road, Roxy Music designer Anthony Price opened his new shop Plaza. From the spring on, hundreds of punks walked the strip, leading up to the massed disturbances of the next eighteen months.
London Punk’s second major zone – North Kensington – was marked out by the Clash. Singer Joe Strummer was a veteran of the massed squats in the Chippenham, just north of the Harrow Road near Maida Vale. As he remembered, ‘someone in the council had decided they were going to knock down about a hundred fine Victorian terrace houses, and it was between deciding and them actually knocking them down that the squat culture flourished.’
Many other punk luminaries squatted during that period, including Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious (Hampstead) and future members of the Slits, the Clash and Public Imaged Ltd (Davis Road, Hammersmith). Clash co-writer Mick Jones squatted in Davis Road, before returning to live in Wilmcote House, one of the huge tower blocks at Harrow Road, just east of Ladbroke Grove. His view from the 19th Floor inspired the Clash’s “London’s Burning”.
In their early days, the Clash were hyper-modernist. Their territory was Ladbroke Grove, Notting Dale and the Harrow Road, all areas marked by dereliction. Through the centre of these empty zones ran the Westway, the only motorway to slice through inner London. Influenced by the J.G.Ballard’s “Crash” (1973) and “High Rise” (1975) they saw this part of London as a mutant environment that, despite its brutality, offered freedom.
Surrounded by empty spaces – like broken teeth in the face of the city – the Clash encoded emptiness into their music. Influenced by the dub reggae that was ever present in London during that period, they introduced the idea of drop-out: sudden gaps in their instrumental attack that highlighted tribal, pounding drums or the barked rants of Joe Strummer. This was, briefly, a science-fiction sound – before a more conventional social realism took over.
The Portobello Road area loomed large in their mythology after the big riot at the August 1976 Notting Hill Carnival. Caught up in what was essentially a black struggle, they felt powerless: the result was their first single, “White Riot”. The disturbances were also featured in the photograph on the back of their first album, released in April 1977: ranks of policeman run with their truncheons as the Westway looms large at the top of the picture.
Ladbroke Grove had long between a West Indian stronghold. As part of their identification with the area’s atmosphere, the Clash covered Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves” on their first album, and hired famed Jamaican producer Lee Perry to work on their summer 1977 single, “Complete Control”. Their fourth single, “White Man in Hammersmith Palais”, described the atmosphere of a reggae show at that famous venue.
The Clash’s humanist, multicultural approach would eventually help them to mass success: it arose out of North Kensington, in the same way that the Warholian carnival of early Sex Pistols’ shows came out of the suburban/ Soho milieu. In the same way, the Sex Pistols’ base in Denmark Street gave forewarning of their wish to enter the heart of the music industry – as they did when they signed to EMI Records in October 1976.
For Throbbing Gristle, it was the blasted environment of Hackney – where poverty was not temporary but ingrained – that shaped their monochrome, brutalist dystopias. They were not as far from Punk as might be imagined: they played at the ICA a few weeks after the Clash on the opening night of the infamous COUM Transmissions “Prostitution” Show, and their support act was Gene October’s Chelsea, renamed LSD just to annoy everyone.
Indeed, the tabloid furore that followed the Prostitution Show in late November – with COUM cast as the ‘wreckers of civilisation’ – can now be regarded as a dry run for the scandal that occurred in December 1976, when the Sex Pistols swore live on teatime TV. In both cases, it marked the collision of aggressive, avant-garde aesthetics with the beginnings of the powerful right-wing backlash that would eventually result in the Thatcher governments.
In 1976, COUM were best known for Mail Art and Performance Art actions: when they decided to add members and move into music, they took the parallel name Throbbing Gristle. Their principal base was at founder Genesis P-Orridge’s house in Beck Road, Hackney – a Victorian street full of decayed working-men’s houses, which were largely squatted by artists and bohemians. This felt like a dehumanised, dangerous part of the city.
Throbbing Gristle’s studio was, as P-Orridge remembered, at Martello Street’ in the basement of a factory, and also next to London Fields Park, which is where a lot of the plague victims were buried. So through the concrete walls of the basement were thousands of dead plague victims, so we nicknamed it the Death Factory, but I always saw the Death Factory as a metaphor for industrial society as well, like Metropolis‘.
