It was a brave move,
punk being derided by just about everyone apart from the punks themselves, and
their venture lasted precisely 100 nights, until the following April when it
all fell apart in an ugly exchange of opinions with their landlord and sundry
other malfunctions that plague all rock clubs regardless of the music they
present. Andrew and Susan would go on to open The Fridge in Brixton, a wildly
successful club that became world famous, initially for the first wave of New
Romantics and then, for far longer and far more significantly, as the cradle of
the UK rave scene wherein they originated the concept of the chill-out room.
But it was the Roxy that got them started, and it is the Roxy that is
celebrated in their book Our Story,
published privately by them a few weeks ago and in which your man at Just
Backdated has a minor interest in that it was designed by my better half and,
since it was sitting on our computer, I took the liberty of advising Andrew on
a few legal matters, not that he took a blind bit of notice.
This isn’t surprising
for the court summons that is reproduced on page 136 doesn’t seem to have
worried him too much either. This is but one of scores of illustrations
throughout a 144-page, large format book, essentially a day-by-day oral history
of those 100 nights, as told by Andrew & Susan, together with many others,
including musicians, who passed through its forbidding black door. Happily,
none of them gild the lily, and this lack of rose-tinted nostalgia makes the
book not just exceedingly readable but often wryly amusing. Andrew and Susan
describe what went on in the Roxy exactly as it happened, and since both kept
diaries and never seem to have thrown anything away the refreshing lack of
hindsight makes it essential as a historical record.
The matter-of-fact
delivery is also rather endearing. Take this entry from Susan’s diary for
January 22, 1977: “Four thugs posing as the Drug Squad robbed us and locked us
in a cupboard. Luckily we were able to smash through the stud partition office
wall and climb into the kitchen. Lost over £200, no money for drinks. The
Stranglers and The Cortinas were great.” Or this one, from March 9: “Captain
Sensible was as stupid as ever throwing pies. Sid Vicious shoved a quiche
Lorraine tart in Billy Idol’s face. A small fracas broke out, heh heh! The
whole thing was very pleasant.”
But behind the humour,
intentional or not, lies a more profound explanation of why the Roxy was influential,
and why the music was perhaps only tangential to its social significance. As
the book makes clear, at the Roxy you be who you wanted to be and no one gave a
damn. Boys and girls could behave as they liked, dress how they liked, in bin
liners if they chose, wear their hair how they liked, pair off with whomsoever
they liked, and no one would look askance. It was devoid of politics, a place for
outsiders, for those belittled by conventional society, the misfits and the
disconnected, where girls could relax without fear of unwanted male attention (or at least give as good as they got),
and where boys could escape the relentless pressure to conform to masculine stereotypes.
It was liberated in the sense that once the black door closed behind you, the rest
of humanity ceased to exist. In keeping with this ethos Susan chopped off her conformist
long blonde hair and dyed the spiky stubble that remained reddish brown: the
before and after photos of her in the opening pages of Our Story speak a thousand words.
The book contains lots
of press cuttings (Sounds magazine
really was punk’s in-house journal), correspondence, contracts and flyers, the
latter all designed in the familiar DIY cut-and-paste punk style that often
featured pictures of the royals for contrastingly shocking effect. There are
also plenty of photos, many of them slightly blurred since Andrew and Susan evidently
feel that an unseen but off focus shot of a lesser known band is more
appropriate, more atmospheric, for their book than a cleaner professional shot of a better known
act. They are right. This isn’t intended as a flashy coffee-table book, it’s a record of how
it was, unglazed, with all its untidy splendour exposed for all to see. In this
respect, the dark grey cover with its overcast photo of Andrew and Susan is
perfect.
“I look at the 100
nights of the Roxy as the life span of punk,” says Mick Jones, and if you
believe that a street movement has its moment but once it becomes mainstream
and commercialised it dies, then he’s right. We are fortunate that Andrew and
Susan captured that moment and choose to share it in their book.
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