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We are at the end of '76...
Ollie Wisdom is eighteen, one day he sees the Pistols and is ignited...
He does everything to form a band and succeeds...
The band has a wonderful name, the Unwanted...
They rehearse twice (yes, you heard that right, twice) and find themselves playing in a strange place that used to be a club for gay gangsters...
In that place, the Roxy, interesting things are happening...
They play in a wonderfully horrible way...
“THEY PLAY SO BAD, SO WHY DON'T WE DO IT TOO!!!!”
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The members of the Eater are between fifteen and sixteen years old...
They tell everyone they want to form a band and as soon as the word spreads, the girls become prettier...
For now, they limit themselves to writing song lyrics. And they write a lot of them....
“And the band you were supposed to form?”
So in the end, they really form it...
They take their name from a line by Marc Bolan...
“And in the next eighteen months we lived in a chaos of excessive teenage indulgence, youthful decadence, and absolute total arrogance”...
They too, of course, end up playing at the Roxy...
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Johnny Moped is an overweight guy...
Someone who would never have gotten on stage without the Pistols revolution...
He's been playing since '74...
He's a damn veteran, then...
In his band, people like Captain Sensible (the name Johnny Moped is his doing) and Chrissie Hynde (“a real pain in the ass”) have passed through...
There's a video online where they play in the garden... it sounds like a crossroads between early Soft Machine and Skiantos...
“Johnny Moped had the three necessary ingredients of rock'n'roll: amateurism, chaos, and humor”
He also plays at the Roxy...
But no Soft Machine (which he really liked anyway), no Skiantos...
Only rock’n’roll...
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Dry, dry.
And possibly straight to the point...
What was punk?
The paradigm of instinctive revolt?
The horrendous sneer of scrap material, meaning rotten, dirty, and dumb?
A situationalist Bignami recited with a frog in the throat?
Pure and simple foolishness?
A bad joke?
Well, I don't really know... perhaps all these things together, or one or the other depending on the case...
But there's one certainty I have... punk was the ultimate rock'n'roll.
Which doesn't mean beautiful music, but amateurism, the crackling dryness of sound, a sense of wild freedom.
Like an ugly duckling that becomes even uglier and therefore beautiful...
Try saying the impossible in two minutes. And in the clash of that moment (the two minutes) and that idea (the impossible), stage the perfect storm....
“The Roxy London Wc2” is a live album recorded (very badly) between January and April '77...
And you can hear the adrenaline punk-pop of the Buzzcocks, the arduous wandering of Miss Lora Logic's sax, the hysterical squeal of Polystyrene, the ragged solidity of rock’n’roll from Slaughter & the Dogs and Adverts, the modernist iciness of Wire...
And the impetus of those fabulous nobodies I talked about at the beginning: Johnny Moped, Unwanted, Eater...
So the A-list is missing...
No Pistols, no Clash, no Damned...
But it doesn't matter, on the contrary...
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