The Jazz Cellar That Said Yes: How the 100 Club Gave British Punk Its First Real Room

By September 1976 British punk had a problem that had nothing to do with songs. The Sex Pistols had notoriety, but most London venues wanted nothing to do with them. The room that finally gave the scene a stage was not a rock pub or a student union. It was a basement on Oxford Street that had spent three decades booking jazz.

A swing club with a long memory

The 100 Club opened in 1942 as the Feldman Swing Club, a Sunday jazz night in a former restaurant, and took its current name in 1964. It had hosted swing and bebop for decades, and its reputation was as a working musicians’ room, not a fashionable one. That history matters because it explains the booking culture. A club built around live sets and open doors was a natural place for a promoter willing to take a risk.

The promoter was Ron Watts, who ran the club’s rock bookings in the mid-seventies. Watts proposed the idea of a festival for the new bands, and Malcolm McLaren, the Pistols’ manager, helped fill the bill. The result was the 100 Club Punk Special, held over two nights, 20 and 21 September 1976.

Two nights, eight bands

The first night brought Subway Sect, Siouxsie and the Banshees, The Clash and the Sex Pistols. The second night had Stinky Toys, Chris Spedding with the Vibrators, The Damned and Buzzcocks. Most of these acts were unsigned. For several, the show was barely a debut at all: the Clash were playing only their sixth gig, and for the first time without Keith Levene.

The Banshees were the strangest entry. Siouxsie had asked Watts for a slot, and the band went on with no songs, building an improvised set of roughly twenty minutes around recited prayers and noise, with Sid Vicious on drums. It was the first show of a group that would go on to a long career. On the second night the Vibrators backed Spedding after learning his material in a dressing room minutes before going on.

The night it went wrong

The festival also had a dark footnote. During The Damned’s set on the Tuesday, a glass thrown by Vicious broke against a pillar and the shards injured people in the crowd, with one young woman losing sight in an eye. Police arrested Vicious. Accounts of the chaos differ in detail, but the incident became part of the early punk story and a warning about how fragile these scenes were.

Why the room mattered

The venue held a few hundred people, and far more claim to have been there than could have fit. Paul Weller, Viv Albertine, Chrissie Hynde and Colin Newman are among those reported in the audience. Caroline Coon’s coverage in Melody Maker helped turn an unsigned bill into an event with a reputation before the lights went down.

The lesson for anyone running a stage today is simple. Punk did not need a bigger club. It needed a promoter with a Tuesday night free and the nerve to say yes, in a room with enough history to treat loud, untested bands as just another set. The 100 Club kept that habit, later hosting Shame, Idles and the Specials, and its decor is still largely as it was in the seventies.

If you play guitar in a band that cannot get booked, that is the useful part of this story: the first room is often a room that expected someone else.