On the 18th of November 1976 Richard Hell - later to be Richard Hell and the Voidoids - released the three-track 45rpm 7" Another World EP on Ork Records in the US.
This contained, on the A-side, (I Could Live With You In) Another World, which was a very unpunk-like six minutes long, and it's probably as well that this has more or less sunk without a trace.
More importantly, however, was what was on the flipside of the record. There were two tracks,(I Belong To The) Blank Generation and You Gotta Lose. The first of those, Blank Generation, was to go on to inspire the Sex Pistols' Pretty Vacant, amongst other things, and remains a firm favourite of this blog, after all those years. It was a song that spoke to us, and suggested that something interesting was going on.
YouTube doesn't seem to have a copy of the third track, or at least not by Hell. There's is a version by Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, from when Hell was with them, which I include here for the sake of completeness but not for any other reason. If you do listen to it, don't come back complaining to me...
Stiff Records released this in the UK, more than once, as well.
The title of the first UK punk single goes to The Damned's first single, New Rose, released on the 22nd of October 1976 by Stiff Records. Several of the band member had the kind of names that would become familiar to us all soon enough, names like Captain Sensible and Rat Scabies.
Finally, things were starting to hot up.
The Damned have an official website here, and there's always the good old Wikipedia page, as well.
It struck me that this year, and particularly next year, mark the thirty-fifth anniversary of Punk Rock, and what came after. I turned seventeen towards the end of 1976, and am fifty-one now, and it's not overstating the case to say that the music of 1976 and 1977 changed my life. So, I decided to try to mirror the events of that time by posting YouTube videos of the songs that meant so much to me, as much as possible posted thirty-five years to the day after they were originally released.
This blog will not be confined to just Punk, though, or it would be a very short blog - even if I could decide on a practical definition of Punk, which I can't. There was Punk, New Wave, Power Pop, Ska, Post-Punk, and any number of other things that made up the soundscape of my life back then, and it'll probably all get a look in at some point.
There's any number of dates I could choose to start what is going to be a very personal view of Punk and its times. I could have started with the first single by The Ramones, Blitzkrieg Bop, released on the 9th of July 1976 -
However, this is not actually the point I'm going to choose. Instead, my beginning is going to be with the release of Nick Lowe's So it Goes, not only his debut single, but the first single to be released on the recently-formed Stiff Records. My view of Punk Rock is predominantly from my side of the great Atlantic divide, although this is not to say the Americans won't get a look in, of course. But first listen to this:
here.