There’s no doubt that Keith Levene was a key figure in British punk. He formed the Clash with guitarist Mick Jones aged 16 and co-wrote What’s My Name?, which subsequently appeared on their debut album. He played in the semi-mythical Flowers of Romance with Sid Vicious and Viv Albertine. He was filmed injecting amphetamine in the toilets of the Roxy for DJ and film-maker Don Letts’s Punk Rock Movie and was the subject of the Slits’ Instant Hit, a song about his increasing heroin problem.
And yet he was also a very anomalous figure in a world where there were supposed to be strict rules about music, dress and attitude: Levene seemed to have discarded the memo about what you were and weren’t supposed to do. He hadn’t just been a fan of prog titans Yes, he had roadied for them on 1973’s Tales From Topographic Oceans tour, one of the high watermarks of prog grandiloquence, precisely the kind of thing you were supposed to keep to yourself in punk’s scorched-earth climate. He was steadfast in the belief that “you have to do the work if you want to be good at guitar”, a line that ran contrary to punk’s anyone-can-do-it ethos. He was not interested in “putting together three chord songs”, which was very much the point of punk, suggesting instead that what you needed to do was “put together a situation where there would be no musical limits”, citing the Beatles or the Grateful Dead – not artists that punk bands were supposed to aspire to – as examples. He lobbied the band’s manager Bernard Rhodes to include a synthesiser in the lineup, like the ones he’d seen Rick Wakeman playing while working for Yes. He got Joe Strummer to join the band – in part by demonstrating to Strummer how well he could play Led Zeppelin songs – then turned their new frontman’s guitar down at rehearsals and gigs, believing him to an insufficiently competent musician. He railed against the band’s “safe and predictable” approach to music.
