As a teenager in a dying seaside town on the east coast of Scotland, punk rock was like a bat signal from a more exciting world. The centre of that world was London, a city where even the boredom was romantic. Somewhere between London’s Burning in 1977 and London Calling in 1979, The Clash sketched a vision of the capital that was brittle and tedious, febrile and antsy, violent, exotic, alive and tantalisingly out of reach. London’s Burning, the boredom song, was a night-time blur in which flashing headlights dissected the sodium glow of the Westway. London Calling was a post-apocalyptic call to arms, a roll-call of biblical disasters which hummed with possibilities. A new ice age, food shortages, a nuclear error! All of it sounded ideal when compared with the actual tedium of being a teenager revising for exams on the fringes of what would later become known as Scotland’s golf coast.
Even though I had never visited them, I knew all about the London venues. The Marquee had been immortalised on an EP by Eddie and the Hot Rods. The Roxy had spawned a punk LP with contributions by Wire, The Adverts, X-Ray Spex and Buzzcocks. Even now, I can’t walk past the Screen On The Green in Islington without thinking about the Sex Pistols show that happened there. The same goes for the 100 Club on Oxford Street, the venue for an even more stellar line-up on a Monday night in September 1976. It was at the 100 Club that the Pistols were supported by The Clash, Siouxsie Sioux (doing The Lord’s Prayer with Sid Vicious on drums), and the debut of Subway Sect, whose singer Vic Godard became the obscure genius of punk, a great songwriter who was more famous as a postman (a very good one).
