It is April of 1977 in London. The Sex Pistols take to the stage at the Screen on the Green, and after lead singer John Lydon fires off a rejoinder to those yelling at him from the crowd they launch into God Save the Queen, one of the most recognisable punk rock singles, or it would have been at the time if it hadn't been banned from the airwaves. But most of the concert footage was taken from the Roxy, the only club in the nation's capital which was hosting punk gigs, which they did for one hundred nights in that year when the movement was at its freshest. The club's DJ Don Letts happened to have a Super-8 camera...
And that was the reason so many vintage performances from some of the most celebrated punk acts were captured for posterity, edited together by Letts into his documentary which had something of a checquered career itself. It began running under an hour before the director added more to its length, by which time it ran around eighty minutes and the footage, never the clearest around, was blown up to 35mm for cinema dates. Controversy abounded when Letts went back and produced his director's cut, which added captions, cropped the 4:3 image to 1.85:1 thus losing part of the picture, and overdubbed certain performances with studio recordings.
To be fair, he had mentioned the record companies grumbling about allowing the film to be released on home video, so it could have been the overdubbing was part of the deal to get the production out there, and rather that than it sitting in some vault somewhere never to be seen again because if nothing else it was a priceless snapshot of a point in time for music which had a limited amount of clips recycled incessantly down the years in various documentaries. Though what was a shame was the quality of that footage, with dialogue hard to make out, never mind the tunes, and visuals which looked as if they'd been kicked around the editing room floor rather than treated with kid gloves.
Still, considering what it was celebrating, it was fitting that the end result should be so ramshackle and home made, its improvisation appropriate to the spirit of punk. To have secured footage of the Pistols and The Clash at this stage in their careers was impressive enough, though oddly they don't emerge as the stars of the film, that accolade going to Siouxsie Sioux of The Banshees who pops up mischievously at regular intervals, both with her band and in the between songs documentary business, taking pills or making a nuisance of herself: you could well see why she was regarded as Queen of Punk for many of its followers. Yet for all the joie de vivre of seeing The Slits rehearse or The Clash arse about outside a motorway service station, it wasn't all fun and games.
In keeping with the rebellious, in your face nature of the music there were also scenes of people shooting up heroin, a moustached man showing quite some dedication by cutting his chest and belly open with a razor blade, and the now-forgotten band Eater relying on the gimmick of chopping up a pig's head when the audience grow jaded with their song. The cramped, dark and muffled club was not best suited to crystal clear sound quality never mind imagery, for example if you'd never seen Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex before you probably still wouldn't know what she looked like after watching this, though some acts managed to shine through the gloom and poor recording. Wayne County put on a show to remember with his/her anthemic If You Don't Want to Fuck Me, Fuck Off, Johnny Thunders actually managed to sound pretty good with his rendition of Chinese Rock and Billy Idol seemed weirdly polite backstage before his gig. Perhaps there would never be a version of this to satisfy everybody, but for what it was The Punk Rock Movie was vivid almost in spite of itself.
