The filth and the fury, 40 years on

Up until that point, as Nick Hornby wrote in 2007, few people had taken notice of punk. “There wasn't much music you could buy: the Pistols' single Anarchy in the UK had been released the week before, and the Damned's New Rose a month or so before that, but it was perfectly possible to own every English punk record ever made without spending more than a couple of quid. The very next morning, however, it became a national phenomenon, and the cause of a hilarious moral panic.”

Richard Walker, who in later life would edit our sister paper, the Sunday Herald, and is currently consulting editor with The National, was 20 years old in 1977. Slightly too old for punk, then, but not too old to overlook its impact. He recalls how there had already been an upsurge in exciting new music, including Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, “and then the door opened and all these bands from America – Television, Blondie, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Ramones – came through, and then in Britain you got bands such as the Pistols, the Clash, Eddie and the Hot Rods … this wave swept away all the things I had been used to. You used to put a certain level of importance on musicianship; after that, you put no importance on that, but on what I’d suppose you’d call the revolutionary aspect of punk. It was very political. I loved bands like the Pistols and the Damned quite early on. Like me, my friends had come in at the fag-end of the hippy era, and those people were challenged by punk.

“I bought tickets for Fleetwood Mac, and I got tickets for Television and Blondie. Both gigs were at the Apollo in Glasgow. My friends were all really excited about Fleetwood Mac, but I couldn’t get anybody to come with me to see Television and Blondie. They all still had flares and long hair, but I guess the younger part of the group eventually gravitated, and we went to see Siouxsie and the Banshees at Clouds. By that time, we had had our hair cut and were wearing straight-leg trousers. Even so, the audience at Siouxsie were a lot different to what you would have seen at a King Crimson gig a couple of years earlier.”

Punk/new wave scenes could be found in the major Scottish cities and towns. New bands formed and multiplied (among them The Jolt, The Exile, "Glasgow’s socio-politico-proto punk band" The Zips, and The Skids, who made their debut in August 1977). One short-lived Glasgow act, Johnny and the Self-Abusers, made its public debut at the Doune Castle in 1977, and later supported Generation X in Edinburgh. In November the band released its one and only single, Saints and Sinners, and split up. One half went on to form Simple Minds; the other half, the Cuban Heels. Craig Tannock, one of the best-known figures on Glasgow’s music scene, when asked about his experiences, remembers: “The closest I ever got to being at a punk gig would be when my band supported the Cuban Heels at a gig at Greenock Academy. I remember their song Mary Millington and they did a great cover of Downtown. They were a really good band, almost verging on surf rock at times.” Of his own band, the Viking Raiders, there is alas little trace.

The Rezillos had come together in 1976 and rehearsed steadily before making their live debut in November the following year, a fortnight before the Sex Pistols released Anarchy in the UK. They were ahead of their time in many ways. In their own words: "The Rezillos ripped into the rock scene through a shared love of 1960s garage rock, the Spectoresque girl group voice of the Shangri-Las injected with their inimitable molten attitude and created their unique left-field brand of punk rock and roll. The speed at which they gathered a following took the band by surprise."

Eugene Reynolds, one of the founding members, speaks of punk "being a rejection of what went before, and that was self-indulgent, pompous rock. It was just kicking out in any direction, really, which is, I suppose, what young people want to do. Sometimes they don't know why they want to kick out. There were certain political reasons why one could kick out but we didn't particularly feel that preaching to other people about politics was ... how can I put it? It seemed a bit second-hand to go and do that.

"If you were politically aware, you were politically aware. I'm not really sure you were going to convert anybody who didn't want to be converted.

"It was a moment in time where the music expressed people's raw feelings about the way they were feeling. We were frustrated people as well. It's a cliche to use the words 'bored teenagers' – [singer] Faye [Fife] was in her late teens but the rest of us were in our early twenties – but I think it's probably fair enough to use that expression. What are you going to do with your life? Where could you go? And music seemed to be where you could make a proper statement and people would listen to you and they would have to take notice.

"These days, I don't think that is open to people, because music has been, to a major extent, neutered and absorbed into the mainstream, and songs have just become MP3s and downloads. There's no face to anything and, as such, there probably isn't such a platform as there used to be then. Music was more untamed then ..."

