Iggy Pop, The Music Machine, London 1978

squats, and Punk and life at 17

I grew up on Bowie, but Iggy, 1977, was the real deal

Having just seen Iggy again after 40 years on 1st July 2023, in London, so many memories came back. I started to pen them on the train with Alyosha, my daughter, for I had been, with thousands of others, part of that incredible London movement of music, mania, and creation.

I was 17 and living in Marseille, France, working as an au pair, and each month I had enough money to buy Rock & Folk, France’s equivalent of our Melody Maker or Rolling Stone. This was when I fell in love. We all have our musical heroes and Iggy Pop became mine. This cover was the first time I saw his face. The French began their love affair with him in 1977, and he with France. “I discovered French culture in the years 1976-1977 … At that time, I did a lot of concerts in France. And then, through literature: Malraux, Genêt, Sartre… Or even fashion and music, via Brel, Ferré. It happened little by little.” (From So French online magazine - by Elisabeth Perotin).

Music changes us, moves us, bands influence us, plucking our favourite lyrics till they become our mantra; falling in love with hedonism. Back then, in 1977, it was all new rawness and energy, as a new ere was coming, the sound of Punk was moving, and we were there to run with it. It was an entire movement of noise and disruption, art mixed with poetry, squats, community sharing and tribes gathering. We were just old enough to be part of that history and young enough to make it happen, for it took energy and daring to up and leave homes and jobs to follow the music. A small ripple which became a huge wave.

I had to get back to the UK where this scene was really happening.

I packed my large white suitcase, bade goodbye to my lovely Marseille family, Gerrard and Helene Detaille, who own the famous Galarie Detaille, and trained it back with my Rock & Folk in hand. (I still have that copy today.)

I got back to London early ‘78

just in time for the peak of the Punk explosion when small venues shot up like morning dew mushrooms. The Roxy, The Vortex and the 100 Club were some of the first spaces to be born from strip clubs. Later the Marquee, Music Machine, Hope & Anchor and others joined the pranksters.

Punk was a pop-up-to-stay-awhile-happening. Johnny lydon, aka Rotten, said: “Before the Sex Pistols, music was so bloody serious, all run by university graduates… How on earth were we supposed to relate to that music when we lived in council flats? We had no money, no job, no nothing. So the Pistols projected that anger, that rock-bottom working-class hate.” John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

Punk Pure was a time and place. Energy of soul, squats alive with bustle. Little worlds swirling around each other, only one thing in mind - where’s the next gig?

Some bands were powerful, like the Clash and the Pistols, others were funsters, experimenting and living on the spontaneity. Some were far-reaching like the Doctors of Madness - still strong today. Then there were the heavies like Iggy, who seemed to be from another energy.

The original Punk? No, he was never a Punk in the London sense of the word, he was/is an artist-persona of incredible fireball charisma. A one-off.

In 1978 he had been revived with Bowie’s help and had released his new album Lust for Life, and was joined on tour by Fred Sonic Smith, Patti Smith’s husband. The stuff of legends. He was here to blow us away!

Iggy

first graced London in July 1972 with Lou Reed and debuted at the King's Cross Cinema, backing David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust tour. I was too young to have been there, but all Iggy fans know it was mayhem. Nick Kent, the Guardian critic wrote this review after Iggy’s first London show. "The audience was terrified, with Iggy climbing all over them, and management decided we would get arrested if we did any more shows," James Williamson, original member of the The Stooges later recalled. The spectacle made an impact on at least two of those audience members: John Lydon and Mick Jones would go on to form the Sex Pistols and the Clash respectively.”

In 2022, Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore unveiled a plaque to mark the legacy of the concerts, 50 years on. (Who would have ever thought Punk would become ‘IT”.) Thurston, who was very much a part of the US punk scene, said “The events in King's Cross were important in part because of the connection forming between the London and New York rock and roll scenes which was primarily Bowie's fascination with Iggy and Lou Reed. That was so significant to everything that came afterwards … It feeds into punk rock…I love that unit of borderless aesthetics.”

