Longlisted for the 2017 Penderyn Music Book of the Year
The Sex Pistols, The Clash and the ’Class of 76
This is the story of the birth of Punk, with a capital P, in the only country where it was a mainstream movement: the UK; told entirely by eye-witnesses (Heylin included) whose words, then and now, have been held up to the light of history’s hindsight.
This is also the story of the rebirth of Rock, by a bunch of bands who set out to deconstruct and destroy the form, on the island that largely invented it and reinvented it at least twice in the fifteen years before Punk.
And it is the story of the ex-Catholic, semi-Irish, snot-nosed, working-class Cockney oik who dealt the final, fatal blow to England’s dreams of empire when he became a Rotten revolutionary.
But most of all it is the story of a handful of British youths who were inspired to raise their voice in song, and allow it to echo around the world.
It is a story that, till now, has only been told piecemeal: of one band blazing a trail gig by gig, convert by convert, to the pre-set agenda – not always adhered to – of a fetish shop owner until, within a single year, the whole island rocked to the sound of ANARCHEEE. How did this happen and why does it still matter? Read on.
The Sex Pistols are one of the most significant bands in the history of modern music yet so few were witness to their brief lifespan, particularly in 1976. That year they gigged relentlessly and developed from Malcolm McLaren’s post-May ’68 Situationist/New York Dolls/Richard Hell wannabe conceit to a band that truly did manifest a ground zero for rock’n’roll that continues to permeate not only every aspect of underground music but as a constant in mainstream culture. It wasn’t just the polarizing reactionary affront of scoundrel urban youth mixed up with a Svengali, it was outstanding songwriting and, by mid-year, an ability to perform as an incendiary lightning rod of inspiration. Heylin has done a masterful job of mapping the when, where and who’s who in the Pistols pied piper saga. He connects the dots and draws the lines from one gig to the next elucidating an atmosphere of England where the future of intelligent rock’n’roll heeds the call of punk in a dismal environment of bedraggled hippie/prog boredom. Key players from the inner circle of Vivienne Westwood, Jordan, Chrissie Hynde, Pete Perrett; to the Bromley Contingent of Siouxsie, Severin, Billy; to the Manchester art school of Buzzcocks, Fall, Morrissey; to the London mob of the just forming Clash, Damned, Gen X et al; to the outliers Pauline Murray, Mark Stewart, Steve Strange; to Sniffin’ Glue’s Mark Perry; to a host of NME/Sounds/MM letter writers – they all enter the maelstrom in the heatwave of 1976 UK as active witnesses and Heylin traces it via any and all available archive, finding order in the sometimes chaotic memory banks. Myths and legends are sorted out (Pistols and Clash had a gig the very same night as the Ramones at the Roundhouse … sorry Please Kill Me) and Heylin, while consistently studious, voices it all with a tone both fun and biting, and with enough quickie obscurant references to keep all us punk rock geeks in chortle mode. But where he really scores is by examining the extant audio documents from the slew of Pistols shows tracking a band whose value was, and still is, debated by audiences and journalists alike. With serious critical facility, Heylin hears undeniable and visionary greatness from a band that truly did turn the industry on its ear, set it ablaze and, with a very real dynamic of group psychosis and tension, compose a catalogue of brilliant music. And, for the lucky few, a host of whom are present in this book, a life defining experience. After the post-Bill Grundy media exploitation, the impossible relationship between Rotten and McLaren (and Matlock and…) and the post-76 Sid Vicious on bass/USA debacle, the Pistols, of course, go off the rails. But from November 1975 to December 1976 they were, by Heylin’s fine research, progressively phenomenal and the author, with a palpable excitement in recapturing such an extraordinary time, offers the Sex Pistols and their fans a well deserved dignity.
Clinton Heylin has finally released his own personal Sgt Pepper – a book about the birth pangs of punk rock itself with every twitch and every breath and every distorted fibre of 1976 noted and put into a thorough context, trying to make sense of just why this most wonderful moment happened. Heylin has pared the narrative to the bone for this dense and condensed speed read through the battlefield and frontline of 1976 culture that totally explains just why this happened and how it happened.
A speed read that mirrors the tempo of the times, an oral history from protagonists to punters. For those who weren’t there, but swear they were, now you are.
