Not only have I never heard of Pure Hell before, but I never knew there was a punk group made up of four black guys til now.

They apparently formed way back in 1974 in Philadelphia. If they sounded like this then, they must be contenders along with The Saints in Australia to claim to be the original punk group.

Their only single was a cover of Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made For Walking, released in 1978.

They also recorded an album, Noise Addiction – this is the title track – but it remained unreleased for 28 years after they fell out with their manager Curtis Knight – an old bandmate of Hendrix in his first group, The Squires.

It’s pretty great too, with a sound somewhere between proto-punks like the MC5 and the hardcore groups that sprang up in punk’s wake like Black Flag.

In 2016 Henry Rollins found and bought an acetate of two of their 1975 demos – Wild One and Courageous Cat – on eBay and released them on his own label. To say they sound ahead of their time is an understatement – though you would also have to say the professional re-recordings of Wild One and Courageous Cat are vastly superior. 

The band were friendly with the New York Dolls and singer Kenny Gordon went to school with Nancy Spungen, leading to a song paying tribute to her – The Girl With The Hungry Eyes – and an NYC gig with Sid Vicious shortly before his death in 1978.

Pure Hell even came to London that year to record a session with Tony McPhee of The Groundhogs and toured the UK, including a Lyceum date with the UK Subs, though I had no awareness of this at the time – or since.

If anyone here has come across them, it was probably in 2012, when they reformed to play their first gig since 1979 at the Rebellion Festival in Blackpool, alongside Buzzcocks and PiL.