London Calling (66 page)

The stairs and the room were painted matt black, which made it very difficult to find your way around. There were floor-length
mirrors everywhere for the punks to look at themselves, which also gave the illusion that the room was bigger than it really
was. As with all clubs, the action was mostly in the ladies’ toilets. The Roxy in its original incarnation ran from December
1976 until April 1977. Don Letts was the D J, but as few punk records had yet been released, he mostly played the reggae and
ska that he played at Acme Attractions. There were short gaps between records because only one of the turntables worked but
that was all right. Letts: ‘In that gap you could feel the vibe of the room by the ambient noise you heard.’ He also recruited
his brother Desmond and some of the Rasta brethren to work at the club. Letts told Paul Marco: ‘They saw the potential for
an untapped herb market and the women.’
⁸
The punks didn’t know how to roll proper joints so they sold them pre-rolled.

There were two bars: a small lounge bar upstairs with a maroon carpet where the Bromley Contingent and the occasional Sex
Pistol would pose and members of the music press would drink, and a proper bar downstairs where the real action was. It was
run by Tony Gothard, the house hippie who had hair down to his shoulders. Lubricated by a pre-gig drink at the White Lion
on
the corner of James Street and Floral Street, the punks lined up outside the Roxy in orderly fashion, always dressed for maximum
effect. It was nothing like the scrum outside CBGBs in New York; in London even the bartender queued up to gain entry. The
look was
Rocky Horror Show
meets SEX with fishnets and black satin, white face paint and heavy black eye makeup. Many girls wore ripped men’s shirts
with the name of bands scrawled on them, the holes and tears held together with safety pins. According to Peter York, the
safety pins and razor blades came from Warhol transvestite superstar Jackie Curtis and were picked up on by the Sex Pistols
from Malcolm McLaren, but the razor blades were from Ian Dury and the safety pin from the May 1968 poster.
⁹
Czezowski had to replace the lavatory chains virtually every day as these were much favoured as necklaces. There were people
dressed as Nazis, dressed in black bin-liners, see-through plastic macs, bondage trousers and muslin tops, there were punks
with noughts and crosses in dayglow paint all over their faces, in torn unravelling jumpers and fishnets with no skirt. One
Japanese girl wandered around naked all evening. Very little of the clothing came from the King’s Road; it was all hand-made.
Faces were painted in bizarre shapes and colours, hair was sculpted and shaved, coloured and spiked. It was all tremendously
creative and inventive, but even more remarkable was how they had managed to get into the West End from the suburbs dressed
that way. The punks were much more extreme than the hippies ever were because they were purposely looking to shock.

The Roxy provided a venue for all the new bands: the Adverts did their second ever gig there; Eater, Johnny Moped, Chelsea,
the Cortinas, Slaughter and the Dogs, the Damned, the Outsiders, the Stranglers, the Lurkers, the Jam, the Vibrators, the
Boys, the Zips, Squeeze, the Rejects, the Only Ones – virtually every punk band going mounted the low stage and thrashed away
at their instruments. Most of them didn’t bother with a sound check, most of them could barely play at all. Those that did
attempt to balance their sound were wasting their time because Armand Thompson, who worked the PA, only used three microphones:
an overhead, a guitar and lead vocals. He claimed that when he was pissed he was incapable of mixing more than that and, anyway,
the club was so small there was no need to mic the drums. He would pretend to change things if a band wanted to try and set
proper mic levels if that made them happy.

Czezowski had a season of American bands – Cherry Vanilla, the Heartbreakers, and Wayne County and the Electric Chairs – which
helped the club’s finances. They were not strictly punk but they had the right levels of energy and were more professional
than the British punks, who learned
quite a bit from them. Unfortunately the Heartbreakers, and their camp follower Nancy Spungen, also introduced them to heroin.

