Steve Strange & Friends Pic Lorraine Owen
‘Who
were the first Welsh Punks?’
“So Merthyr, in a way, drove me to Punk Rock” Chris Sullivan.
The South Wales Gang
Back: Dave Lambert, Colin Fisher (with fag) Terry May (wearing wraparounds)
Centre: Keith Richards in middle
Front: Kelly, Graham Williams (beret), Bunty (centre), Mark Taylor, Steve Strange
‘Punk’
means many things to many people, a youth cult, a musical revolution, a fashion
statement, an attitude – but it’s not that which concerns us here, neither is
it the musicians or the bands. Our quest is to try and find out why some
‘characters’ from amongst the youth of Wales during 1976 specifically, should
be turned on, by what was in essence, an urban phenomenon, arguably originating
in the twin cities of New York and London? Sure, Punk was soon adopted by the
provincial cities of Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow etc and the history of
British Punk is well documented in excellent books such as Jon Savage’s
essential reading ‘England’s Dreaming’, and
our very own Chris Sullivan’s simply titled, but just as essential, ‘Punk’.
The
age of the characters in 1976 is critical to this story, too young and you
could not have gone out to the clubs and gigs, too old and you simply would not
have ‘got it’. The early Punks were old enough to go out to night clubs, and a
common theme in pretty well every story, is a love of dancing, dressing up and for
the music of David Bowie and Roxy Music. In effect, the characters were already
primed in terms of music and fashion – they were ready for the next big thing.
The
first Welsh punks were the south Wales gang, they were there in 1976 - right at
the beginning. In fact they already ‘were’ ……. already dressing up, they just
didn’t have a name for it yet. I have not encountered anything similar in north
Wales this early on. So many who answered my calls got into it, like myself,
from 1977-78 onwards, by then the first Punks had already moved on. The 1977,
1978, stuff and the fallout from punk is another story.
South Wales 1976.
Our
starting point then, is how did these characters become so well informed, even
before the Sex Pistols show at the Castle Cinema, Caerphilly, on the 14th
December 1976? These characters were already tuned-in and turned-on to Punk,
before the infamous Bill Grundy, Sex Pistols interview, which was probably one
of the main factors in getting Punk out to the wider masses. Nicola Heywood Thomas’s
HTV documentary fully covers the Caerphilly concert of December 1976 and is on
YouTube.
The
fact is, that the characters and individuals featured in this piece were
already followers of fashion, Bowie heads, soul boys, frequenting Northern Soul
nights in Wigan Casino. What’s amazing is that these ‘individuals’, these ‘characters’,
became friends, became a gang. So why the transformation I ask, why ‘abandon’ Bowie
for the Sex Pistols, or was it just a natural progression? And there it is, my
first misconception, Bowie was not abandoned, as Chris Sullivan maintains it
was all part of the same thing.
Chris Sullivan 2015
Chris Sullivan, from Merthyr Tydfil, “I used to go round to my mate’s house and
get a flagon of cider and get absolutely hammered and lie on the floor
listening to ‘Man Who Sold The World’ – I was young then, only thirteen or
fourteen. We all loved Transformer – after that came Patti Smith, Jonathan
Richman, John Cale of course, this was before Punk was really happening – we
were all listening to this really dark rock music”.
The
characters were discovering music and fashion, often independently, like minded
souls who had yet to meet as Lorraine Owen from the Rhondda Valley explains
Lorriane Owen “Roxy Music was the flowering of your interest in music that had a
fashion extreme attached to it. It was Eno not Brian Ferry for me. Roxy was our
lead in ….”
Dancing
was also crucial part of the equation according to Keith Richards from Cardiff,
and this happened in the night clubs of south Wales which acted as a focal
point for gathering the gang.
Lorraine Owen 2015
Keith Richards “For me it was Roxy Music, we were going to a club called Drones where
you had music you could dance to – it was all about the dancing and the
fashion”
Mark Taylor, from Cardiff, “What
you had in south Wales was a group of people, stretching from Newport, Cardiff,
Bridgend, Swansea and up to Merthyr. These people would have been interested in
Bowie and Roxy Music. We saw each other at clubs and we would introduce
ourselves, you’d see someone in their ‘attire’ and think they’re pretty cool –
you’d know where they were coming from’.
