Читать книгу Buzzcocks - The Complete History - Tony McGartland - Страница 44

This was the year in which Britain enjoyed its hottest summer for a century, Labour leader Harold Wilson quit as prime minister and Africa was ravaged by guerrilla conflicts. It has also passed into rock legend as the year that UK punk broke. In reality, the New Wave’s first tremor happened a couple of months earlier, on Thursday, 6 November 1975. That night, the Sex Pistols, whose line-up featured Johnny Rotten, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones and Paul Cook (guided by ex-New York Dolls manager Malcolm McLaren), played a support set at St Martin’s College of Art in central London, where Matlock was taking a part-time course. The band made such a racket that the plugs were pulled after only five songs, which included covers of the Who’s ‘Substitute’ and the Small Faces’ ‘Whatcha Gonna Do About It?’. Soon after, they supported Eddie and the Hot Rods at the Marquee, and media reviewers watched in amazement as the Pistols ripped the headlines from the Hot Rods, with Rotten smashing chairs into the PA system while Pamela Rookie (later known as Jordan) stripped off to the waist. At the time of these astonishing early gigs, the bestselling album in the country was by Jim Reeves, and a concerted media campaign had resulted in the re-entry into the charts of the Beatles.

It was an inauspicious start for a group who would revitalise rock music, but their decadent majesty was recognised by several people over these months: Stuart Goddard – or Adam Ant, as he later styled himself – was the singer in Bazooka Joe, who saw the Pistols and was so impressed that he quit the very next day to form his own punk band, setting a precedent that would be followed by hundreds of musicians across the country. In the following months, Joe Strummer left the 101ers, having been upstaged by the Pistols on the two occasions they opened for the five-star pub rock’n’rollers. He later said of Rotten’s band, ‘As soon as I saw them I knew rhythm and blues was dead.’

Steve Bailey (later Severin) and Susan Janet Dallion started the amateur, discordant and completely wonderful Siouxsie and the Banshees after hearing about the Pistols’ appearance in Bromley; Shane MacGowan quit his job as a barman in north London to kick-start the Nipple Erectors into action; William Broad set out on the road to becoming Billy Idol; and, last but not least, Peter McNeish and Howard Trafford vowed to form Buzzcocks.

McNeish and Trafford had met at the Bolton Institute of Technology in 1975, and, after reading an NME review of the Pistols’ notorious support slot for Eddie and the Hot Rods, they arranged to see Rotten’s band at a Friday night gig in High Wycombe, northwest of London. The pair duly borrowed a car for the weekend and travelled south, catching the group on the Friday night (which ended up in a huge punch-up, as would usually be the case) and at Welwyn Garden City on Saturday (which didn’t).

Both were gobsmacked by the band’s sheer energy and Rotten’s antagonistic stage presence, not to mention their savage version of the Stooges’ ‘No Fun’. During that weekend of intoxication by the punk spirit, a vision of their own group took shape in their imaginations, and by the time of their return to Manchester they had a suitably Sex Pistols-ish band moniker, and their own personal pseudonyms – Howard Trafford became ‘Howard Devoto’, and Peter McNeish transformed into ‘Pete Shelley’.

Over the next four months, Shelley and Devoto, along with scores of other nascent punks, threw themselves headlong into creating their own New Wave groups. At this time, there were no rules: the idea was simply to recast yourself in the vein of the Pistols, and to play as loudly and as aggressively as possible. Within four months of their trip south, Shelley and Devoto had booked the Pistols for a gig in Manchester; another month later, and Buzzcocks (completed by bassist Steve Diggle and sixteen-year-old drummer John Maher) had made their debut supporting them. In the audience that night were Ian Curtis, Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner (who later formed Joy Division), Stephen Patrick Morrissey, Mick Hucknall and Tony Wilson. After this gig, the course of Manchester music was changed forever.

As the summer wore on and the temperature rose, punk bands began to excite a certain amount of media interest, garnering mixed reviews in the music press, which was often more interested in the sensational aspects of the New Wave – the violence at gigs, the rowdy behaviour of the bands – than the music. Up until this time, punk was relatively unfocused, but Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren attempted to present it as a concerted movement in September 1976, when he booked the 100 Club in London’s Oxford Street for the infamous two-day punk festival that showcased all the leading New Wavers, including the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Subway Sect and Siouxsie and the Banshees on the first night, and the Damned, Chris Spedding & the Vibrators, the Stinky Toys (from France) and Buzzcocks on the second. McLaren succeeded in creating a media event, with NME taking up the punk cause, and the papers having a field day when their prejudices about punk violence were confirmed when Sid Vicious (then drummer with the Banshees) allegedly took a girl’s eye out when a beer glass he hurled shattered on a pillar.

After this, punk rollercoastered, with groups getting banned from venues of all descriptions (including the 100 Club) and record companies seriously wondering whether the New Wave could make them a quick killing. However, events were moving fast and, on 22 October, the Damned issued their debut 45 (heavily influenced by the New York Dolls’ own debut) on the independent Stiff label, with the record selling four thousand copies via mail order before it was picked up for distribution by United Artists. In view of the major labels’ hesitancy, independent releases looked as if they were the way forward. This appealed to Buzzcocks more than most – they had no intention of moving to London, and record companies seemed less than enthusiastic about making the jaunt north. This strong regional loyalty remained with Buzzcocks throughout their career, and reinforced their individuality within a movement that had more than its share of plagiarists. (Shelley later said, ‘We didn’t hang out with any emerging scene, we just appeared there and started doing these things until it worked.’) At this stage, a single could be recorded and pressed up for less than £1,000, which meant that, if suitable distribution could be found, the record might even make a profit. Buzzcocks didn’t want to be left out, and, having secured a loan from friends and family, they recorded four tracks just after Christmas 1976 for release on their own New Hormones label. The success of their debut Spiral Scratch EP showed that a cheap self-released record was viable, and indeed preferable to major-label avenues. This early success has led many observers to credit Spiral Scratch with being the catalyst for the entire independent record label ethos.

Nineteen seventy-six ended as it had begun, with the Pistols holding the trump punk card. On 1 December, they appeared on Thames TV’s early-evening current-affairs programme, Today, hosted by veteran presenter Bill Grundy. The Pistols were obviously there to act up for the cameras, and Grundy played into their hands, chatting up hanger-on Siouxsie Sioux, and asking the band to ‘say something outrageous’. Steve Jones did. With ‘dirty bastard’ and ‘fucking rotter’ having been broadcast on primetime TV, the newspapers rolled off the presses the next morning with tales of outraged viewers kicking their TV screens in – Rotten, Matlock, Jones and Cook instantly became household names.