The Way We Wore: A Life in Threads by Robert Elms

Author:Robert Elms [Elms, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2020-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

10

Punk was a trouser revolution. For all the crashing glory and rabble-rousing bile of the songs, it was the clothes that really pulled so many pent-up kids in from different cultural corners and pushed the scene to such inflammatory prominence. Before anybody picked up a guitar or sat behind a drumkit, before a single staccato note was played, they strolled into a clothes shop and pulled on a pair of strides with the legs tied together, or stuck a safety-pin into a ripped-up T-shirt with a slogan scrawled across it. Punk was born out of the frantically bubbling stylistic stew of the mid-seventies, one of many startling assemblages which emerged at the same time, and one which struck a chiming chord before any chords were played. The look came first.

It was shortly after that scarifying night at Louise’s, when I saw Steve Marshall, his eyebrows completely shaved off, proudly walking through Burnt Oak wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a pair of cowboys with their ample dicks hanging out, that I first heard the name the Sex Pistols. He said, ‘You’ve got to come and see this band, they’re fucking terrible, but somehow they’re fucking brilliant.’ I remember the words exactly because they were exactly right. Much of the audience at early punk gigs was made up of people whose musical taste, like mine, was towards well-made, well-played funk records and a bit of highly polished glam dance from Bowie and Roxy. Most of them rarely went to see bands at all, and some of them weren’t particularly into music. They were drawn to the Sex Pistols and the Clash and all the rest of the emerging gang by the way they looked and the attitude their attire embodied. It was the almost narcotic pull of their shocking glamour which drew you in. The barbaric howl took some time to tune into.

I also remember Steve Marshall’s words with deep regret, because I didn’t take up his offer to go and see the Pistols at Middlesex Poly in Hendon, one of their earliest gigs and a short bus ride from Burnt Oak. In fact I’ve lied many times and told people I was there, invented elaborate stories about seeing Jordan or Siouxsie spraying Anarchy on the walls of the gents’ toilets while Lydon sneered his way through a butchered version of ‘My Generation’. They did do it. I didn’t see it. But I’m not the only person who’s fibbed about seeing the Pistols in the early days. You could fill Wembley with the number of bods who claim to have been at St Martin’s art school, the El Paradiso strip-club or even the Screen on the Green, whereas in fact the early audience for the Sex Pistols, for the as yet undubbed ‘punk’ thing, was made up of no more than a couple of hundred people and an even smaller inner coterie of scene-makers. It’s a textbook example of what can happen if a group of like-minded souls get together, bonded in opposition to the mainstream.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.