‘I do this to shock people. Society is garbage.’ When the punk scene exploded in Scotland

The councillors had squeezed into the Glasgow Apollo on October 16 to see the Stranglers in action for themselves. Aitken had been present in the City Halls, on Candleriggs, on June 22, when the English band had played there, and to his displeasure had witnessed two stage invasions, rowdy behaviour, vandalism, and much spitting. He met the Stranglers afterwards – “they were pleasant enough, although I had difficulty in communicating with them. They maintained that they weren’t a punk group, but there is no way they will ever be allowed to this city again”.

By August, Jan Tomasik, manager of the Apollo, was publicly appealing to the council to allow the Stranglers to play his venue on October 16. He, too, had been at the City Halls: “These people should have seen a Bay City Rollers show,” he said. “I’d rather have 12 Stranglers shows than one by the Rollers ... This new-wave music has to be given an airing, otherwise you can turn our entertainment centres into bingo halls.”

The committee’s decision to allow the Apollo concert to go ahead was seen as a common-sense move. There had, after all, been an endless, over-heated furore in recent months over punk rock, a movement that had begun in New York and gradually found its way across the Atlantic.

The best-known of the British punk bands were the Sex Pistols. They had played their first live show in November 1975 in London, and had built up a steady following through word of mouth. In September 1976 they headlined a punk festival at London’s 100 Club, alongside another new act, The Clash. Other bands had been busily emerging, too: The Damned, Buzzcocks, The Vibrators, Eater, Penetration, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Subway Sect. British music, as author Mick Wall recounts in his biography of the influential BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel, was clearly about to undergo its most exciting period since the late 1960s.

Tabloid notoriety came the Pistols’ way in early December 1976 after they and their entourage were interviewed on an early-evening Thames Television show by Bill Grundy. Goaded by Grundy to “say something outrageous”, the Pistols duly obliged. One furious viewer kicked in the screen of his new £380 television set. The interview scandalised British parents and led to a tabloid frenzy. “Punk rock,” the Evening Times said the following morning, “is a new development whose essence is anarchy and outrage”.

Notoriety followed the Sex Pistols' 1976 appearance on a show hosted by Bill Grundy (Image: Newsquest)

The Pistols had already released their debut single, Anarchy in the UK (it “exploded like a hand grenade in an elevator”, says music historian Peter Doggett in his book, Electric Shock). Such was the uproar that their label, EMI, withdrew it from sale within a fortnight; but Peel, says Mick Wall, continued to play it on his show so that listeners could tape it at home. The Pistols were dropped first by EMI, then by A&M. Their single, God Save the Queen, caused predictable outrage when it was released by the Virgin label during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in May 1977.

Punk’s DIY ethic and raucous, energetic sound spoke to young people who saw nothing in the then-current music scene to entertain them. Safety-pins, spiked hair and ripped clothing began to be spotted at punk-rock gigs. Many adults looked upon the punk scene with unease and distaste, especially when they considered the seeming nihilism of someone like Johnny Rotten, the Pistols’ lead singer.

The fall-out from the Stranglers’ City Halls concert in June 1977 temporarily derailed Glasgow’s punk-rock scene. As Vic Galloway records in his book, Rip It Up: The Story of Scottish Pop, “young punks had to travel to The Silver Thread Hotel at nearby Paisley, or head for the east to the Nite Club or Tiffany’s in Edinburgh, to see their safety-pinned heroes throw shapes and incite a little teenage insurrection”.

Scotland gave rise to countless punk/new wave groups, some of whom lasted longer than others. The Rezillos’ debut single, I Can’t Stand My Baby, brought them to the attention of John Peel, whose audience had increased hugely as new, younger listeners tuned into him. The Valves were another of the bands that sprang from the thriving punk scene in the capital. Johnny and the Self-Abusers, a short-lived Glasgow act reportedly banned from the Doune Castle pub in Shawlands for being “offensive and abusive”, quickly gave rise to Simple Minds.

The Rezillos caught the attention of legendary BBC DJ John Peel (Image: Newsquest)

The punk/new wave ethos is summed up by Robbie Collins, one-third of The Jolt, a band formed in Wishaw and Shotts. Interviewed on the punk77.co.uk website, he recalls: “There was a great sense of something happening in Scotland. We felt that anyway and the gigs used to be really great. There was a spirit of being part of some sort of revolution.” The weekly music magazine, NME, which took an enthusiastic interest in punk and new wave, sent a reviewer to a Jolt concert in Edinburgh in June 1977; the reviewer, Ian Cranna, described the trio as “the most enjoyable British new wave band I’ve yet encountered”.

The list of bands who appeared that year at the Apollo, Scotland’s highest-profile rock and pop venue, included such reassuringly familiar names as Rod Stewart, Fleetwood Mac and Glen Campbell. But The Damned, from London, appeared there in March, supporting Marc Bolan (who just six months later would die in a road accident). The influential new-wave US bands, Blondie and Television, played there in May. Later in the year it was the turn of the New York punk outfit, The Ramones, and The Clash. The Stranglers’ concert in August passed off without incident.

An Evening Times writer, visiting Paisley’s Silver Thread Hotel in August, described the youthful punk audiences as “weird creatures who flitted past like figures from Dante’s Inferno”. A crop-haired 19-year-old woman in a torn, inside-out T-shirt and graffiti-spattered jeans told him: “I don’t do this for a laugh. I do it to shock people. Society is garbage. I have tried nearly everything to find a way out of it, and this is the only way out. Now I conform to only one thing – anarchy.”

The manager of Graffiti Record Shop, in Glasgow’s Queen Street, said that 40% of the records he sold each week were by punk bands. A Glasgow Herald journalist observing punk fans’ wear ­– sunglasses, spiky hair, sometimes accessorised by an old plastic bin-bag – said some of them preferred to take their “outlandish gear” in a bag and dress in venues’ toilets “rather than risk provoking a violent attack from the ‘punk haters’.”

Punk was, said former Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook in 2016, “all about the freedom to be yourself”, but at the time it sharply divided opinion about punk musicians’ abilities. An impassioned letter to the Herald, written by someone sympathetic to punk, pointed out: “In the so-called art world there have been fakes, freaks bare canvases, slashed canvases” and, in music, Peter Maxwell Davies’s St Thomas Wake, which the writer’s family found “totally unlistenable”. Let talent be, he concluded, “in the eyes, and ears, of the beholder”.