Iggy came back to London in 1978

The band were playing three nights at the mythical and magical Music Machine in Camden Town, London. This goddess of music venues suited Punk. She was in constant transition. In 1977 she was renamed and rebranded to accommodate the new manic music. Like a stately home, she was the crème de la crème for acoustics, style, and intimacy (holding 2,000) and where we made our mark with home-made fashions, plastic bin liners as dresses pulled tight with string for belts, lashings of blond spikes and black lipstick.

Unisex.

Punks were the IT crowd.

The doors opened from 8 till 2am

The warm up bands started at about 9pm, the main band at 12 midnight. Tickets were often hand-drawn and printed off on rough coloured paper. Many bands were free, they just wanted us there, at the bar, buying drinks, hanging out, looked at and looking at. If you knew the bouncers you could get in for free. There was also the side-trick of scaling up the drain pipes and up via the skylight in the roof.

Once in the theatre, the smell of cigarette smoke merged with patchouli oil and ganja, while thick sounds of Dub music, a sub genre of reggae, the club sound of the time, led us down into the underground tunnel and onto the dance floor; or up onto the balconies or small alcoves. It was more than magical, it was majestic and solid, ornate with renaissance-style pillars, and scalloped ceiling mouldings flicked with gold and red paint.

I adored this place; it was my home-from-home; almost six nights a week, after work, in those early days of the Punk uprising where we, the drifters and misfits, carved out our lives in those precarious, young years.

The Music Machine was only a Punk Venue from 1977 - 1982, five short years, before it became a disco, before being an opera house, theatre, cinema, hippodrome, dance palace, speakeasy, and today, 2023, you can have the pleasure of becoming a member of the elitist House of Koko, advertised as “A thrilling new members' club situated backstage at London's iconic KOKO.”

Dame Ellen Terry, a Shakespearian actress at the end of the 19th-century, opened this wonderful entertainment place - The Camden Theatre - in 1900, while London’s most sought-after theatre architect, and its creator, William George Robert Sprague, stood on the marble steps. 

Would Ellen and William approve of this three-tier auditoria becoming the iconic symbol to Punkism? I somehow feel that Ellen would have loved it. To perform at the Machine meant you were IT.

Ellen certainly was.

Some gigs I saw: Suicide. The Clash. Adam and the Ants. Iggy. Dead Kennedys. Joan Jett & The Blackhearts. Marianne Faithfull. The Police. Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers. Siouxsie & The Banshees. Depeche Mode. Simple Minds. The Jam. The legendary Link Ray. And many more.

I have tried in vain to find a photo of the time, but none exists in public domain. The only photo I have found is of the revamped Koko club where Eliza and the Bear performed in 2015. Bring down the glitz and glory a notch, more smoke and mirrors, this is what it was like.

Wildly lovely. The best space ever, like a fantasy playground.

It was class.

Eliza and the Bear performing at Koko, London by Jamie Leming. Public Domain

She transformed again, as Punk became a shader pale in 1982. We wept, yet it had served its purpose, memories were made. The Machine became part of our Punk, New Wave collective consciousness.

Original poster: Public Domain

I got tickets for all shows

and was right at the front, touching the stage, in that place of madness and energy. Iggy is stagical - my word for stage and magic. He knows how to create a sense of theatrical anticipation; a long slow, musical intro and lots of stage smoke. As this was the first time most of us had seen him, adrenalin was high. The moment he came on with Scott Thurston on Keyboard, Scott Asheton on Drums, Fred 'Sonic' Smith on Guitar and Gary Rasmussen on Bass, I knew he was 10 levels up.

I shout to the French Punkette next to me that die-hards said, if you can get on stage, it’s backstage. “Faisons-le - let’s do it.” She shouted back. She wore her eyeliner thick drawn, Mary Quant mouth-pout, stripped to nothing eyebrows, fishnet top, stockings to match, covered by a black jacket. Even as the crowd surged while Iggy bounded on, throwing himself across the stage, she remained a Diva of French chic on this seminal punk night.

*Mary Quant (11 February 1930 -l 2023) - The British fashion designer and fashion icon Read more here.

