Punk clubs

In the mid-1970s punk began by sending messages from an underworld—posters that aped the style of ransom notes, gigs in Soho strip clubs, and a two-night “festival” in the 100 Club (a bleary basement off London’s main shopping boulevard, Oxford Street). The two main London clubs for punk were the Roxy (in Covent Garden) and the Vortex (in Soho), both belowground sweat pits. Tellingly, the Live at the Roxy album (1977), which documents the period, begins with the sound of Shane McGowan (of the Pogues) stealing the microphone hidden in the restroom, the centre for the evening’s chemical and sexual experimentations. Punk reveled in a taste for slumming that was almost heroic in its intensity—arguably suitable for a city where World War II bomb sites still gaped like missing teeth. Yet, when the major London punks came to record, most chose to work with major labels, surrendering to the professional expertise of the previous generation and to producers who had created the records that the punks had obsessed over as teenagers.

The Sex Pistols signed first to the British-based major EMI and were produced by Chris Thomas, who gave Roxy Music their neurotic timbre and went on to create a lush new-wave sound for Chrissie Hynde’s popular Pretenders. The Clash signed to the local arm of the American giant CBS and, between bouts with bona fide eccentrics, including Guy Stevens and Lee Perry, worked with American Sandy Pearlman (producer of Blue Oyster Cult) and Glyn Johns (who had engineered for the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Faces). From an international perspective, punk seemed at the time to be a storm in a British teacup, and only the Clash achieved significant success in the United States; but its message did have a lasting impact elsewhere, notably in Europe and on the West Coast of the United States, where it provided the inspiration for Guns N’ Roses in Los Angeles and for the grunge movement of Seattle, Washington, spearheaded by Nirvana during the early 1990s.