Mark Taylor 2015
Lorraine Owen “I met up with the south Wales and Merthyr boys at ‘Rudy’s in Newport”. Lorraine also adds “Meeting gay people was fantastic, I got to
Newport and the gays shaped my existence”.
If
it was a shared love of Bowie and Roxy, dressing up and dancing that got them
out initially into the clubs of south Wales, they also frequented London, and
Taylor cites the ease of travel on the 125 train to London. The London trips
would appear to be twin missions – shopping and concerts.
Chris Sullivan “Coming from Merthyr Tydfil, where every single solitary time I left the
house I’d have a fight, - well in the daytime maybe a fight once a week, but at
night every single solitary time, me and my mates just got fed up with it. We’d
catch the 7-20am bus from Merthyr which arrived in Victoria at midday. We’d
hang out a’ ‘Sex’ (Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s shop on the King’s Road) and we’d find out where all the parties and
gigs were, and that’s what we did – we got fed up of Merthyr”
Fashion
The
importance of fashion cannot be under-estimated, Taylor had also visited the
King’s Road. I asked Taylor whether it was it the music or the fashion that
came first?
Mark Taylor & Alison Lowndes 1976
Mark Taylor “They go hand in hand. My older brother had been a Mod.There had always
been music in the family. You could pick up de-Mob suits and you could also
pick up things like a Mary Quant dress and cut it in half. A lot of the girls
were in Fashion College and you could pay them to make you clothes”
Keith Richards “We were all individuals – we were all different – we always stood out.
It was our love of music and being different – we wanted to be different”
Something
Chris Sullivan alludes to is that fashion was a like a ‘tradition’ in places
like Merthyr Tydfil.
Chris Sullivan “In Merthyr Tydfil, fashion and music, and fighting and football were
all interwoven, all the hardest skinheads were always the best dressed. Its
different in Merthyr, clothing is something that people still do, even the
football hooligans are well dressed – it’s like a tradition”
But
the more I talk to these characters, the more I realise they were already dressing
up - in almost a proto-punk fashion, as if occupying a parallel universe. There
is undoubtedly a progression from Bowie and Lou Reed, but whatever influences
came from London you suspect that the south Wales gang would have done
something anyway. They are as much mavericks and trailblazers as they are
followers of the ‘new’. Certainly characters such as Steve Strange were out
there pushing the limits.
Mark Stephenson & Debbie(?) 1976
Lorraine Owen “It came in through Steve (Strange) more
than anybody”
Chris Sullivan “They used to call us ‘sickies’ or ‘weirdo’s’ before there was a word
for Punk. We got into this thing of outdoing each other in terms of weirdness,
and we just got stranger and stranger with the clothes. My mother made me a
leather T-shirt, this was in 1976 – with a zip. The London Punk thing at the
time was all based on Vivienne’s stuff – we were more handmade.
People like Colin Fisher
was the first person I saw wearing eyeliner and bin liners – and he was
influenced by Lou Reed. Colin Fisher was certainly the first one who had a nose
ring and chain. He was a hairdresser, a tough kid from some estate in Newport”
I pierced Taylor’s nose
for him in December 1975 in the toilets at Stowaway’s. That’s why initially we
had safety pins in our nose, you had to get leverage to get them in”
Mark Taylor & friend 1976
Sex Pistols
The
role of the Sex Pistols and the punk bands in all this is quite interesting. It
provides the backdrop and somewhere for like-minded souls to hang out but it is
not really the spark that lights the fuse – the Welsh gang were already fired
up and if anything were far more outrageous than the Pistols
Caerphilly audience Pic Dave Smitham
Chris Sullivan “My entre to all this came via Nils, (Nils Stevenson, Sex Pistols tour manager and
manager of Siouxsie and the Banshees) he
had a stall on Beaufort Market and we got talking when I was buying a pair of
drainpipe trousers and he mentioned this band that I might want to see, and
that was the Sex Pistols. If you look at the early Pistols photos they are
pretty straight looking – compared to us”
Mark Taylor ‘We weren’t just from the sticks, we were well informed. I’d already
seen the Pistols, Clash and the Buzzcocks at the Screen on the Green, so when
the Pistols did come to Wales, there was a ready market for them’
Chris Sullivan “It was the only place where people of that ilk would get together – the
band was almost secondary”
Lorraine Owen 1976
There
is a distinct change after the Bill Grundy interview and the Media
(Tabloid) hysteria that followed. Punk reaches the masses and from this point onwards
the individuality becomes lost, Punk
becomes a mass fashion and it is quite obvious that the individuals or what
Mark Taylor calls the ‘movers and
shakers’ were already moving on. Sullivan, Taylor and key players like
Steve Strange had, by 1978, become club promoters and associated with yet
another new movement, ‘the New Romantics’.
