Bromley Contingent – Nostalgia Central

Britain in the mid-1970s: The streets were awash with stale, post-hippy denim and airbrushed Farrah Fawcett-Majors flickbacks. But in the summer of 1976, a group of outrageously attired suburban teenage misfits from the outer fringes of south-east London – dubbed the ‘Bromley Contingent’ – were among the first to take up the cause of the Sex Pistols and brought punk to the masses.

As the group’s reputation spread during 1976, so did that of their most flamboyant followers.

Sometimes feared, though more often regarded with envy and suspicion, the Bromley Contingent were mythologised in the music press to such an extent that Melody Maker named them Group Of The Year in their 1976 Christmas round-up.

Two years later, Siouxsie And The Banshees, the band that sprang from the belly of the Contingent, had eclipsed the Sex Pistols and their third-rate imitators with a look and sound that echoed the defiant elitism that brought them to notice in the first place.

“We didn’t even call ourselves ‘punks’, let alone refer to ourselves as ‘The Bromley Contingent’”, complains Steven Severin, ex-Banshees bassist and Class of ’76 ace face. “There was no such thing. It was just a bunch of people drawn together by the way they felt and the way they looked”.

United in their desire to dress up, play outré music, and bring outrage to suburban respectability, the Bromley-based peacocks created a subculture of their own. During 1975 and 1976, this artful, intelligent and often dangerously attired vanguard of proto-punk misfits did much to create the aura of illicitness and cultural degeneracy that characterised the early punk aesthetic.

“There was nothing in Bromley to cater for young people,” says Bertie Marshall (alias Berlin) of the dormitory that was a 20-minute train journey to London’s Victoria Station. “It was the end of glam rock. 1969 was all sunny and bright, but by ’75 it was grey, desolate, nothing. ”

The first stirrings of camaraderie among the decadents of North Kent came on 20 September 1975, when two music-obsessed late teens – Steven Bailey (alias Severin) and Simon Barker – met 18-year-old Susan Ballion (alias Siouxsie Sioux) during the intermission at Roxy Music‘s sell-out show at Wembley Arena.

The common currency was clothes. “Fashion was very important,” says Severin, who can still recall the outfit he wore that night.

So can Siouxsie, who reckons her second-hand purple-and-green dress with a large, fishtail-like bustle was a costume-drama hand-me-down.

Siouxsie, an Emma Peel-inspired fantasist from nearby Chislehurst, had had an epiphany of sorts while recuperating in hospital after a stomach operation.

It was summer 1972, and David Bowie was performing Starman on Top of the Pops. “He was incredible,” she says, “the skinniness, the alienation, the otherworldliness. ”

Soon after, the schoolgirl loner began to form an identity of her own. Following her elder sister, a club dancer, to central London, she discovered the camp delights of The Rocky Horror Show and the subterranean world of gay nightlife.

That made her an ideal invitee to The Nuremberg Rally Reunion Party, thrown on Valentine’s Day 1976 by Steven Bailey and Simon Barker, where guests were asked to “dress in Nazi uniform or drag”. “Ostensibly it was a normal house party, ” Severin recalls, “but with home-made swastikas, armbands, brown shirts, things like that. There was no evil behind it.”

“I called myself Berlin after Cabaret, which was based on those Isherwood stories,” says Marshall. “I was into the look of it. Very superficially, it’s red and black: great colours, and stylish. It wasn’t pro-fascist, pro-Nazi. It was the worst thing you could do to fuck your parents off. ”

The Bromley Contingent’s persistent, almost belligerent use of Third Reich imagery, for aesthetic reasons and as a shock tactic, created confüsion later when some wrongly interpreted their symbol-stealing as evidence of punk’s far-right leanings.

Sioux is curt and pointed in her explanation. “High camp, not death camp,” she says.

As the flashiest femme fatale in the area, the arrival of “the girl from the Roxy Music concert” was eagerly anticipated.

“The door went about 1.30am,” says Berlin, “and the whole room crackled. She looked like a ’20s flapper, and a bit punky, with a gold and black Chinese dress, fishnets and these pink transparent stilettos from Sex. She had a crop, with blonde spiky bits around her fringe, and theatrical make-up with little swastikas on her cheekbones. She saw me dressed in drag. We clicked immediately. ”

“People think that Sioux is an invention,” adds party host Simon Barker. “But she’s always been how she is, even before she had a group. Some people have a look for the public, but when they’re at home, it’s back to the track pants. Sioux always looked incredible, a star even before she’d sung anything.”

Stars were in short supply during the mid-’70s, and in Severin’s view, even the once otherworldly and cultish Roxy Music had lost their lustre. “They’d gone from small concert halls to Wembley, and that was quite symbolic,” he says. And their ’40s GI look was deadly dull.