[Anarchy in the Year Zero] is excellent, sharp, and lays its agenda bare from the off. It’s anti-revisionist. It also does not seek to court favour; those guilty of changing views over time into a falsehood are exposed, with evidence. Shaped by an array of input, both new and historic from a vast number of individuals and sources, Heylin guides us through the birth of punk as it evolved; situations, events and individuals interacting and creating something life changing and remarkable along the way. He leaves you wondering how it was possible for so much to have taken place in ‘year zero’. Leaving the over-intellectualising at the door, Anarchy In The Year Zero provides a welcome, much needed balance. And does so at a lively, digestible pace, with a welcome humorous air blowing through making it all the more enjoyable, oh & readable. Call it a refreshing refresher.
Most accounts of the Punk Revolution restrict themselves to recycling the same, over-familiar sources. Enter Clinton Heylin … [his] fastidious research and forensic examination of many previously unutilised original sources … moves quickly through the year, his pace matches the speed at which the scene develops. Peter Lloyd’s colour photos are equally fresh. The whole book is a glorious reminder of the romance of the pre-internet era, when it was possible to go a gig with no idea of what you were going to see or hear. Clinton and Route are to be congratulated for putting these thirteen months under the microscope and observing the fascinating creatures scurrying around.
If you want to drink in that brief twelve-month period where the Pistols, The Clash and the Damned represented a rebellion against the forces of Chinnichap, Genesis and 10cc, in the sweltering hot summer of 1976, before it all went horribly wrong, let this tome be your guide.
Mick Middles talks with Clinton Heylin about Anarchy in the Year Zero on FAB FM...
Clinton Heylin talks with Jimmy Wagg on BBC Radio Manchester about the punk experience in Manchester...
Clinton Heylin Interview – Anarchy in the Year Zero
An extract from Anarchy in the Yeat Zero.
Whatever Rotten’s concerns about the original trio’s musical chops, McLaren knew that his presence gave renewed purpose to his own great plan. Starting the third week of September 1975, he agreed to rent the band a rehearsal room and studio flat behind Zeno’s bookshop, having answered an ad in Melody Maker which began, ‘Tin Pan Alley. Must be useful for some musicians, agents or such…’ His hero, fifties impresario Larry Parnes, would have been proud of him.
(Later on, McLaren would begin to parrot Lydon, asserting that ‘the music wasn’t [ever] important. It was just a declaration of intent and an attitude.’ But such post-Pistols statements are belied by his every action in the year the Pistols mattered.)
Having spent months looking for grade-A Attitude, McLaren had stumbled on someone it spumed from like some great geyser. Once Rotten found a ‘way of expressing it’, bile gushed forth in all the lyrics he wrote in the months before the band found a public platform for this loaded Pistol. The songs had titles like ‘Submission’, ‘I’m A Lazy Sod’ and ‘We’re Pretty Vacant’, to which Matlock, Cook and Jones set their own Small Faces-but-for-the-seventies sensibility. McLaren couldn’t wait to tell one former incumbent:
Nick Kent: The first time Lydon’s presence was made known to me was when McLaren and I were walking down Denmark Street, and he turned to me and said, ‘We’ve found a singer. He’s the best thing in the group. He looks like a spastic, and he’s just written this song, “You’re only twenty-nine/ You got a lot to learn.”’ [‘Seventeen’]
As for Rotten, he couldn’t wait to unveil his own version of punk rock on a London that still hadn’t quite recovered from the Blitz. Years of being ignored, put down and put upon had produced a genuinely angry young man who, like an automaton of hate, one only needed to wind up (and stand back) to see folk scatter. Unless one felt just like him. And Rotten now had a remit, planted there by the equally iconoclastic McLaren:
Johnny Rotten: We didn’t stay in a rehearsal studio until we were so perfect we were boring. The whole idea was to get out and have some fun … and we hoped that some people would see us and go away and form their own bands. We wanted to make a new scene. [1977]
The ‘we’ in question was not the royal ‘we’. Rather, it represented the philosophical union of manager and man-at-the-mike which would last until the darling buds of May, that is, the first flickers of infamy. For now both were equally anxious to smelt the Sex Pistols in the furnace of public opinion and see if it still stood up. But neither of them had a clue as to how one actually secured gigs. McLaren’s last resort was literally called The Last Resort, a late-night restaurant/club on the Fulham Road, which agreed to allow them to play, then at the last minute changed its mind.
