Forty People in Manchester
On 4 June 1976, the Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester to roughly 40 people. The gig had been organized by Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, who had formed the Buzzcocks in February after seeing the Pistols in London. In the audience were future members of Joy Division, the Fall, and the Smiths, plus Tony Wilson (who would start Factory Records) and producer Martin Hannett. A teenage Steven Morrissey wrote a letter to the NME about it. Nearly every significant Manchester act of the next decade traces its origin story to that room. Punk’s creation myth is not about one band. It is about what happened to everyone who saw them.
Two Cities, One Voltage
Punk coalesced in two places almost simultaneously. In New York, the venue was CBGB at 315 Bowery, opened in 1973 by Hilly Kristal. Television debuted there on 31 March 1974. The Ramones followed on 16 August. Blondie, Talking Heads, the Patti Smith Group, Richard Hell and the Voidoids: all passed through across 1974 and 1975. There was no name for what they were doing until Punk magazine appeared in January 1976, cofounded by John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil.
In London, the catalyst was Malcolm McLaren. He and Vivienne Westwood ran a shop at 430 King’s Road that cycled through identities: Let It Rock (1971), Too Fast To Live Too Young To Die (1973), SEX (1974). SEX sold fetish wear and ripped clothing to art students and proto-punks. McLaren had managed the New York Dolls in their final days, and when he returned to London he assembled the Sex Pistols from the shop’s regulars. Their first gig was at Saint Martin’s School of Art on 6 November 1975.
The two scenes developed from different soil. New York punk grew out of the avant-garde, poetry, and the Velvet Underground. London punk was more working-class, more political, more tied to unemployment and the collapsing British economy. What they shared was velocity, volume, and the conviction that rock music had grown bloated and needed to be taken apart.
Ancestors
None of this came from nowhere. The Stooges, formed in Ann Arbor in 1967, built a sound around Iggy Pop’s physicality and Ron Asheton’s distorted, repetitive guitar. Their self-titled debut in 1969, produced by John Cale, was a blueprint: raw, unpolished, hostile to the audience’s comfort. The MC5, their Detroit neighbours, released Kick Out the Jams that same year, a live album that opened with a profane exhortation and never let up. The New York Dolls, formed in 1971, fused Detroit aggression with glam rock theatricality. All three were commercial failures. All three became foundational.
Further back, mid-1960s garage bands (the Sonics, the Seeds, the 13th Floor Elevators) had proven that untrained musicians at maximum intensity could produce something essential. Lenny Kaye’s 1972 compilation Nuggets collected these tracks and handed them to a new generation.
The Sound
Punk’s musical vocabulary was deliberately limited. Power chords, maximum distortion, minimal finger movement. Tempos fast enough to make guitar solos impossible. Songs kept to two minutes, sometimes less. The Ramones’ debut, recorded at Plaza Sound studios in January 1976, contains 14 songs in 29 minutes. Producer Craig Leon tracked instruments in three days, vocals in four. Total budget: $6,400. Johnny Ramone played downstrokes only, a technique that produced a relentless, buzz-saw rhythm at the cost of physical pain. He rarely varied from barre chords.
The Damned’s New Rose, produced by Nick Lowe at Pathway Studios in a single day, came out on Stiff Records on 22 October 1976, five weeks before the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the U.K. It was the first punk single released in Britain. Its B-side was a cover of the Beatles’ Help!, played at roughly twice the original tempo: respect expressed as demolition.
Wire pushed reductionism to its logical extreme. Their debut Pink Flag, recorded at Advision Studios in September 1977, fit 21 songs into under 36 minutes. Some tracks lasted 30 seconds. If a riff didn’t need repeating, the song stopped. Three of four members had art-school backgrounds, and they treated punk’s constraint as a formal problem rather than a limitation.
The Infrastructure
Punk’s most durable contribution was not a sound but a method. The Buzzcocks borrowed 750 pounds from friends and family to record their Spiral Scratch EP at Indigo Sound Studios in Manchester on 28 December 1976, with Martin Hannett (credited as Martin Zero) producing. Released on 29 January 1977 on their own New Hormones label, it sold out its initial 1,000 copies and eventually moved 16,000. It was the first self-released punk record in England, and it detonated the indie label model.
Stiff Records, founded in 1976, released early singles by the Damned and Elvis Costello. Rough Trade opened as a record shop in 1976 and became a label in 1978, organized as a cooperative. SST Records, founded by Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn in 1978, distributed American hardcore across the country.
The fanzine economy ran parallel. Mark Perry, a 19-year-old bank clerk from South London, saw the Ramones at the Roundhouse and nine days later published the first issue of Sniffin’ Glue, named after the Ramones song Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue. Made with felt-tip markers, a typewriter, and a photocopier, the first issue sold 50 copies. By the final twelfth issue in 1977, the print run was 20,000. Perry stopped publishing because he was afraid of becoming mainstream. That instinct, the refusal to grow comfortable, was as punk as any chord.
Beyond 1977
The initial explosion was brief. The Sex Pistols imploded in January 1978 after a chaotic American tour. Sid Vicious was dead by February 1979. But the infrastructure outlasted the bands. In the United States, hardcore punk picked up where first-wave punk left off, faster and angrier. Black Flag toured relentlessly from 1980, dragging punk into every American city with a VFW hall. Bad Brains brought blinding speed to the Washington, D.C., scene. Minor Threat, also from D.C., played their first show in December 1980 to 50 people in a basement. Ian MacKaye would later cofound Dischord Records, operating on the same principle as New Hormones: musicians controlling their own means of production.
Meanwhile, in Brisbane, Australia, the Saints had been working in near-total isolation. Their single (I’m) Stranded, self-released on Fatal Records in September 1976 with a pressing of 500 copies, predated vinyl debuts by the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Buzzcocks. Punk was never only Anglo-American. It was a set of conditions (cheap gear, no future, something to say) that could occur anywhere.
Essential Listening
- Ramones – Ramones (1976)
- Sex Pistols – Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1977)
- The Clash – The Clash (1977)
- The Damned – Damned Damned Damned (1977)
- Wire – Pink Flag (1977)
- Buzzcocks – Singles Going Steady (1979)
- Richard Hell and the Voidoids – Blank Generation (1977)
- X-Ray Spex – Germfree Adolescents (1978)
- The Saints – (I’m) Stranded (1977)
- Dead Kennedys – Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables (1980)
- Black Flag – Damaged (1981)
- Bad Brains – Bad Brains (1982)