Memories of seeing The Sex Pistols and The Clash, 1977

New York, 1977 - I did my first trip to America during the 'Summer of Sam'. That was certainly a jolt of reality for a young English guy. It was like being transported into an episode of 'Kojak'. 

A serial killer, Son of Sam, was at large in New York City. The city wasn't considered safe, even at the best of times. There were blackouts, firebombings, a crime wave and rioting in some districts. The city was on its knees financially, virtually bankrupt. The police refused to patrol the subway, so a group of vigilantes - the Guardian Angels - provided unofficial protection so that folks could travel safely.

The search for Son of Sam was a mystery that gripped everyone. The killer, David Berkowitz, taunted police and the media, leaving notes for them at the scene of his crimes. The killings went on for over a year. Local newspapers carried headlines saying no-one was safe in the city. Then, in bizarre circumstances involving a parking violation, Berkowitz was finally caught in August 1977.

While New York was a city on the brink in the '70s, it was still an incredible spectacle for an 18 year-old from England. It was a hotbed of bohemia and fringe artistry. Before the real estate developers moved in and rents skyrocketed, the city had this incredibly raw and brash feel to it.

Me on Fifth Avenue, New York, 1977

American culture was the stuff of legend. As a teenager I was particularly fond of American writers like John Irving and Hunter S. Thompson., Jack Kerouac and Tom Wolfe. The language, the music, the architecture, the food - were all very different and fascinating back then, in the days before US culture engulfed the western world.

That process of cultural homogenisation began in 1977, with cheap transatlantic travel, thanks to the pioneering Laker Airways. Star Wars was the big hit movie of the summer in the US and I came back to the UK with movie posters and other Star Wars promo stuff. Nobody had heard of it, because UK release dates in those days were often months later. It wasn't until December 1977 that my friends at home finally got to see this movie I had been raving about.

The musical divide across the Atlantic was also much greater back then. The punk scene in New York, at clubs like CBGB's and Max's Kansas City, had not yet become part of the mainstream. My friends in the USA were all listening to Boston, Kansas and Aerosmith. Fleetwood Mac and Peter Frampton dominated the radio airwaves. 

 

Back in the UK, punk had reared its ugly head, just in time to stick two fingers up to one of Britain’s historic events, the Queen's Silver Jubilee. 

"The air turned blue"

Earlier that year in the UK, during the early summer we had celebrated the Queen's 25 years on the throne. Right in the middle of all that, the Sex Pistols released God Save The Queen and gave the  jubilee celebrations a spiky edge.

The Pistols hit the headlines in December 1976 being goaded into four-letter infamy on teatime TV. The public outrage was intense: "Who are these punks?" said the Daily Mirror. Suddenly we had a new youth cult - a riot of our own!

Although the Pistols were seen as punk's chief provocateurs, their notoriety prevented them from being full-time players on the actual music scene.

After the Today Show controversy, their record company, EMI, severed their contract. Concert bookings around the country were cancelled by local councils anxious to avoid having punks raising merry hell on their high streets.

This footage of a Thames riverboat party, where the Pistols performance is cut short by a police raid, shows quite clearly how the Pistols were targeted by the authorities and frustrated at every turn. A young Richard Branson is seen remonstrating with the police before the party is dispersed and Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren is arrested.

Without the Sex Pistols as a regular presence, the punk gig scene was made by bands like The Clash, The Damned, The Buzzcocks and hundreds of others with typically nihilistic names like the Snivelling Shits. They were out there in the clubs, bashing out their songs just as fast and loud as they could - and getting gobbed (spat) on by their frenzied audience. What a time it was to be the frontman in a band!

I wasn't a punk - I never gobbed at anyone. I was just along for the ride, like most teenagers if the truth be told. I did dress up in a black bin liner and spray beer and shaving foam around in my 6th form common room, but that was just part of a 1976 pre-Christmas show skit about punk rockers.

Real punks were in the minority at most gigs; they were the hardcore. Just look at the old film footage. There are more people with long hair and wearing flared jeans than there are actual punks in bondage gear, ripped t-shirts and safety pins through their noses.

Anyway, it wasn't about a uniform way of dressing so much as an attitude, a classic youthful rebellion. And it was exciting going to a gig and having the feeling that things could kick off at any moment.

That nervous energy was palpable at The Clash gig I went to at The Rainbow Theatre in London on 13th December 1977.

Extra security had been brought in, to make sure the punks didn't rip the place apart, as they had done the last time The Clash played there earlier in the year.

The sense of menace was stoked up even further by the skinhead elements that attached themselves to punk gigs and to bands like Sham 69, who played support for The Clash gig at the Rainbow.

Sham were no more menacing than any other punk band, but for some reason they attracted the mindless hooligan elements, and never really shook them off.

The Clash meanwhile, were the real thing, an edgy and more than competent rock band with a rebel image and songs that reflected the bleak outlook for many people in the 1970s. They had the same kind of explosive stage presence as The Who. Not as musical, but spiky and combustible. Their songs were not overly complicated, but that was the ethos, of course. Three chords, no boring solos, three minutes and out.

The Clash at The Rainbow

I remember being impressed by how good they were as a band. Topper Headon especially, who propelled the band in the way all good drummers do.

We were close to the front, nobody stayed in their seats, it was a free-for-all. But security was heavy-handed and people were being beaten. The atmosphere was us-against-them.

The Clash's songs, like White Riot, London's Burning, Career Opportunities and their cover of Police and Thieves reflected this conflict between young people and the authorities, especially in the cities around Britain in those days. The economic environment in the late 1970s was fairly depressing and young people in the inner cities genuinely felt there was no future. Police brutality and corruption were out of control at this time. The Clash's stance wasn't just a pose in the service of their punk image, they lived it and the devotion of their fans was largely due to the fact that The Clash really did mean it, man!
The Sex Pistols, meanwhile, had lurched from one disastrous record deal, with EMI, to another one with A&M, who dropped the band before the second single God Save The Queen, was even released. A copy of that unreleased single will set you back over £10,000 today.

