DECEMBER 1976 John Peel’s Punk Special airs
This Friday night, the Sex Pistols were meant to be playing Lancaster University’s student union. On paper, they were a week into their Anarchy In The UK tour with Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers and The Clash (co-headliners The Damned had already been kicked off the tour before playing a single gig). But like all but three of the nationwide trek’s initial dates, tonight’s show had been cancelled.
Why? Try the group’s fabled appearance on ITV’s London area news show Today on December 1, when interviewer Bill Grundy unwittingly provoked the Pistols to use such
verboten TV words as “shit”, “bastard” and “fucking rotter”. Shocking the tea-time audience, after just four minutes the Pistols were national hate figures, condemned as harbingers of nothing less than societal collapse. After the Today show, the band had gone back to their rehearsal space at the Roxy Theatre in Harlesden, where manager Terry Collins sent them packing. As well as graffiti – ‘Bill Grundy Is A Wanker’ was one, legend says – the manager added they, “left the lavatory in a dreadful state with a broken mirror.”
In terms of punk and how it was seen, there were also altered reflections on December 10’s John Peel radio show.
Encouraged by angry letters from longhaired listeners, he’d been playing selections from the first Ramones album since May, and debut 45s by The Damned and Pistols as soon as they were available. But tonight, from 11pm on BBC Radio 1, he devoted the entire show to the savage new music in a programme later dubbed the Punk Special.
“Tonight, we are going to have a look at punk rock,” said Peel in his introduction. “Mind you, no two people seem to be able to agree on exactly what punk rock is.”
Luckily for punk-hungry listeners across the nation, his was a savvy, connoisseur’s overview rather than the swearing and gobbing mainstream take now convulsing the tabloids. For those dismayed by cancelled tour dates, there were four speedy tracks from a November 30 Damned session and the debut Sex Pistols 45 Anarchy In The UK (described, superbly, as “a good old stomper” and bound for a Number 38 chart placing on December 18). From the US there were urgent ’76 sounds from the Ramones, Richard Hell & The Voidoids and Pere Ubu, plus Television’s Little Johnny Jewel from ’75. From 1973, earlier punk frenzies were represented by Iggy & The Stooges and the New York Dolls, whose Personality Crisis was, says Peel, “considered highly influential by some authorities”. The attitudinal link to ’60s garage snot was accentuated further with tracks by The Shadows Of Knight and The Seeds: before playing the latter’s Pushin’ Too Hard, Peel observed they were “a band that
I used to hang around with in California in the ’60s… they seem to be fairly crucial to the punk movement.”
Other acts would earn a less secure place in the firmament. Pub rock chart act Eddie & The Hotrods’ Horseplay (Weary Of The Schmaltz) were justified with the words, “they’re on the front of the current issue of Sniffin’ Glue and that’s good enough for me.” Taste has also largely forgotten the rushing Farfisa confection of Boys Will Be Boys by New York glam punks The Fast, who later morphed into Hi-NRG chart act Man To Man, while sicko-boogie Slash by CBGB regulars Tuff
“No two people seem to agree on exactly what punk rock is.” JOHN PEEL
Darts! suffers from association with the group’s even-more-unsavoury debut LP, made after the departure of vocalist Robert Gordon. Coming out of Australia, The Saints’ undying (I’m) Stranded is declared ‘Peel’s Big 45’, the must-own song of the show, though recent music paper ads by Rough Trade apologised for its scant availability.
“I’m not about to dress up as a punk, or change my hairstyle or anything,” said the 37-year-old Peel in closing, “but I’m very grateful to the bands and the people who make the music, or most of them anyway, for the excitement and heated debate and general bewilderment they’ve brought back to the rock scene.”
The revolution wasn’t immediate, of course. This month the music weeklies remained content to put Elton John and Joan Armatrading on the cover, and Peel was happy to play Jackson Browne, Pink Floyd and Ralph McTell on the following week’s shows. Yet, as punk went overground and the regions embraced it, the Punk Special was a reminder of how it began and where it could go. There was excitement coming in ’77, as the Pistols released Never
Mind The Bollocks and The Clash,
The Damned and the rest broke through. As he lined up sessions for The Adverts, The Jam and The Stranglers, Peel would do his bit to ensure the virus kept on mutating.
As he observed, shortly before going to see Generation X at the newly-opened Roxy in Covent Garden in January ’77: “There’s life in the old bastard yet.”
Ian Harrison