77 Sulphate Strip: The year that changed music

by Barry Cain

An eyewitness account of 1977 by one of the only journalists allowed full access to the bands. This is the true story of punk – how it really felt and what happened – and how John Lydon, Hugh Cornwell, and Rat Scabies feel now about what they said and did back then.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

416 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2007

About the author

I started my working life as a trainee court reporter in Soho before moving to Gloucester to become a journalist on the evening Citizen newspaper. After completing my indentures I returned to London and became a music writer at the time punk was rearing its ugly head. I went on the road with the Sex Pistols, Clash, Jam and Stranglers amongst others and wrote about my experiences in the book '77 Sulphate Strip. In the '80s I published the magazine Flexipop! that featured a flexi-disc on the cover of each issue containing a song exclusively recorded for the mag by the likes of Blondie, The Jam, Madness, The Cure, Bauhaus, Genesis etc. Alas, the magazine was eventually banned but has since attained cult status. I continued publishing mainly pop magazines well into the '90s before becoming a travel writer specialising in cruises. I've now returned to my first love, music, and have launched Flexipop! on line. A book about the magazine will be published later this year and Spandau Ballet have provided a never before released flexi-disc to accompany it.

Reviews

[Crispin Kott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where the fuck has this guy been all my life? I'd never heard of him before my good pal Mike gave me the book, and I'm still not sure why.

The straight inside dope about that crucial year in British punk as written by one of the few music scribes who makes me consider giving the whole game up.

[Jaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was always a Sounds reader back in the day; rightly or wrongly Record Mirror was perceived as 'uncool' and most of my contemporaries gravitated towards the aforementioned rag, or the NME.

Barry Cain was pretty much the lone voice of punk at RM, and this book - a compendium of his articles, supplemented by new interviews - is an excellent chance for folks like me to catch up on what we missed. Recommended to elderly punk rockers everywhere!

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fine book which doesn't choose to over state Punk as in a overtly intellectual way like many books and doesn't rely overtly on nostalgia..although needless to say as it is revisiting the past there are elements of that.
Discussions in the day with the likes of The Damned, The Clash and the Pistols alongside a myriad of other bands does however suggest a common focus for the bands, The introduction of monthly charts before each chapter too is genius showing the truth of the mundane state of the charts and the minority influence of Punk within it.
The book touches on the politics of Punk from the left leaning views of Joe Strummer to the then 'Tory' loving views of Paul Weller..
Certain folks haven't really changed their view much of what Lydon says as Rotten still stands after all these years showing maybe he was always aware of the gravity of his words.
So far this is the best of the '77 UK punk books I have read and as it was by a Record Mirror journalist who was there at start till arguable finish this is maybe no suprise.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

The bulk of the book are all the articles Barry Cain wrote for the music mag Record Mirror in 1977. He was one of the key British music journalists writing extensively about punk rock in a sympathetic light in the mainstream media. He interviews The Sex Pistols, The Stranglers, The Damned, The Clash and The Jam, tours the US with The Damned, and widely covers this developing music scene. The articles are very interesting from a historical perspective, but offer little insight.

At the end of the book, he prints current interviews with some figures covered in the book ... most notably Hugo Burnham, Rat Scabies and John Lydon. These are much more interesting, and the wild interview with Lydon almost makes the whole book worth reading.

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a mixed bag. The book is split into two parts, the first part concentrating on interviews bands gave to the author in 1977 when he worked for Record Mirror, with a few reviews from the same year thrown in for good measure. The second part involves the author meeting some of the original interviewees in 2007 and getting their opinion on the year in question and their quotes from the time.

This is all well and good but is routinely spoiled by the author droning on about his private life at the time. No offence to the guy but I bought this book to read about the bands I loved from '77, not endless pages about his teenage dancehall days or his soap opera romance with his Greek girlfriend. Tear these pages out and burn them and the book would go up a star or two. The Demis Roussos interview can stay though (yes, really), it's possibly the funniest part of the whole book.

The original interviews are as you'd expect, belligerent punks giving belligerent answers to mostly inane questions. A few of them are absolute gold, especially when the author travels to Amsterdam to meet The Stranglers and gets dragged into a Hell's Angels den with the band. There's also some tasty Sex Pistols nuggets here, the main reason I purchased this. It also includes interviews from The Clash, The Damned, The Jam, Ian Dury and a few other lesser players. Oh, and Demis Roussos.