Czezowski did not have a proper agreement with René Albert, the club’s owner, and often made a loss. At the end of March,
the owner brought in a new manager, called Reiner, and turned over the booking of the bands to an agency. It was the beginning
of the end. On 23 April 1977, Andy Czezowski was physically ejected from the club for non-payment of rent, which by that time
was running at £25,000 a year. Siouxsie Sioux was playing that night and opened her set by announcing that as Andy was no
longer running the club, this was the Roxy’s last night. Before performing her encore she announced from the stage:

‘I’d like to make an announcement that Andy’s been kicked out of this club, that the people who actually own the lease here
are taking advantage of the fact that he made the place famous. I want every single one of you in the audience tonight to
promise that you’re never going to show up here again. This place is closing.’
¹⁰

Meanwhile the new manager, Reiner, was jumping up and down on a banquette at the back shrieking: ‘No it’s not. It’s staying
open! It’s not closing!’ It dragged on until 24 April 1978, but from the moment Czezowski left, it became just another venue.
Punk had worked too well and there were hundreds of bands out there, all desperate for somewhere to play, so the owners never
had a problem booking acts. As punk became more mainstream, plenty of kids from the suburbs trekked in to fill the place.
But the atmosphere was gone. The real Roxy had closed.

Czezowski started a new place, the Vortex at the Crackers discotheque at 203 Wardour Street, but he got swindled out of it
almost immediately, and the Vortex never had the atmosphere of the old Roxy. He and Sue Carrington finished up by buying a
building in Brixton, from which they could not be evicted, and successfully ran the Fridge Club there for twenty years.

The massive publicity given to punk by the tabloids was taken up by the music press as a way to boost their flagging circulations.
NME
,
Melody Maker
and
Sounds
covered every punk gig, interviewed the most inarticulate punk bands (‘People who can’t write interviewing people who can’t
talk for people who can’t read’ – Frank Zappa), encouraged the public to buy extremely bad records (‘If you really be honest
about it most Punk records were fuckin’ awful, and just another con’ – Johnny Rotten
¹¹
), and wrote yards of overwrought prose about punk being the music of the streets that was empowering working-class youth.
In reality most of the key members of the
scene – Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, Jamie Reid, Glen Matlock, Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, TV Smith and
Gaye Advert, Viv Albertine – had been to art school, which had far greater impact on punk sensibility than any tower blocks
overlooking the Westway. More directly, the T-shirts, the record sleeves and the posters all showed a profound sense of the
history of contemporary art, making references to Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism, the Situationist International and other twentieth-century
art movements. In the future, punk was to become more celebrated for its graphics and clothes than for its musical contribution,
though in 2007 Rupert Murdoch’s
Sunday Times
did give away a free CD of tracks by the Sex Pistols, the Damned and the Buzzcocks called
Anarchy in the U K
, packaged with Jamie Reid-style graphics, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of a movement it vilified at the time.

The commodification of punk didn’t take long; as a social movement it was over by April 1977, the time Andy Czezowski was
thrown out of his own club. It had taken about nine months from start to finish; after that it was just a question of record
companies trying to wring records out of the bands; of King’s Road shops and market stalls flogging unravelling sweaters and
plaid bondage trousers, and the entrepreneurial spirit shown by those punks prepared to pose for tourist photographs for money.
Some of the original Roxy crowd turned to prostitution, others dealt in speed.

It is axiomatic that the true character of a culture, the state of its national consciousness, can be glimpsed through a nation’s
popular music, television shows and tabloid newspapers. In the post-war period there was never such a division as the one
between the punks and the cultural establishment in the late seventies. The punks exposed the barely restrained violence beneath
the British stiff upper lip; the repressed rage of the ‘flog ’em, bring back hanging’ old ladies delicately sipping their
tea in Bexhill-on-Sea and Windsor; the roiling frustrations and daily disappointments of the robot-like millions commuting
into the City of London each day to make millions for foreign bosses and anonymous shareholders; the blatant hypocrisy of
the Fleet Street newspapers, suppressing and distorting facts to suit the political objectives of their millionaire owners;
the cynical manipulation of children and the poor by the pony-tailed advertising men of Charlotte Street – one punk band had
a song about the champagne party held to celebrate the launch of individual fish-finger packs for pensioners – the steady
diet of murder, murder, murder in films and television drama, and, in the seventies, still the puritan admonitions against
sex. The contradiction here was at its most obvious and schizophrenic: sex was legal, in fact, and yet it was a crime to
depict it graphically on film or in print; murder was illegal, in fact, and yet it was celebrated and depicted dozens of times
a night on television. One was healthy, pro-life, natural; the other its exact converse, but the anti-life brigade were in
power, spreading a grey fog of sexual guilt and fear, headed by Mary Whitehouse, the Billy Graham Crusade, and the right-wing
Festival of Light.