An interesting insight into punk comes in an interview on the StrawberrySwitchblade.net website. Rose McDowall, one half of the band, said there “was not a lot I liked from the 1970s apart from punk, when punk set me free from my chains ... When punk happened it totally saved my life. I was a really f*****-up teenager who really did not want to conform to the norm, never had even when I was a kid. I didn't want to be like everybody else because I didn't respect them.

“But I was at that age where I felt 'what am I supposed to do?', and then punk happened. 'THAT'S what I'm supposed to do! I'm supposed to be me!' Punk allowed me to be me without feeling like a fake. It totally liberated me. I didn't have to be a girly girl and it wasn't expected of me, or if it was it didn't matter. I would probably have done the same thing anyway but been really outcast or locked up for being a nut. My mum was always telling me I was a bit crazy. Punk was my saviour. It sounds like an extreme thing to say, but for a pubescent teenage girl who's totally f***** up about life, it was really, really, really my saviour.”

Glasgow businessman Ian Adie has never forgotten two punk gigs, the first being the Damned’s concert at Clouds, at Tollcross in Edinburgh, in 1977. "My pals, who were going to the gig, had embraced punk fully and were all zips and piercings. I was a scaffolding sales rep and less inclined, but they insisted I get rid of the moustache and straight clothes. The message was: 'Get punked up or you're no' gaun.' Hours later, I’m sitting on the train to Edinburgh with mascara around my eyes, my hair spiked up, wearing my best black T-shirt – which they ripped to bits – and a big, sparkly pair of Mum's clip-on earrings.

"The Damned came on to a low stage with no barriers and not a bouncer to be seen. They were nose-to-nose with a wild crowd of punks facing them. The music was fantastic – deafening and immediate. My hair was snot-solid for a week and I couldn’t quite remove the mascara – I got a few funny looks on building sites that week."

The following year, he saw the Clash at the Apollo. "My pals and I packed into the balcony," he remembers, "and as you looked down on the crowd, it was astounding – a human whirlpool of noise and movement. The atmosphere was truly electric and when the band strolled on stage, the hall erupted. Everybody, even the band, was in black, the lighting was stark and the music full of anger and meaning. What a gig."

Edinburgh was alive, too. In his memoirs, the Waterboys' Mike Scott speaks of relocating to Edinburgh from Ayr in 1977; the capital, he says, was “ablaze with punk rock”. In his 2013 book, Lust for Life, Irvine Welsh and the Trainspotting Phenomenon, author John Neil Munro speaks of his friendship with Welsh, which started in Edinburgh in 1977. One passage recounts Welsh’s love of punk music: “I remember,” writes Munro, “we both bought the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen on the day of its release. [Welsh] recalls that day as being crucial: ‘I felt like something had shattered inside. I remember looking at you and us deciding there was no staying where we were. There’s no question that day changed my life. If it hadn’t been for the Pistols and the Clash I’d never have written Trainspotting.'”

Edinburgh was also the location of a landmark concert – the White Riot gig by the Clash on May 7, 1977, at the Playhouse. The late Stewart Cruickshank, a radio producer and an authority on Scottish music, wrote almost a decade ago: “It sent reverberations through the Scottish music scene that would forever change the way music was discovered, made and distributed north of the Border. Punk would march on to encourage DIY music-making.”

Fanzines cropped up, too, including Ripped & Torn, the influential work of Tony Drayton. The effect on Drayton when he first heard punk, he says, "was electrifying, an absolute jolt. I’d been reading about the London scene in the music papers so first it was more a visual and theoretical thing but the music was better than I could possibly have hoped for. I’d been buying and enjoying new American stuff like Patti Smith, the Ramones and Jonathan Richman and I was already a big Velvet Underground/Lou Reed fan; but hearing New Rose by the Damned for the first time blew all that away. This is what I’d been waiting for all my life."

He quickly got into the habit of spending weekends in London, sampling the vivid punk scene. Glasgow came to seem like an alien landscape when he returned on Monday mornings.

