The Subway Sect Mark II shattered after performing their Club Left 'Songs For Sale' set in Paris in 1981 as captured by Sarah Partridge (photo no.1).
So what did punks do after the early days of filth and fury? By ’78, the early UK punk scene was already fracturing: after the Pistols crashed & burned, a fraternity of post punk musicians attempted to break from punk clichés and experiment with non-rock styles, Crass declared that punk was dead, as did Pete Shelley with Buzzcocks entering their pop punk formative phase while street punk and Oi! Bands attempted to redefine punk.
Vic Godard was there right from the very start, since his Subway Sect were among the performers at the legendary 100 Club ’76 Punk Festival sharing the bill with Siouxsie & the Banshees, The Clash and the Sex Pistols.
theguardian.com/ : “Vic, in league with Bernie Rhodes, was thinking of an even more shocking revolt against conventional taste: cocktail jazz. Rhodes persuaded Godard to ditch the original Sect and hired a fresh group of musicians with a little more swing than the original band. One of the first public expressions of this was Club Left, a regular night that ran at the Whisky a Go Go in Soho as the ‘80s began. The idea was to annoy everyone. But this sonic handbrake turn went on to point a lot of music – and a lot of punks – in a very different direction.”
The Clash’s manager Bernard Rhodes recruited keyboardist Dave Collard (photo no.2 by Coneyl Jay), bassist Chris Bostock (photo no.3 by Ian Usher), guitarist Rob Marche (photo no.4) and drummer Sean McLusky (photo no.5), key members of various Bristol groups, who along with Vic Godard formed a new incarnation of Subway Sect with a completely different sound influenced by ’40s-style crooner music mixed with jazz, soul, rockabilly and skiffle, which was referred to as ‘Cool Bop and Swing’. These cool cats, a London ‘Rat Pack’ with Johnny Britton as the regular Club Left DJ, even toured extensively and their refined set became the “Songs for Sale” album.
“I remember looking down from the club’s floor-to-ceiling window one night just before opening, and seeing a queue stretching round the corner into Shaftesbury Avenue. We attracted an amazingly eclectic crowd, and you never knew who would turn up together with our hard-core regulars…”. Rob Marche “Club Left hosted a weekly array of great performers. If it had an ethos, it was a simple nod to the Beatnik past of Soho and Paris of the 60's”. Sean McLusky
The far-retro Club Left project reintroduced various people to easy listening. Artists such as Sade or the group of young women, who had supplied occasional backing vocals for the likes of Shane McGowan’s first band, the Nipple Erectors, and went on to become Bananarama. When Vic Godard got married and took a break from music in ’82, the rest of the band with the addition of Dig Wayne became the JoBoxers, fusing elements of northern soul, rockabilly, NY disco and funk.
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