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Roxy Club

Roxy Club

100 NIGHTS OF PUNK

ROXY CLUB owners Andrew Czezowski, Susan Carrington, Barry Jones and 45 Original are proud to announce re-imagined artwork celebrating the original home of punk in one bespoke, limited-edition design – the next in 45 Original’s exciting Lost Venues Retrospective Editions Series.

December 1976 to April 1977, 100 crazy nights. That’s all it was. That’s all it took. A four-month long revolution that changed music and plenty more besides, forever. The former gay club in London’s Covent Garden became the unlikely mecca for the vibrant new anti-establishment movement that for the previous year had been challenging every rule, every boundary, shocking anyone and everyone in its’s path.

People don’t talk about the Roxy as a venue. It was, more, so much more than that. It was the place they could breathe at last, be themselves, do whatever it was they wanted to do, good, bad or ugly, it really didn’t matter. It felt more like home than a venue.

The list of those who played there in those 100 days is truly astonishing, bands many of whom who would flourish into household names known and loved the world over to this day: The Clash, The Damned, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Generation X, The Adverts, Buzzcocks, The Heartbreakers, The Jam, The Police, Sham 69, The Stranglers, X-Ray Spex, …and many, so many more besides.

Incredible list, incredible times.

The Roxy was punk at its inception. Innocent, raw, warts and all; before the claws of commerciality inevitably brought it into line. As soon as the venue established itself, it was gone. So Roxy. So Punk. The true spirit of the movement embodied perfectly within four months – and four walls.

Wait a minute. Isn’t this all just romanticised, nostalgic twaddle about a damp basement full of raggle-taggle misfits who took loads of drugs, pogo danced and where a lot of the bands couldn’t even play their instruments?

You bet it is.

And proud to be so, too, because Punk was about DREAMING, about destroying barriers and building new worlds to replace the boredom that stifled our lives; worlds where you could be whatever, whoever you wanted. Hands up who’d go back to that smelly basement in one blink and a pogo…

LET’S DREAM AGAIN.

ROXY CLUB – RETROSPECTIVE EDITIONS

The Roxy Club artwork has been created by designer Simon Collett, co-director of leading UK entertainment creative agency Tour Design in collaboration with Andrew Czezowski and Susan Carrington.

The design pays homage to this truly iconic London music venue and documents some of the seminal bands that performed at The Roxy during those infamous 100 nights including The Adverts, The Boys, Buzzcocks, Chelsea, Cherry Vanilla, The Clash, Cock Sparrer, The Cortinas, The Damned, Don Letts (Club DJ), The Drones, Eater, Generation X, The Heartbreakers, The Jam, The Lurkers, The Models, Johnny Moped, The Only Ones, Penetration, The Police, The Rejects, Sham 69, Siouxsie And The Banshees, Slaughter & The Dogs, The Slits, The Stranglers, Subway Sect, The Vibrators, The Unwanted, Wayne County & The Electric Chairs, Wire, X-Ray Spex.

Our retrospective designs of the Roxy Club are on sale now as a limited edition of only 100 signed, stamped and numbered 50x70cm and A3 litho prints and screen printed t-shirts.

In view of COVID’S decimation of the live entertainment sector, 10% of 45 Original’s Roxy Club Retrospective Edition sales profits will be donated to the Music Venue Trust’s ‘Save Our Venues’ campaign.

Visit the official Roxy Club website (roxyclub.co.uk)

Photographs by Nick Coombe of Roxy Club from 1977:- Exterior Neal Street daytime shot of the club, and interior detail of the graffiti in the toilets.

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