Released in 1977, the group’s darkly ambient first album reflected this environmental worldview. P-Orridge: ‘when we’d finished producing the tapes that became “Second Annual Report”, I remember going outside at Martello Street as a train passed on the railway line, and there was a transistor radio blaring round the corner, and a sawmill cutting up wood, and I just said, we haven’t invented anything. We’ve just put down what’s here all the time’.
The zenith of London Punk was the Sex Pistols River Thames boat trip on the Jubilee Bank Holiday, June 1977. To promote the single, “God Save The Queen” – which although banned right across the media was rising fast up the charts – their record company Virgin hired a pleasure boat called The Queen Elizabeth ostensibly for a German synthesizer group. When the Captain found out that it was for notorious the Sex Pistols, he was not pleased.
As the boat floated up river towards the Houses of Parliament, the Sex Pistols began playing “Anarchy In The UK” – an extraordinarily symbolic moment, as the group laid its claim to be the real face of England, not the nauseating nostalgia of the Royal Silver Jubilee. In the press iconography of the time, images of Punk and the Sex Pistols vied with pictures of the Queen and the Royals – both icons of a divided country on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
The lyrics of “God Save The Queen” laid it all out: ‘god save your mad parade’; ‘there is no future in England’s Dreaming’. For many young Britons, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee – she had acceded to the throne 25 years before – was a rotten lie, a return to the early 1950′s, just after England had won the war and the old class structure was dominant. In 1977, this dream was manifestly threadbare, and nowhere more than in London’s derelict areas.
Beneath the stupidity of its media face, Punk was concerned with truth and perception: as Johnny Rotten had sung on “I Wanna Be Me”, ‘now is the time to realize, to have real eyes’. The drama of the Jubilee boat trip – enacted on the river right in front of England’s Parliament – brought present realities into collision with state-sponsored fantasies of the past. The cry of ‘No Future’ allowed the future to happen.
In their very different ways, the three keynote London groups of the period worked on the same principle: that the existential truth was to be found, not in the wealthy areas that existed and will always exist in London, but in its forgotten interzones. Not just because they embodied the desperate situation of England at that time, but because they highlighted the fact that the city was porous, that it could be bent to the aesthetic or dissident will.
Within these empty spaces the punks – just like the Lettrists had done a couple of decades before[6] – could remap the city. The energy that they poured into districts and buildings that had been rejected by everyone else offered a kind of instinctive urban regeneration that, twinned with the media concentration on London that occurred in the Jubilee Year of 1977, could now be regarded as the start of the capital’s climb back up to its present world city status.
Just as Punk Rock, in enshrining failure, made success very difficult for those groups who were, then the consequences of its love for the inner city had the effect of closing down the circumstances in which it flourished. Beginning in the early 1980′s, the regeneration of London has been thorough and brutal: there are now almost no empty spaces within the inner city. Like Manhattan, London is increasingly become for the very rich.
Most punk landmarks have long disappeared. The Roxy Club is now the basement of a shoe shop, in the consumerist paradise of Covent Garden. Despite some vestigial grunge, Notting Hill is now associated with young Conservatives rather than the West Indians, bohemians and druggies of yore. The Kings Road has become a branded high street, its individuality barely clinging on in the Vivienne Westwood’s World’s End at number 430.
The single best visual record of London in 1977 can be found in the landscapes of Derek Jarman’s film “Jubilee”, with its vistas of corrugated iron and destroyed Victorian housing. Much of it was shot in Rotherhithe, in London’s Docklands, which is now one vast new upmarket housing estate. Even Hackney, Throbbing Gristle’s nightmarish manor, has become in part a fashionable, art-world district – on the Hoxton/ Shoreditch strip.
Thirty years on from Punk, London is a city transformed. On the one hand the improvement in housing conditions and facilities can only be applauded, but there is a downside – in that it is increasingly hard for the young, the poor, the bohemian and the artistic to live near the centre of town. Which then precludes something like Punk ever happening again. Until the next serious economic downturn.