Mark Taylor “When it hit the Newspapers ‘Big Time’, a lot of people appreciated the
DIY aspect of it. You could get hold of a leather jacket and ripped jeans and
there you go”.
Chris Sullivan “By the time the Caerphilly one happened, it was a bit old hat for us,
especially as teenagers in those days, in the 1970’s, trends came and went in
the space of a few months”
Mark Taylor “Everybody talks about the Caerphilly gig, but what they forget about the other gigs”. The Sex Pistols had previously played at
Stowaway’s Newport, the Top Rank, Cardiff and the Bubbles in Swansea during
September 1976. These live dates by the Pistols are crucial to this story, as
these dates occur before the Bill Grundy interview and the press furore that
followed, which confirms that the real ‘pioneers’ were in on the scene well before
the Grundy affair.
Mark Taylor “You couldn’t have asked for a
better dynamic to occur in south Wales than the Pistols tour to bring everybody
together. The timing was perfect”. I think they (Sex Pistols) were surprised at the response they had.
People made a special effort – we were all pretty good at posing”
Chris
Sullivan said something very interesting on the Heywood Thomas documentary
where he suggested that getting laid was probably more of a concern than any ‘politics’
associated with Punk.
Chris Sullivan “I’ve always maintained that the politics thing in Punk Rock is complete
and utter rubbish. It was a fashion and that’s
it. The politics was laid on later by Malcolm (McLaren). He (McLaren) had his back against the wall and needed to find a way of justifying
this behaviour, so he rammed a political agenda behind it”
Mark Taylor & Jonathan James 1976
Mark Taylor who worked at the time in the Dry Docks in
Cardiff, “I was quite Leftwing. My grandfather had been
down the Docks before me so it didn’t particularly scare me all this Anarchy in
the UK stuff”
If
this piece initially began it’s journey as a quest to find the first Welsh
punks, it quickly became apparent from the interviews, that the individuals who
made up the south Wales gang were already on the train before they had ever
heard of punk. If anything the emphasis they have all placed on dressing up and
dancing means, that punk provided another backdrop, a new focus. Yes, punk was
great for dressing up and being outrageous and providing that backdrop but actually
the music was not so good for dancing. Maybe Bill Grundy did them all a favour,
they moved on to club culture soon after punk became ‘mainstream’ and to quote
Bowie, put on their dancing shoes (again) not that they ever really took them
off.
Mark Taylor “It all started from Malcolm
McLaren and Vivienne Westwood – and it all blossomed. She deserves to be a
Dame!”
Chris Sullivan “I’d say by 1977 we were completely done with Punk, it was to do with it
going mainstream and we weren’t mainstream people”
Steve Strange pic Lorraine Owen 1976
References
Colegrave,S,
Sullivan, C., 2001, ‘Punk’, (Cassell & Co)
Savage,
J.’ 1991, ‘England’s Dreaming’ (Faber
& Faber)
Lorraine Owen & Rhys Mwyn 2105 @ Merthyr Rising
Caerphilly audience Pic Dave Smitham (Chris Sullivan centre right)
Caerphilly audience Pic Dave Smitham
Rare pic of Billy Idol courtesy of Lorraine Owen