"Glasgow was grim, and I lived in Cumbernauld, which was even grimmer. There was a disco in the town centre that we used to go to of a Saturday night. When I say Steve Miller and Peter Frampton were the musical highlights of the evenings there, it gives you some idea. When I progressed to getting the Friday night bus to London, walking down the Kings Road and Portobello Road, seeing bands, then coming back on the Sunday-night bus for work in Glasgow on Monday morning – it felt like my home was in London and I was only visiting Glasgow. Coming back to Glasgow was like going to the moon; it was only doing Ripped & Torn that kept me up there – as it helped me meet other alienated people."

The Herald’s former music writer David Belcher recalls his first punk gig: Eddie and the Hot Rods at the Apollo in December 1976. “It wasn’t truly hardcore punk, it was a sort of pop-punk gig, and it was quite a big one for the time.” The band was supported by Ultravox.

“There weren’t too many people dressed as punks; punk hadn’t really caught on at that time in Glasgow. There was a hard core of old-time Glasgow hippies there. The Glasgow hippy wasn’t a peace-loving hippy like others everywhere else. They were there to be appalled by Ultravox – they were throwing things at John Foxx, who was dancing in a strangely angular, new-wave fashion before it was even hip. During the interval someone in the crowd shouted, ‘Punk rock!’ excitedly and a bearded, frizzy-haired hippy in the front row stood up and confronted the entire stalls and shouted: 'Shite!’”

Belcher recalls that the gospel of punk had first been preached to him by Stewart Cruickshank. “He was living in London. He wasn’t heavily interested in punk but I remember him wearing safety-pins as a fashion item, and he kind of latched on to that area of punk: punk as a fashion, punk as a little political statement.”

Many at the time thought that pub rock was almost a catalyst for punk rock. The Herald’s arts editor Keith Bruce recalls that a line could be drawn between the two. “There was a back-to-basics approach in punk rock that could also be found in pub rock: not just with bands such as Dr Feelgood but also in Ducks Deluxe. Quite a few of those bands survived the transition to punk rock and became quite big, like Graham Parker and the Rumour. You could go from liking that kind of basic bar-blues thing to liking punk rock fairly straightforwardly, because both relied on a few basic chords. It’s funny, though, how everybody forswore their prog-rock past [when punk happened] but now, of course, everybody claims to have always liked King Crimson.”

Bruce remembers the Jam playing the Glasgow venue, Zhivago’s, in St Enoch Square; there was another good venue just around the corner, the Mars Bar, in Howard Street. “I had my 21st birthday there. It was a Tuesday and they said, 'Do you want a band? I said, 'It’s fine, thanks, I’ll get a DJ.' And that is how I cancelled a Simple Minds gig. They had a residency there on Tuesday nights – I think they’d been there as Johnny and the Self-Abusers before, but they were Simple Minds by that time, 1979.”

Does Tony Drayton think the breakthrough effect of punk can still be felt today in music or in broader culture? "Absolutely. Sometimes I hear/see the shock side of punk in new stuff and other times the [Vivienne] Westwood/Malcolm [McLaren] situationist perspective; but for me punk is always there in the shadows of popular culture."

He remembers those punk years with affection more than nostalgia. "Nostalgia is for things that have gone. But I carried on doing punk stuff, from fanzines and the Puppy Collective to being part of the Archaos punk circus movement and then starting the killyourpetpuppy.co.uk site to explore and celebrate the forgotten world of anarcho punk," he says. "Affection, as it was great music, great people, great times. I also remember those days with some regret that I didn’t realise what I was doing with Ripped & Torn was so important – I treated everything lightly whereas, with a bit more of a business head on me, I could have developed the fanzine into something powerful and national."

I mention to Richard Walker that the Damned’s New Rose single still sounds as fresh as it did 40 years ago. “It was brilliant, but, to be honest, if I had to look at the relative influence of bands, the Bee Gees were way more revolutionary, and had much more impact on popular culture, and on growing up, than the Pistols. The Pistols were incendiary but the Bee Gees, and dance culture and disco were amazing in changing attitudes to gay people, and recognising the political impact of the dancefloor, which was replicated when, later, things like house and techno happened. That was truly revolutionary.”

Visit rippedandtorn.co.uk. A series of events are being staged in London to mark punk’s 40th anniversary. Visit punk.london