When this potential avenue fell through, the Pistol with the greatest pop sensibility, Glen Matlock, took matters into his own hands. He convinced the social secretary at the art college he was ostensibly attending – thus receiving an annual government hand-out without having to ‘sign on the social’ – to let them play. St Martin’s College of Art had several things going for it. It was not only slap-dab in the heart of the city, it was across the road from their new rehearsal room. Most importantly, it was not a pub.
All it took was Matlock’s request. There were many tin-pot colleges in the South East that needed bands willing – for ‘beer money’ at best – to provide support for an evening’s entertainment in front of apathetic students pissing away their grant at the subsidised bar of a weekend. When there were no Christians available, even a band calling itself the Sex Pistols would do. The bassist promptly decided to visit other art colleges in the environs to see if it was just as easy to get gigs elsewhere:
Glen Matlock: Just before that [St Martin’s] gig, I went over to Central School of Art in Holborn and swung us another gig there … ‘I’m in a band and we’re looking for a gig.’ ‘What’s the name of the group?’ asked [social secretary] Al [McDowell]. ‘The Sex Pistols.’ [His friend] Sebastian [Conran]’s eyes lit right up … ‘With a name like the Sex Pistols, we must have you.’ So I invited them to the gig at St Martin’s.
This meant at least two people would be there to see the Sex Pistols – as opposed to the headliner, Bazooka Joe. However, if Matlock was relying on the band’s manager to fill out the sparse throng from his address book of contacts, he was to be disappointed. McLaren wasn’t yet sure they were ready. The extent to which he drummed up interest was mentioning it to the fashion-conscious boy and girl who ran Sex, Gene Krell and Jordan, and its accountant, Andy Czezowski, a colourful character but hardly a music buff.
On the night, though, McLaren was a most willing rabble-rouser. Bazooka Joe’s bassist well remembers at the soundcheck, ‘Malcolm standing at the front, orchestrating them, telling them where to stand.’ When they did start playing, at ear-splitting volume, Krell, who was standing alongside his boss, remembers, ‘Malcolm looking perplexed and then curious. I think he could see what a lot of the clued-up amongst us could see – this raw talent.’
If so, he had a musical antenna like few others. The drummer pounding away at the back of the stage is not so convinced it was ‘raw talent’ McLaren heard, and not the sound of a penny dropping: ‘I don’t know what he thought about the music … but he did know we were able to shock, … and I think he [then] made a decision to get more involved.’
At the time, McLaren was as likely as the band to draw others’ attention. St Martin’s attendee Paul Madden, for one, noticed some ‘weird bloke … wearing peg-leg trousers … [who] kept running back and forth’, and formed the view, ‘He was trying to start trouble.’
He need not have bothered. When it came to looking for trouble, the mere presence of the Pistols would more than suffice. And St Martin’s was the living proof. As Madden told punk chronicler John Robb, ‘They had an attitude that was basically, “Fuck off, we’re the Sex Pistols.” … They had a confidence in what they were doing.’ Even from the makeshift stage the band could see that they had set something in motion as yet unnameable – but explosive:
Steve Jones: We’d start[ed] playing live shows before we could play, really. I mean, we could make noise and some sort of construction of the songs and stuff; but it was madness, it was total madness.
John Lydon: The college audience had never seen anything like it. They couldn’t connect with where we were coming from, because our stance was so anti-pop, so anti-everything that had gone on before.
Paul Cook: We went on and it was really loud. It was deafening. And we were going really mad, ’cause this was our first gig and we was all really nervous. And suddenly you had this great big hand pop out, and someone pulled the plug out. [1977]
That someone, possibly chewing gum, was in the employ of Bazooka Joe, whose drummer John ‘Eddie’ Edwards had stuck around long enough to see Rotten ‘get up and sing in his torn woolly, [before] everyone said, “Oh, they’re not much good, are they?” and went and sat in the bar … [We just thought] they were a bit untogether and a bit messy.’
