The year was 1977 and Don Letts had a video camera.
Letts was the DJ at The Roxy, a nightclub in London that gained some notoriety by hosting Punk acts like Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Slits, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Generation X, and several others. In his role as DJ, Letts is often credited with introducing British punks to Jamaican reggae. (I’ve occasionally seen it misreported that Letts himself was from Jamaica. Letts commented in an interview that, until he visited the country with Johnny Lydon, the closest he had come to Jamaica was watching The Harder They Come.) As an amateur filmmaker, Letts was responsible for making one of the key documentaries about the early days of Punk Rock, 1978’s The Punk Rock Movie.
Shot largely at the Roxy, The Punk Rock Movie features raw but candid footage of some of the key Punk bands. Sex Pistols are there, of course. The Clash get a lot of footage and it’s interesting to see the young members of the band doing something other than screeching about imperialism. Billy Idol appears and shows off the rough charisma that would make him a star. We watch as The Slits argue in rehearsal. Siouxsie Sioux both performs and appears backstage, playing the enigmatic Punk diva. We also see quite a few Punks acts who are no longer as well-remembered as The Clash or Sex Pistols. Even with the DIY, anti-star ethos of the Punk Rock era, stage presence counted for a lot. Some bands just naturally had it and some bands did not.
I watched The Punk Rock Movie on Tubi and the most frequent caption was one informing me that the lyrics were unintelligible due to the music. It was a caption that I saw so frequently that I found myself both predicting when it would pop up and laughing when it did so. The Punk Rock Movie is a raw film. Don Letts shot the footage with a Super 8 Camera and, as a result, there’s nothing slick about the film. The images are sometimes blurry. It can be hard to make out what everyone is saying. It’s a far cry from the type of carefully choreographed and meticulously shot concert footage that we’re used to seeing. Needless to say, that’s a good deal of the film’s appeal. It’s often said, perhaps incorrectly, that Punk was started as a reaction to the commercialization of rock. At a time when soulless hitmakers and aging millionaires were dominating music, Punk came along with a burst of anger and vitality. The Punk Rock Movie captures that youthful anger. It captures the feeling of people refusing to accept that only a certain few were allowed to make music or express themselves. Scenes of the police raiding a Punk store add a political element of the film while the backstage and tour bus footage serve to remind us of just how English the original Punks were.
It’s no surprise that Sex Pistols dominate the film. We don’t see them backstage but we don’t have to. All we have to do is see Johnny Rotten (as he was known then) staring out at the audience. One of the more interesting thing about Punk is that the Sex Pistols were sold as being a band that didn’t know how to play their instruments or sing. This film reveals that, for whatever they lacked in formal training, they were naturals on stage. Regardless of what Malcolm McLaren and the press may have insisted, they were born to be stars.
