Feature on punk rock in suburbia

The following feature was published in Deep magazine, the in-house magazine of a Croydon bar and club.

THE SOUND OF THE SUBURBS

John Peel got it right. Any culture wars won by punk rock, said the amiable Scouser, were won in the suburbs. When punk exploded, the epicentre might have been the middle of London, but the shock waves had most effect out where the tube lines don’t run. Three years after The Sex Pistols played the 100 Club, most of the handful of people present would be dressing in tea-towels and mascara and standing like shop-window mannequins at Spandau Ballet gigs.
The biggest bomb-crater left by the punk wars was financial. Before punk, you could start a band any time you wanted, provided you had about twenty thousand quid. After punk, you went to Woolworth’s and bought a guitar and amp for about twenty notes and your drummer played on Tupperware boxes full of rice. Then your mates borrowed your ‘gear’ and it was all round to their bedrooms to play the songs of The Adverts.
My home town had only one real punk legend. Dee Generate played drums with Eater, who had an EP called Get Yer Yo-Yos Out. He was 15 and, when the anti-punk backlash started – and Johnny Rotten was razored in a car park – Mr and Mrs Generate had a brick heaved through their window a few streets from me. We saw Dee Generate and the VD Scabs at a village hall in 1977. Our local record shop put out singles by Slimy Toad and Johnny Moped, and the summer of 1977 is best summed up by an online ‘Diary of a Suburban Punk Rocker’:

‘May 13th. Sent off for Sex Pistols T Shirt. – The naked 13-year-old boy with a stiffy and fag. Not exactly rock n roll but it will annoy [sic].’

Annoyance was part of the package. On Jubilee Day 1977, me and my kilted mates avoided the street parties and sat in my room playing The Pistols’ God Save the Queen out the window through my crappy little speakers. We’d had our punk epiphany. Mine had come at my own suburban music Mecca; Croydon’s Greyhound. Here it was – with my long hair and Jethro Tull jeans patch - that I saw The Stranglers, the only band I’ve ever seen that I could also smell. They were dark and incredible, even if I did believe for some time that their bassist was called Jean-Jacket Borneo.
Bands I saw at the Greyhound include Buzzcocks, The Jam, The Slits, Ultravox [the good Ultravox, with John Foxx] and The Vibrators. At a Magazine gig, I stood at the bar with Siouxsie Sioux on one side of me and Billy Idol on the other, treading on Idol’s blue suede shoes for good measure. Other bands that, to my shame and regret, I didn’t see at the Greyhound include The Ramones (The Ramones played Croydon!), Blondie and Talking Heads. After an Adverts gig at the ‘Hound, my mate found two halves of a leather jacket in the road outside. He took them home and joined the two halves with safety pins (what were shares worth in that industry in 1977?). Functional and decorative.
The idea of punk fashion would be unrecognisable to today’s youth, who gauge style by expenditure. Oxfam shops have never had it so good as they did in 1977. I would regularly venture out in great baggy granddad shirts with ‘We’re the flowers in your dustbin’ stencilled across the front, and huge second-hand suits with ten or fifteen badges down the lapels. Cheap mail-order PVC trousers were big, DMs, home-sewn bondage trousers and kilts. I went to see Ultravox wearing a nylon protective coat I used for a weekend job cleaning planes at Gatwick Airport. Everyone I passed got a static shock.
Suburban music took longer to grow, but it outlasted its London origins. Watching a band called Easycure in a back garden in Crawley in 1977, I rated them. Watching them a year later in Merstham Village Hall – premiering a song called Killing An Arab and now called The Cure - you could still see big things ahead. But it took time. Crawley – one of the original 1960s New Towns - also had its sports centre. By 1978, The Stranglers were now moving up the league and, when they played the sports centre, my soon-to-be girlfriend leapt on stage and snogged the bassist, whose name I now knew to be Jean-Jacques Burnel. I played at Crawley Sports Centre myself in ’79, with my band The Escalators. We won a competition to support The Clash, and my abiding memory is playing table tennis with Paul Simonon while my mum talked to Joe Strummer.
There was some doubt by then, though, as to whether The Clash and The Stranglers were punk enough; there were never any such doubts concerning The Damned. The Damned have a well-documented Croydon connection, with Captain Sensible being a local lad. When Sensible moved to guitar, their new bassist divided his time between thwacking the strings for The Damned and looking for me to beat me up for an ill-advised dalliance with his girlfriend. The Damned borrowed a couple of amps from my band once and, with gobbing still being de rigeur, they came back looking like glazed doughnuts.
Music fads come and go, but it’s the differences rather than the similarities that mark out punk and post-punk. It was comparatively difficult to get the music, for a start, which is why I had to ride a dangerous and uninsured Yamaha RD200 seven miles to Croydon in torrential rain in order to buy Joy Division’s Transmission on the day of its release.
Punk’s legacy is debatable. Every talentless Brit artist out of St Martin’s School of Art claims to have been influenced by punk, but that’s just because none of them can paint. The real legacy, after all the coloured vinyl and Patti Smith T-shirts have been lost, is that, for a couple of years, we had some music which was ours.