Virgin Records picked up the Pistols' contract and released God Save The Queen just in time for the celebration of the Queen's Jubilee in the summer of 1977. It was an era-defining moment. A perfectly timed kick up the ass to the older generation.

It was all good clean fun really, even if it was underpinned by real disaffection. But the establishment didn't see it that way. The Pistols were deemed a menace to society and by mid-1977, they had been run out of nearly every town and city in England. They were public enemy #1 and couldn't get a gig.

Three days after I'd seen The Clash, the Pistols did have a rare gig scheduled at Brunel University in Uxbridge. It was a totally different experience from the Clash gig.

The Pistols arrive at Brunel University

Brunel was a regular haunt for us in the 70s, as we only lived a few miles away and could get there easily on the underground. The university had two main concert areas, the student union for smaller gigs and all-nighters and the sports barn, a gymnasium that served as an arena, for larger shows. That's where the Pistols played.

This was their first big gig for months, so tickets sold out instantly. It was hot and sweaty inside but there was a great sense of anticipation as we waited for the Pistols to take the stage.

A lot was riding on this for the Pistols. They'd been hyped up by the music press, but there were questions about whether they were still relevant, or had they gone soft?

When they came on stage, the crowd started jumping around - to say they were pogoing is probably a stretch, because it was so crowded in there you couldn't move around much.

In terms of their stage presence, there was a clear difference between the Pistols and The Clash. The Pistols displayed little of the collective nervous energy of The Clash. The focus was very much on Johnny Rotten and, to a lesser extent, their very own cartoon punk, Sid Vicious.

They ran through their set and it was quite fun, for a while, with Rotten giving the crowd what they came for, a large dose of sneering cynicism.

Here's some rough audio of them playing God Save The Queen

Then it just became a bit samey, there was no real tension - no sense of punks against the world. Rotten started to berate the audience for being too tame.

The Sex Pistols at Brunel University

But the nature of the venue and with so many people crammed in, made it a bit of an endurance test for the audience.

And where the Clash were a stage-hardened and reasonably tight band, the Pistols looked a bit laboured in comparison. The Pistols' edgy but typically basic punk rock just felt a bit lame in comparison to the drama and tension generated by The Clash.

Sid's bass was turned right down to mask his shortcomings. Steve Jones gave it plenty of attitude, but really it fell to Johnny Rotten to carry the show on his own.

The NME's Chris Salewicz, reviewing the Pistols at Brunel, said the atmosphere at the gig was one of utter alienation. "The most total lack of empathy between a band and an audience I've ever seen." Maybe the Pistols wanted it that way, he mused.

Like me, Salewicz had just seen the Clash at The Rainbow and noted the contrast of "two utterly polarised extremes of positivism and negativity".

The NME review of The Clash by Cliff White tells you more about his dislike of all the hype around punk (he had a point) than it does about the gig.

I've also pasted here part of the Lester Bangs series of articles about his time on the road with The Clash.

NME's review of The Clash

The Clash review part 2

The Clash continued to evolve as a band. For punk rebels, they played the music business game very well, backed of course by the coffers of major label CBS.

Their cleverly manufactured image as the 'last gang in town' served them well and they worked hard to demonstrate that they believed in what they were doing.

Sadly, The Sex Pistols didn't evolve beyond a short and chaotic US tour. They split up soon after in 1978. McLaren exploited their fame and notoriety by putting together a movie about their rise to fame, The Great Rock N Roll Swindle. Sid became an unlikely pop star in his own right, but it wasn't to be a happy ending for him.

New York City police arrest Sid Vicious

at the Chelsea Hotel on Oct. 13, 1978

New York, 1978 - I returned to New York in the summer of 1978, where I saw Bob Marley & The Wailers at Madison Square Garden.

Meanwhile, Sid Vicious was holed up in the faded charms of the Chelsea Hotel with his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, feeding their respective heroin habits.

Without the band to keep him occupied, Sid's life spiralled out of control. At the hotel, Nancy died of stab wounds in what appeared to have been an argument with Sid. Indeed, he immediately confessed to the killing, though he subsequently denied it. But before he could stand trial, he died of an overdose in February 1979.

The more positive and enduring legacy of those early punk days is the music that came later, including The Clash's classic double album London Calling and the various albums John Lydon made as part of Public Image Ltd.

Punk music itself was throw-away and not meant to last, though it's good, now and then, to listen to songs like The Damned's New Rose and those early singles by The Sex Pistols and The Clash, to be reminded what a unique movement it was.



















Further viewing:
The Clash - BBC Documentary
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2LTvv6oSog

Rebel Truce - The History of The Clash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sxz2NVFKhE

The Sex Pistols - Pretty Vacant, at the Riverboat Party, 1977
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7d2VX-NTbgM

The Sex Pistols - A five minute history lesson
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdDgwYm2G9I

More rough audio from Brunel - I Wanna Be Me & Seventeen
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5zfQZDfqAs

The Sex Pistols - Liar, from their legendary show at the Screen On The Green, Islington
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0RJYBcGx6E

The Sex Pistols - Steve, Paul and Glen revisit their old Soho haunts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qV31UIxIQE0

More on my musical adventures in New York here:
https://bangnzdrum.blogspot.com/2020/07/more-musical-adventures-in-new-york.html

https://bangnzdrum.blogspot.com/2020/06/musical-adventures-in-new-york-part-1.html