As he played “The Endless Sea”, my favourite song, she grabbed my hand and we scrambled on stage, where we were quickly pushed down the famous backstage stairs by two bouncers, to a room where bottles of whisky, packs of cigarettes and an Asian woman with high black boots cast her eyes over us. (Mitzie Than, hustler for the bands in the late 70s.)

The Endless Sea from 2023, 1st July. London

Above us is a dirty sky
Full of youths and liquors
A little girl, a little guy
This air can't get much thicker

Oh-oh, the endless sea
Oh-oh, the endless sea
Oh-oh, the endless sea
Let it wash all over me

Mitzie takes Punkette by the hand to the underbelly of Sprague’s theatre. I am alone in a windowless room with my hero’s music pounding from above. The bouncers will not let me go back up, so, the only way is down along the dark corridor and out of a side entrance where the dustbins are. From here the guttering goes all the way up to the men’s toilets, then to the roof. It wasn’t long before my buddy Gray and his gang were charging 50p there to get in to see the bands. But that is another story.

I cannot get back in. Tiny, a bouncer for many of the punk bands, and good friend to the first black US Punk bank Pure Hell, tells me: “Get on stage, it’s backstage and out the door. You have to have another strategy.”

I walk home to our squat off the Caledonian Road. I cried my black eyeliner away and remember the smell of London, that damp June night time smell mixed with petrol fumes, and the winter of discontent just around the corner, sent a shiver through my body of ‘and so, what next?’

My room was minute. Gail got the big fancy room with the balcony, and Louis and Grey shared the boring room, while Steve the Christian convert (R.I.P), had the comfort zone. No one was home, they were out clubbing in the West End. My room was the box room, covered with a huge image of Iggy and a very old army map.

I closed my eyes and put my finger out. It landed on Morocco at the tip of Africa.

That’s where I’ll go at summer’s end.

I stand on the tiers for next gigs

I do not have footage or photos. We did not have cameras, even though Kodak Instamatic cameras cost little; it just wasn’t our thing. The closest I can get to Iggy’s insane energy is this video taken one month before his London gig.

(I love the way the audience just sit there - static! )

On the last night many of us got backstage, where this time an after party went on till the early hours. Iggy came through the room like an unfinished tornado. He pulled some punks with him, first come, first served. I was far too shy to push in, and they all left pretty quickly to the London night into waiting cars.

I was happy. I had managed to see my hero up close.

Yet, despite the excitement, the image of my map was floating in the mania of that night. We all lived for music, lived for the night. Lovers by Day & Fighters by Night. We were the nightclubbers coming to town . We had little money, shared squats, in this one today, kicked out by the Council the next day. Frenetic, exciting and then, it became one long exodus, trailing our clothes in bags, sometimes we got broken into, once a family moved in downstairs for a few days, then a squat burned down in Islington, and the police raided.

I knew it was time to go for now …

I prepared my backpack, cut my hair short like a lad’s and wrote hitching signs

with my finger metaphorically still on my map, I leave the squats, my Music Machine friends, Tiny and the gang, my squatter family, Gail, Grey, Steve and Louis Eugene, who would not long after stow away on a boat to Australia, and a kind meal with my parents.

I didn’t come back till 1979 for the second round of Iggy’s gigs where I was determined to find a way to follow the tour.

Thank you for reading my story. Part two is coming later this week, as I travel down through Spain to Morocco with my new best friend, El Matcho, my dog.

I come back to Iggy next time, and that winter of discontent when the Labour government collapsed, and the arrival of Thatcherism took over in.

So, enjoy your weeks ahead in this strange, unusual time that we are all living in. I am very thankful to you for reading my work, as this supports me, motivates me, and yes, to carry on.

Everything takes so much longer when life has that tendency to get in the way of life, for that is life. So, soon, very soon, in fact, I have given myself a launch date which is the 21st September. I have my new Substack ready for those of you who are interested in venturing into the world of documentary filmmaking.

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If you are interested in learning how to make a documentary, digital story or hands-on scrapbook take a look at my website, Scatterflix.