Punks, what’s your problem? The 100 Club was past its primeThat London could lose another live venue is sad news. But the 100 Club has not been the home of new music for years.
Last week saw music fans despairing at the news that London’s historic 100 Club venue on Oxford Street was facing closure.
Could it really be true that the birthplace of British punk rock and a home to British jazz might be no longer? Yes, basically. The Evening Standard reported that the venue is under the threat of closure due to spiralling overheads – its rates bill has hit £4,000 a month while landlord Lazari Investments now charges rent, with VAT, of £166,000 a year. Owner Jeff Horton is now looking for a buyer or major sponsor to step forward to keep the club open.
Cue people on Facebook getting themselves all in a tizz, furiously stabbing the “create group” button with their pitchforks, and writing things like: “We have to stop this, otherwise the venues that have shaped the greats and will shape the future of music will be gone.” It’s the sort of sentiment that could feature within the paraphernalia of the vile O2 British Music Experience at the old Millennium Dome – if those words had been run through a spellchecker and had an O2 logo stamped atop.
There’s been an uprising of British punks, too, the sort you see mugging for the camera on the back of London postcards, spouting statements like their “heritage” is at risk.
Me? I’m not too sure about all the fuss.
It’s been a good decade, probably two, since the 100 Club served any sort of function in shaping popular music’s future. The venue has become akin to a British take on New York’s CBGB club, which itself closed in 2006 – the sort of place where record labels sporadically place their edgier new acts to garner a bit of reflected punk cool from the fact the Sex Pistols once trod its rickety red boards. Said acts don’t even have to be new; I saw Towers of London there in 2007, after Donny Tourette had escaped from Big Brother. Well, I say saw; I watched two songs, thought “life’s too short” and went to hang out in the video game shop next door.
And I was also part of the press throng that saw the Horrors play in 2006 and every night of Gallows’ four-night stand in 2008. Both bands’ appearances were exciting, but don’t tell me those bands’ live agents didn’t know the significance of booking their shows there. Unlike Brixton’s Windmill venue, Shoreditch’s Old Blue Last, Elephant and Castle’s Coronet Theatre or Stoke Newington’s late, great Bardens Boudoir – venues that really can hold a claim to being the cradle of British music’s future – I’ve never just walked in, seen something brilliant and unexpected and skipped home thrilled. Far from being a home of new music, the 100 Club merely serves an important marketing purpose for a modern music scene obsessed with authenticity.
As for the punks’ claims of their heritage being destroyed, that’s the most galling claim I’ve heard. I’ve got Black Flag bars inked on my skin, I’ve got a favourite Crass B-side, and the 100 Club says as much about my heritage as my local Greggs does. I never thought punk rock was supposed to be about heritage, or monuments, or even bricks and mortar. It’s a transcendent spirit, it works in your head, in your bedroom or in a music venue. I thought punk was about ideas, anger, being disconcerting about who and what you respect, about questioning the status quo (especially Status Quo). But if you are looking for the home of modern punk rock in the capital then The Fighting Cocks in Kingston upon Thames has much more of a claim to that title than the 100 Club does.
The sad part of this story is that London might just lose another inner-city venue, which, looking at the gaping void left by the Astoria every time I walk down Charing Cross Road, is depressing, especially when it’s one that isn’t branded with corporate sponsorship like so many other venues in the city.
It would be nice if people’s ire was fuelled with that sort of honesty, and not with making claims for the venue’s significance and purpose that are as dead and as stupid as that other punk relic Sid Vicious.