The second part features three long interviews from 2007 with Hugh Cornwell, Rat Scabies and John Lydon. Cornwell is easy going, eager to reminisce and good-humoured. Scabies less so but a lot of fun. He's brutally honest in a charming way, tossing in gems like "We thought we were really special, but the truth is we were just a bunch of fucking losers who had nothing else". He comes over regretful and melancholic in parts, which is fascinating.

The least interesting interview goes to Lydon. Sadly the author couldn't get a sit down with Paul Weller or Mick Jones, so we have to endure Lydon's drivel instead. He dips into what '77 meant to him and chats about the Pistols and Malcolm briefly, but the majority of his interview consists of tedious football hooligan chat, what "firm" had the toughest "lads", his time fighting at Arsenal and his hatred for everything Tottenham. Why he imagines anyone with a fully functioning brain would find this interesting is anyone's guess. It's very adolescent, very long-winded and very, very dull. I'm not sure whether he's going through some kind of belated mid-life crisis here but frankly it's embarrassing.

Worth it for some of the '77 interviews, and for 2007 Cornwell and Scabies, but it's no England's Dreaming. Then again what is?

[Gary Richards · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult to rate. Some parts of the book I hated. Others I really liked. Three stars is the compromise.

[Phil · Rating 2 out of 5]

At one point towards the end of this book, the PR man Alan Edwards, an old friend of the author, muses on the paradox that the punk uprising of 1977 has remained so influential in popular culture when so much of the music that gave rise to it has failed to age well. The same can, I think, be said of much of the contemporary writing about that music - it launched a whole generation of tyros who are now senior journalists, but at 37 years' remove is pretty much unreadable without a strong cringe of embarrassment, particularly from those of us who were there and thought it all horribly important at the time.

The clue, I suppose, is in the title. There's very little like amphetamine for boosting the sense of self-importance and leading one to believe that mediocre prose is somehow elevated to urban poetry status by quick gear-changes, promiscuous wordplay, and, frankly, hype. Did we really think the opinions of sundry members of The Stranglers, The Damned, even the blessed Sex Pistols and Clash, were so important that we were prepared to spend money and valuable time poring over them at length in the weekly music press, for which Barry Cain wrote seemingly endless chemically-aided copy in his capacity as a staffer for the "Record Mirror"? Well, just sometimes it paid off, but in this tightly-packed compendium of columns from Barry C's (and my) annus mirabilis there's a hell of a lot of misfired sub-Kerouac by the author, and even more tedious and repetitive posturing by his subjects and friends. There's an occasional explosion of brilliance, such as a summation of the late Johnny Thunders as (I paraphrase) someone who could play like he only had 24 hours to live, but all too often performed as though he'd died 24 hours previously, but these are nearly lost in the yah-boos of The Pistols, the 'thinking men's yob' postures of the highly intelligent Clash, and anecdotes about Hugh Cornwell on acid.

The reviews take up the first three- quarters of the book. The rest consists of a series of interviews with some of the previously-featured dramatis personae, whom Cain revisited 30 years later to ask for their opinions now on what happened then. To this jaded fifty something at least, this is a considerably more useful exercise, and its style more considered, less self-consciously flashy, less... speedy. The aforementioned A. Edwards gives good copy. Rat Scabies (aka Chris Millar, formerly of The Damned) is thoughtful and self-deprecating. John "Rotten" Lydon is as mad as a bag of stoats, and the verbatim transcript of a lunch conversation in California between him and Barry as they get progressively drunker, is both funnier and more embarrassing than most of the 77-era interviews it both replicates and puts in context.

I can't really recommend this book. I almost certainly won't be reading it again. As with many things about 1977, you probably had to be there.

[Alan Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

1977 really did change everything. It was the year I left primary school and, while I already loved music, by virtue of my uncle's record collection, already a Beatles-lover, this was the year I started to make my own choices, the year I was exposed to punk. Barry Cain, essentially reviewing his own Record Mirror output, revisits 1997, the music, the characters, the society. The late chapters are more recent interviews with some of the main players from '77 and, while much of the music has stayed with me over the last 40 years, John Lydon makes an interesting point that, while punk changed everything, it left little behind. It's probably true that there are half a dozen great albums form this period, at least those which can be considered punk - many of the later bands were simply imitators; the Clash became one of the best bands ever but only their first, 1977 album could be considered punk. I loved revisiting and Cain is an excellent tour guide.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Barry Cain's book is a fascinating look at the articles he wrote in 1977 covering the nascent London punk scene, along with current day commentary and contemporary interviews with some of the scene makers he covered back in the day. What astounds me is how well he wrote in '77, how smart, how rhythmic, how playful his music writing is/was, and how intuitive he was about the bands and musicians of the time.