Pub Rock (United Kingdom) - Legacy

Legacy

Pub rock may have been killed by punk, but without it there might not have been any punk in Britain at all.

The boundaries were originally blurred: at one point, the Hot Rods and the Sex Pistols were both considered rival kings of "street rock". The Pistols played support slots for the Blockheads and the 101ers at the Nashville. Their big break was supporting Eddie and the Hot Rods at the Marquee in Feb 1976. Dr Feelgood played with the Ramones in New York. The word "punk" debuted on Top of the Pops on a t-shirt worn by a Hot Rod. Punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue reviewed Feelgood album Stupidity as “the way rock should be".

Apart from the ready-made live circuit, punk also inherited the energy of pub rock guitar heroes like Dr Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson, his violence and mean attitude. Feelgood have since been described as John the Baptist to punk’s messiahs. In the gap between the music-press hype and vinyl releases of early punk, the rowdier Pub Rock bands even led the charge for those impatient for actual recorded music, but it was not to last. Punks such as John Lydon eventually rejected the pub rock bands as "everything that was wrong with live music" because they had failed to fight the stadium scene and, as he saw it, preferred to narrow themselves into an exclusive pub clique. The back-to-basics approach of pub rock apparently involved chord structures that were still too complicated for punk guitarists like the Sex Pistol Steve Jones, who complained "if we had played those complicated chords we would have sounded like Dr Feelgood or one of those pub rock bands". By the time the Year Zero of punk (1976) was up, punks wanted nothing to do with pub rockers. Bands like The Stranglers were shunned but they didn’t care.

Ironically, it was Stiff Records, formed from a £400 loan from Feelgood’s Lee Brilleaux, who went on to release the first British punk single—The Damned’s "New Rose". Stiff Records' early clientele consisted of a mix of pub rockers and punk rock acts for which they became known.