Bazooka didn’t stay in the bar for long. By this time the Mandrax Jones had popped shortly before hitting the stage was beginning to kick in and, as the boy looked at Johnny, he began to think, ‘This is fucking fantastic … I’ve made it. We’re actually playing in a band.’ (By his own admission, he ‘was fucked up’.) Jones started to get a bit carried away, turning his amp up full and aiming swipes at the PA the headliners had never been entirely happy sharing, sending a Bazooka Joe roadie scuttling across the road to the pub where the band had settled:
Robin Chapekar: We were sat in the pub and one of our roadies came running in, shouting, ‘You’d better get back! They’re trashing the gear and everyone is leaving in droves.’ We shot back. They were making a massive noise … They were kicking the amps, the drummer was trashing the drums. We went over and said, ‘Enough is enough!’ Danny took the mike off John and I took the amp off Steve and pulled the plug on him … They were too loud and the space wasn’t big enough.
Not every member of Bazooka Joe shared the general distaste. In this particular boot camp, bassist Stuart Goddard comprised a minority of one, ‘The rest of my band hated them … They thought they couldn’t play … I thought they were very tight.’ But even he had to admit, ‘They were abusing the instruments.’ The abuse didn’t stop there. When the plug got pulled, there was either ‘a brawl’ (Chapekar), ‘a bit of a fracas’ (Matlock), or ‘a huge scrap’ (sayeth Lydon).
Predictably, the cause was Rotten who, according to Goddard, ‘slagged off Bazooka Joe … [so] our guitarist Danny Kleinman leapt from the front row and pinned John against the back wall.’ So much for inter-band camaraderie. For Goddard, it would prove a turning point, ‘I came out of that gig thinking, I’m tired of Bazooka Joe, I’m tired of Teddy boys.’ (It would still take several top-up doses of the Pistols in performance for Adam Ant to emerge from Goddard’s febrile imagination.)
Matlock convinced himself the evening’s events had put the kibosh on the following night’s Central School of Art gig. To his mind, the whole performance had come across as ‘something of a racket. Plus, Bazooka Joe kept on pulling the plugs on us, trying to get us off the stage … [But Al McDowell] kept roaring with laughter all the way through the set – well, what we managed to do of it. I really thought we’d blown it … In fact, he really liked us.’
The following night they succeeded in getting the whole way through their eleven-song set. Indeed, Matlock would subsequently insist the Central was ‘one of the best gigs we [ever] did’. And the reaction was largely positive, aided as it was by a few familiar faces. As Steve Jones observes, ‘They pulled the plug on us [at St Martin’s], but the next gig, all the [same] crowd was there again.’
McLaren immediately realized art colleges were the best way to acquire valuable stage-time and hone the Pistols’ performance-art, while distancing the band from the current pub-rock revival which, to McLaren’s mind, was giving ‘rock revivals’ a bad name.
Clinton Heylin is one of the leading rock historians in the world, with over two dozen books to his name. These include biographies of Bob Dylan (Behind The Shades), Van Morrison (Can You Feel The Silence?), Bruce Springsteen (E Street Shuffle) and Sandy Denny (No More Sad Refrains), as well as his acclaimed pre-punk history, From The Velvets To The Voidoids, and the one and only history of rock bootlegs, Bootleg. His highly acclaimed titles It’s One For The Money and Anarchy In The Year Zero were nominated for the Penderyn Book Award. His titles, JUDAS! and Trouble In Mind, are in-depth accounts of the two electrifying periods in Bob Dylan’s career when he was roundly booed; No One Else Could Play That Tune delves deep into the New York recording sessions for Dylan's 1974 masterpiece Blood on the Tracks. He lives in Somerset.
A History of Fairport Convention and Its Extend Folk-Rock Family In June 1968, a group of Muswell Hillbillies made their official album debut as Fairport Convention. In the next fifteen years, three of those founding Fairportees – Richard Thompson, Ashley ‘Tyger’ Hutchings and Simon Nicol – along with the next generation of Fairport recruits – Iain Matthe..
Read More
Sixteen Again: How Pete Shelley & Buzzcocks Changed Manchester Music (and me): a love letter from Paul Hanley to his favourite band and his favourite city.
Read More