Punk was opposed to all this. Punk put a crack in the carapace of power and control and exposed the Wizard of Oz hiding within.
It said ‘Fuck this!’ instead of ‘Mustn’t grumble’. It was overwhelmingly negative, but that was what was needed. As the country
waved flags and celebrated Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee as if Britain still ruled the waves the punks showed the true
state of the country. Punk believed in absolute honesty and personal empowerment; do it yourself, don’t wait for some boss
or bureaucrat to condescendingly help you. The way things were going, with a shrinking manufacturing base and ever-growing
dole queues, there was no future for young people. Punk encouraged them to develop what skills they had and take a pride in
personal achievement; it was pretty basic but it was better approach to life than they received in sink schools. Nor were
the kids from the council estates the only ones who were disillusioned; the ex-public school managers of the Members told
me how they felt adrift; they had been brought up to rule an empire, to be leaders in society, but that society no longer
existed and it had not yet been replaced.

Whereas the hippies had a pantheon of gurus and mentors – William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, R. Buckminster Fuller, Marshall
McLuhan, R. D. Laing, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Bob Dylan and the like – the punks did not read and their ideas remained
garbled and ill-formed. People like Johnny Rotten, Joe Strummer and Malcolm McLaren took on that inspirational role in the
movement. Malcolm McLaren, despite his contradictions and financial hypocrisy, clearly felt that punk could be the agent for
social change. Unfortunately his eye for the main chance distracted him. Johnny Rotten told Chris Salewicz: ‘I think he did
things to the best of his abilities. He didn’t start out for the wrong reasons. It’s just that money interfered. He gets things
wrong and tries to manipulate people’s lives like it’s a game of chess.’
¹²
With no-one to offer any direction, punk rapidly ran out of steam. It did not, however, run out of speed, which continued
to be the drug of choice for the next movement, the New Romantics.

Perhaps the most significant role played by the punks in the late seventies was in the formation of Rock Against Racism (RAR),
one of the most important anti-fascist organizations of the period, which was supported
– albeit sometimes reluctantly – by most of the punk bands. RAR was formed in response to a racist outburst from a quite unlikely
source. At a concert in Birmingham on 5 August 1976, Eric Clapton, who had based his entire career on playing the music of
black American blues musicians, launched into a drunken racist diatribe in which he supported the anti-immigrant 1968 ‘rivers
of blood’ speech of the right-wing politician Enoch Powell. The man who at various times had said: ‘All I did was copy B.
B. King’ and ‘If it ain’t Mississippi black music it ain’t worth a damn’, now drunkenly told the audience:

Vote for Enoch Powell! Enoch’s our man. I think Enoch’s right, I think we should send them all back. Stop Britain from becoming
a black colony! Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out! Get the coons out! Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now
I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Vote for Enoch,
he’s our man, he’s on our side, he’ll look after us. I want all of you here to vote for Enoch, support him, he’s on our side.
Enoch for prime Minister! throw the wogs out! Keep Britain white!
¹³

The response was immediate. A left-wing activist, Red Saunders, his friend Roger Huddle and others wrote a joint letter to
the music press which read:

Come on Eric… you’ve been taking too much of that Daily Express stuff and you know you can’t handle it. Own up. Half your
music is black. You’re rock music’s biggest colonist. You’re a good musician but where would you be without the blues and
R&B? You’ve got to fight the racist poison otherwise you degenerate into the sewer with the rats and all the money men who
ripped off rock culture with their cheque books and plastic crap. We want to organize a rank and file movement against the
racist poison in music. We urge support for Rock against racism. Ps: Who shot the Sheriff, Eric? It sure as hell wasn’t you!