Pub Rock: London's Proto-Punk

The image is a truly iconic one -- Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, bedecked in a white suit on stage, his hair blowing in the wind while he slams through a crazy, over-protracted keyboard solo.  The reason the theatrics are so necessary isn’t immediately clear.

Dr. Feelgood

The response, in the early ‘70s or so, as the history goes, is a rather grungy-looking, sneering lead singer in clothes of questionable taste, doing his darndest to be everything Emerson, or Elton John, or Rod Stewart is not.

You may think we’re talking about Johnny Rotten or Joe Strummer. Actually, we’re talking about Lee Brilleaux. His band wasn’t the Sex Pistols – it was called Dr. Feelgood. And we’re not talking the explosion of punk, but a horse of a slightly different color that didn’t erupt spectacularly, but rather crept almost unnoticed into the pubs of London, making the aforementioned blast possible.

Appropriately enough, the kind of music we’re talking about was called pub rock.

Granted, that commercial rock’s bloated and boring excesses led directly to the Sex Pistols, the Dead Boys and so many other iconic bands is 100% true. But often history leaves out a few steps – and in the humble opinion of Garagerocktopia – a lot of great music.

We’ve made mention many times on this blog of a subgenre called “proto-punk.” Stateside, this usually means the raw, ragged music of the late ‘60s to mid ‘70s that presaged the powder keg that CBGB’s became in the mid ‘70s. There is broad acknowledgement that the first wave of punk – in America at least -- was made up of outcasts who actually liked Iggy and the Stooges, the MC5 and the New York Dolls.

In the United Kingdom, though, there was another kind of proto-punk called pub rock.

While there has always been tension between the commerce and artistic sides of rock, people on both sides of the Atlantic could see that the suits were really muscling in – and artists, understandably, weren’t exactly holding their noses when paid the large sums of money.

But, as with other eras and decades, some felt rock had become too much a commodity and less something to actually enjoy. And when that happens, many react by returning to the basics. Such was the case of pub rock.

Pub rock was so-dubbed because the pubs – at first the less touristy, neighborhood pubs, were where the bands plied their trade. Later, as the genre became set, having these retro-sounding artists became a prestige thing.

 

It’s not clear that they really intended to create a new genre, but the first wave  of pub rockers definitely designed their music to be everything arena rock was not. Mostly, pub rock was punchy, simple short songs, sometimes covers or copies of early American rock and roll.

Some pub rock bands leaned more towards funk, while others weren’t shy about showing some country or folk roots. And, like so many times past, once British musicians their mitts on American music, they not only put their own flavor in it, making it something different – but just as cool – than it began.

Eggs Over Easy

Some say, in fact, that it was the American band Eggs Over Easy who started pub rock. Playing a folksy style, they caught the interest of local British musicians. The sound these musicians created found its niche, and venues began to spread across London, though it didn’t venture too far beyond.

While pub rock never embraced the raw anger and radical politics of punk, it was unmistakably an extended middle finger at mainstream rock. It was regularly  underproduced. Its intentionally rough sound was a growl heard loud and clear by many both in the mainstream and outside.

After all, job number one for pub rock was to put back into rock what the suits and the sell-outs had siphoned out of rock – the ability to make the audience feel something, anything. No doubt, punk in Britain was going to happen no matter what, but pub rock certainly made that road a tad less bumpy.

Perhaps the most important pub rock band was Dr. Feelgood. Playing a bluesy, no-frills brand of rock (They took their name from a Piano Red song). It wasn’t uncommon for the band to be decked out in god-awful cheap suits, with Brilleaux sneering stage persona and his lack of shyness about wiping his nose on his coat sleeve on stage.

Another of pub rock's most important bands was Eddie and the Hot Rods, about whom we have done a feature.

The band continues today, albeit with no original members.

Like so many artists and styles of music we talk about here, pub rock never got the accolades and fame it deserved. Perhaps that’s fitting – after all, it was a reaction to accolades and fame.

Pub rock never spread very far beyond the London city limits, which is probably why, as a genre, it was so short-lived. In the United States, it’s still largely unheard of, though some figures from the pub rock era are familiar in the U.S. – and everywhere else.

Many have also commented that the frantic energy that was pub rock’s bread and butter was never caught in the studio very well.

For a short time, pub rock and punk did walk Earth together. But though the same sensibilities gave birth to both, it was two very different sets of fans. The punks lumped the pubsters in with the rest of the old order. Perhaps pub rock’s reverence for traditional styles just didn’t jibe with punk’s all-encompassing iconoclasm.

Many pub rockers were later misidentified and mis-associated with punk. In America, where punk was something to be feared by the mainstream, Elvis Costello and Ian Dury were lumped in as punks. The Stranglers were also pub rock veterans, but had the wherewithal to let themselves be designated punks, though the punk rock faithful were generally hostile to the that band.

 

Meanwhile, some pub rockers did slide their way into punk – the Damned and Joe Strummer, amongst others, got their starts in the pubs. Other artists, such as the great Nick Lowe, would simply continue their legacies with music that changed up all the time and defied easy pigeonholing.

But punk was a much more in your face, vivid reaction, and the punk explosion quickly blew pub rock into obscurity, where it faded away by the early ‘80s.

In Britain, Pub rock seems to be remembered fondly. Julian Temple produced a well-received documentary on Dr. Feelgood, Oil City Cofidential. If you scour Youtube, you might be able to find more than a clip or two of pub rock. Do so. It’s music that’s well worth the time and effort.

We have not presented Power Pop as much as we'd like here at Garagerocktopia. We'll take a big step towards correcting that in our next post with a feature on the great North Carolina band the Spongetones. If you're not too familiar with what Power Pop is all about, these guys are a first great step in getting schooled up.