Subway Sect were one of the first punk bands, and one of the more unusal. They played at that epochal 100 Club Festival in 1976 but their sound has more in common with what would come to be called post-punk.
Not for them the filth and the fury, the thrashing and yelling, yet they still had a pleasingly ramshackle approach that was summed up in their signature song: “We Oppose All Rock’n’Roll.”
Vic Godard once explained the difference between his band and the likes of the Pistols, Clash and Damned: “They just want to revitalise rock & roll whereas we just wanna get rid of it.”
I saw them several nights running on the White Riot tour in 1977, where they supported The Clash, Buzzcocks and Slits, if memory serves. So by the time they did a John Peel session in October that year I already knew the songs pretty well, even though they had not made any records.
I also taped that Peel session – along with most others that caught my attention – so I played it to death, getting to know these songs even better.
Listening all these years later, they are still familiar enough for me to sing along to Chain Smoking, Parallel Lines, Don’t Split It and Nobody’s Scared.
Their sound is so unique, with elements far removed from punk – Godard was a great admirer of the Rat Pack and his band members were heavily into Northern Soul.
When it came to their recording career, Subway Sect were unfortunate to find that their manager, Bernie Rhodes, reserved most of his energy for his other charges, The Clash.
Subway Sect’s first singles, Nobody’s Scared and Ambition, did not appear until 1978 and after recording an entire album, Rhodes decided not to release it.
He fired the entire band except Vic, who would re-emerge as a crooner in the Sinatra style, releasing an album in tribute to Cole Porter before giving up music altogether to become a postman.
In the Noughties he re-emerged again, this time with a passion for hip-hop, followed by an album of Northern Soul covers. I last encountered him in a Hackney studio a year ago previewing an eclectic n
ew album produced by Mick Jones of The Clash.