Revolt into Style: New Sounds in New York and London

Like Pete Townshend of The Who, Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, and Ray Davies of The Kinks, Paul Simonon and Mick Jones transposed their art school aspirations into musical aspirations. Art schools on both sides of the Atlantic offered their students loosely structured days informed by lessons in theory, craft, and creativity. The exigency of creativity inspired students with musical talent to pursue muses in the visual and sonic arts and, in turn, to paint by day and play house parties at night. These schools, then, served as incubators for the protagonists of the British Invasion of the 1960s and the emergence of punk (and new wave) in the 1970s. The punk circles of downtown Manhattan also included organic punk intellectuals, whose interlocutors included Andy Warhol, French poets, and Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman.

Today Your Loves, Tomorrow the World

Simonon was born in 1955, and grew up in Brixton, in inner-south London. When he was eight years old, his mother and father separated and, seven years later, Simonon moved in with his father. A mishmash of pages from art history books adorned the walls of their apartment, and Antony Simonon encouraged his son to sketch masterworks by Johannes Vermeer and Vincent Van Gogh. Between the sketching and, at the behest of his father, leafleting for the Communist Party, Simonon found the time instructive. "Being with my father made me self-sufficient," he recalled. "It was tough but I needed it. I learned the value of hard work." Simonon's work ethic served him well during basic training on the bass, led initially by Jones and, in 1978, by producer Sandy Pearlman.

Simonon's diligence reaped rewards, to begin, in the form of a scholarship to the Byam Shaw Art School. From 1974 to 1976, he later remembered, "The other students thought my pictures were great but the teachers used to take the piss out of me." Simonon's strength was figurative art, but the lessons of his instructors, who fancied American abstract art, eventually found expression in his low couture and stage backdrops for The Clash. If there was no future for Simonon at Byam Shaw, he did have the good fortune of good looks and good timing.

Jones, like Simonon, was twenty years old in 1975, a fellow Brixtonite, and an art student. Unlike Simonon, Jones had homely hair, an imperial overbite, and could actually play guitar. Jones lived with his grandmother on the eighteenth floor of Wilmcote House, an exemplar of Le Corbusier's machines-for-modern-living, which provided the backdrop for Clash treatises on chronic boredom ("London's Burning") and youth-on-youth violence ("Last Gang in Town"). In his teens, Jones staved off boredom by following the Queen's Park Rangers Football Club and tuning into deejay John Peel on Radio London, a pirate station afloat the MV Galaxy, off the coast of Essex. Jones read the music weeklies, bought the latest LPs, and attended Hyde Park concerts by Traffic and The Rolling Stones. (Jones also pored over copies of Creem and Rock Scene sent from Minneapolis by his mother.) At sixteen, Jones was a self-starter on stylophone (a stylus-operated keyboard) and, in fairly quick succession, drums, bass, and guitar. With fellow Mott the Hoople devotees, Jones played in Schoolgirl, and eagerly solicited technical tips from the older kids. In their eyes, his hunger appeared "embarrassingly naive," Jones recalled. "I was always asking how they did it. I think they couldn't understand where this kid was coming from. 'Why can't he just be a lot cooler?'"

After a stint in 1974 with The Delinquents, a glam-rock outfit, Jones teamed up with bassist Tony James to place a classified ad in a July 1975 issue of Melody Maker, a rock'n'roll weekly: "Lead guitarist and drums to join bass-player and guitarist/singer, influenced by Stones, NY Dolls, Mott, etc. Must have great rock'n'roll image." That October, though, Jones hedged his bets on a future with James, and attended an audition on Denmark Street, London's version of Tin Pan Alley. The fledgling band was impressed with Jones's guitar skills, but their follow-up efforts ended in vain. When Glen Matlock and Malcolm McLaren arrived at Jones's address, his housemate grew suspicious, turned them out, and never reported the inquiry of the founding members of The Sex Pistols.

In January 1976, Jones and James hired Bernie Rhodes as their manager, continued to audition drummers and, in archetypal punk effrontery, settled upon London SS as their appellation. By all accounts, Rhodes's back-story before the late 1960s is difficult to discern. His mother, pregnant with Bernie, arrived in London at the close of World War II. She worked as a seamstress in the 1950s, and Rhodes spent the early 1960s allegedly sharing ideas about rock, art, and fame with Marc Bolan, of T. Rex, Townshend, and Mick Jagger. Rhodes mash-mixed these ideas with agit-prop slogans from the Situationist International, including "Be reasonable, demand the impossible" and "The arts of the future can be nothing less than disruptions of situations." In 1974, Rhodes began working at Sex, the shock-and-awe clothing boutique owned by McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. A fall collaboration between McLaren and Rhodes gave rise to their first manifesto T-shirt, with its challenge to each passerby noted in large, bold script just below the collar: "You're going to wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you've been lying on!" In smaller typeface below, the shirt compiled the "hates" ("YES [the band] ... synthetic food ... David Hockney and Victorianism") and the "loves" ("Archie Shepp Muhammad Ali Bob Marley Jimi Hendrix ... Kutie Jones and HIS SEX PISTOLS ... Guy Stevens records").

In this text lay the germ cell of the London punk scene. Rhodes's study of Marxist political theory left him well-versed in the importance of cultural revolutionaries, and the shirt reflected his fascination with avant-garde musical figures from the black Atlantic. Steve "Kutie" Jones, petty thief and eventual guitarist for the Pistols, had been hanging around McLaren's shop for years, hounding the aspiring impresario to support his musical aspirations. Guy Stevens possessed an encyclopedic understanding of black music, worked for Island Records, and produced a handful of albums for Mott the Hoople — a band that loomed large in the imaginations of Strummer and Mick Jones.

Within the logic of loves and hates, a number of paths could have been forged. The two that would come to dominate UK punk in the late 1970s dovetail nicely with the political maxim often attributed to Antonio Gramsci, the cofounder of the Italian Communist Party: "The socialist conception of the revolutionary process has two characteristic marks which...