“We're anti-racist,” says Shane, “but basically all we want to do is earn as much money possible for doing fuck all!”
If you ever get the chance to flip through issue 6 of Skum fanzine you will find the first interview with Shanne Bradley's band, The Nipple Erectors, from 1977. That line-up was Shanne on bass, Roger Towndrow on guitar, second drummer Rick Collett, and frontman Shane MacGowan. You can find transcripts of this interview online, but if you read the zine itself you will see The Nipple Erectors’ section is entirely scrawled by hand. This was a deliberate decision by Skum creator Mark Jay to honor MacGowan's own zine, Bondage, from December of ‘76.
Roger and Rick are absent from the interview. A telling detail, as over the next few years of the band's tenure, Shanne and Shane would be the only constant members of the band. But these two were also a constant in everything important happening in London's snowballing music scene; Each of them ubiquitous punks, playing crucial roles in its history.
“Do you ever want to do anything besides blasting the audience's brains out?” asks Mark.
"Not yet,” says Shanne.
●
Cowgum was a brand of industrial strength rubber solution glue that would improve anyone’s night out when inhaled. The punk scene in 1976 London would have had its distinct smell, and a good show might be marked by the crowd being doused and walking home sticky with it.
It’s appropriate then, that Mark Perry’s seminal London punk fanzine should be called Sniffin Glue. He maybe wasn’t a Cowgummer, though, as the title is a Ramones reference. The Ramones first came on Perry’s radar in the summer of ‘76 and he promptly bought their first album at Rock On records. You could also find copies of Punk magazine there. Punk was a New York publication, and the only book in the shop with The Ramones’ name on it. There were other fanzines, too, a lot of them covering sixties surf-rock and rockabilly, but nothing about the nascent alternative noise you could hear in London already.
Sniffin Glue set a trend and begat a flurry of new fanzines. Punk was an explosion and kids at the shows would rush home and report on everything they’d seen and heard, and felt. While the journalists from the International Press Corporation were at the back of the club trying to contextualize the new sound they’d dismissed as crap months before, everyone up front had fresh eyes.
“The weeklys are so far away from the kids that they can’t possibly say anything of importance to punk rock fans.” - Sniffin Glue, issue 1 (July 1976)
Perry’s first issue only mentions a few English bands: Eddie and the Hot Rods, The 101ers, and The Damned. The cover story reviews The Ramones’ first show in England at the Roundhouse on July 4th and at the end, Perry makes it clear he wishes for this scene to remain a small cult following, to keep it their own. He would not get his way.
Also in the crowd at the Roundhouse was an 18-year old Shane MacGowan wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, and white plimsoll shoes. Joey Ramone credits this gig with inciting the punk movement in London and beyond. But he may not have known of some of the things happening in the college circuit the year before, which we’ll forgive him for. After all, he wasn’t there. Neither was Shane.
But Shanne Bradley was! She was always there.
(to be continued)