Happy New Year to you, I hope you are in good spirits and full of unbridled optimism as we roll into not only a new year but a new decade to boot. I haven’t quite digested the fact that the first decade of the 21st century is now consigned to history but give me a few days and I’ll adjust. Not much to share from my New Years Eve, when I was in London it was always a good night to go and see a band, hope they’d play well past midnight and wonder why the muppets were out in Trafalgar Square in the freezing cold being watched with trojan authority by the Metropolitan Police. That never looked like a good time to me and its probably why I never did it. I was lucky enough instead to see some good concerts on the last night of the year the best of which include Billy Bragg (three times I think), Madness and Ride if memory serves correctly. Going out around here on New Years Eve reminds me of Berlin in the 1980′s with police roadblocks (drink driving checkpoints) at every other major intersection and every amateur drinker in the city out to ‘get totally wasted’…I must say its not appealing and even knowing that the cops will be out in full force you still see people sloshed as they drive their way home in the wee hours. As a result, it makes me pine for London Transport even if it meant getting the party night bus home from Trafalgar Square which seemed to stop in parts of Hammersmith that hadn’t been visited my traffic since the 1930′s.

I now tend to celebrate at 5pm local time with London simultaneously ringing in the New Year and then settle down to something approaching a normal night with the Clash Bloggette away from the risk of pubs at midnight. Speaking of Trafalgar Square,  I was doing some Clash research and January wasn’t usually the busiest month of the year for the band but on January 1st 1977 they did play a tiny venue that in an amazingly short spell became one of the most celebrated venues of the punk movement in London. It sat just a few hundred yards up from the famed square.

If you wander around the gentrified streets of Covent Garden these days with its arty boutiques and candle shops it seems a million miles from somewhere that hosted the famous Roxy Club from late 1976 into 1978. However just the shortest of staggers from Covent Garden tube sat the venue right at 41 Neal Street, from here the Roxy sprang to life in December of 1976. I’ve walked past the former location a few times and there is no indication it ever existed just the same white tiled entryway that took you to the lobby and stairs down to the original basement venue. Upstairs now resides a Speedo swimwear shop, which seems like almost as trite a transition as you could even fear. It wasn’t always thus…

Covent Garden Tube (love the staircase)

Andy Czekowski held an ambition of creating a focal point for the punk scene when he opened the little club in December 1976. Considering the odds, the recognition that the original acts who played at the venue achieved makes it completely remarkable. The debut concert was by Generation X, followed that same month by The Heartbreakers and Siouxsie and The Banshees. The official gala night opening (prices were raised by 25p to 1.25 entry for the night of January 1st. What prompted such an expensive night in the still new venue? The Clash were to headline along with The Heartbreakers.From literally a standing position the previous summer The Clash had played enough gigs in the prior three months (and gained some press and notoriety right along with that) that they were in a position to be relevant enough to properly christen the Roxy on the first night of 1977. Czekowski might seem to have been the right owner at the right time, as the Roxy in its very short history hosted an amazing list of artists each of who were integral to what was happening in 1977. That definition of Andy seems fair until you realise he also later founded the (brilliant) Fridge in Brixton (one of my favourite venues). The Roxy became synonymous with the London Punk scene and perhaps it was only meant to last the short time that it did, however two critical components helped propel it into the fame it still holds, the resident DJ happened to be Don Letts and The Clash baptized the place. Incidentally Letts and The Clash remain as interwoven as New Years Eve and getting drunk even after all these years. I’ll be back with more about The Clash appearance, Don Letts and the Roxy over the next few days.

Cheers ~