“It was the tail end of glam, and they were looking backwards, ” he continues. “Roxy and Bowie were getting too big. There was nothing new coming through that we could identify with. ”

But when, on 9 December 1975, Simon Barker caught an unknown support band, the Sex Pistols, playing at nearby Ravensbourne College of Art, he knew instinctively that this was a noisy riposte to the detached complacency of the old guard.

“I was the only one of us who actually saw the show,” says Barker. “They were brilliant”, he told his late-arriving mate Severin. “The singer blew his nose on stage!” Reckoning the band to be akin to Iggy and the Stooges and the New York Dolls, Barker and Severin went to the Marquee on 12 February 1976, when the Pistols’ support slot to Eddie And The Hot Rods ended with a ban from the club.

“At last we’d got a band who we really could get into, ” Severin remembers. Their friends soon started coming too. Siouxsie, Berlin, even their old mate Bill Broad (pictured below, alias Billy Idol), who skived off from his English Literature course at Sussex University to see what the fuss was about.

“Johnny [Rotten] would harangue the audience, telling them, ‘Why don’t you go home to your Melanie records?’” Idol says. “Seeing them was an epiphany. They were a model for what you had to do. You had to go on a stage somewhere.”

For the time being, the core of the Bromley Contingent was content to regard the suburban streets as its theatre. But bonds between band and fans grew fast, hastened by a memorable night in May 1976 at Berlin’s family home at 8 Plaistow Grove, Bromley (Two doors up from where teenaged David Jones – later Bowie – had lived at number 4 a decade earlier).

“It was known as Baby Berlin’s Bondage Party,” recalls the host, who’d agreed to let Sioux and Steven bring along their new pals.

“We had this real suburban, three up, three down house with a draylon sofa, a shag pile carpet and a wooden music centre that played Bowie, The Stooges and Patti Smith, with a bit of Diana Ross thrown in. About 60 people turned up, and it was great, real chaos, people losing their minds with sulphate and alcohol. Johnny Lydon wrecked my bedroom for no reason. Everybody fucked everybody else. Siouxsie called it the Sex Olympics.”

Increasingly, the suburban starlets stalked West End clubs, gay discos such as Bangs in Tottenham Court Road and Louise’s, a lesbian club at 61 Poland Street in Soho where they’d dance to Doris Day and disco records.

“We couldn’t go into a straight club at that time without encountering a bit of aggro,” Barker explains. They also frequented Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood‘s shop Sex, a haunt for Siouxsie since its days as Let It Rock.

“She was the first of a crowd of people who were a bit different from the rest, ” remembers Glen Matlock, who worked there before joining the Pistols. “They were a bit glam rock, a bit Velvet Underground, a bit Roxy Music. The forerunners of punk, the Bromley Contingent. ”

According to Berlin, another shop assistant, the lavishly made-up, lasciviously attired Jordan (pictured below) outflanked even the Bromley crowd.

“We were extreme, but how she presented herself in everyday life between 1974 and 1977, commuting every day from Seaford, was extraordinary, a mix of naivety and bravery. ”

“We did find kindred spirits there,” says Barker. “If you wore straight-legged trousers in those days, you were classed as a poof. To go up to Sex and see people wearing the same clothes was a peculiar thing. When you’re living in Bromley, you feel like you’re the only ones.”

McLaren soon saw the potential in this peacockish posse. “From the start, Malcolm was keen to build an entourage around the band and the shop,” reckons Severin. “He would ring and tell us when the Pistols were playing. ”

Increasingly, he and Vivienne found the Contingent and their widening circle of fabulously modish friends – such as Little Debs from Burnt Oak, Philip Salon from Dollis Hill and Sue Catwoman – at Linda Ashby’s flat in St James’s Court, near Victoria.

“Malcolm liked the idea that he was recreating the original [Warhol] Factory,” says Berlin. “Linda Ashby, the lesbian prostitute, is very important in this. Hers was the place where we could go after a night out. It was a great breeding ground where Malcolm could spout his ideas off.”

Her services as a dominatrix were a source of amusement: “In the other room, there’d be a newsreader or a kids’ TV presenter with a baseball bat up their arse, ” Siouxsie says.

Both Jordan and Simon Barker would soon rent rooms from the dominatrix, whose outfits invariably came from Sex.

As a showcase for interested record companies, McLaren booked the Pistols to play a late-night set on 29 August at the Screen On The Green cinema, Islington. Media interest was high, and Sioux and Severin reacted as they best knew how –  with sartorial warfare.

Photographers were more interested in Siouxsie, in a black cupless PVC bra and knickers, fishnet tights, a swastika armband, bondage stilettos, and a see-through polka-dot raincoat, than in the band. The shots suggested the Pistols were more than a band – they were inspiring a new cult.

As the band’s notoriety spread, so did that of the Bromley Contingent, christened and mythologised in Caroline Coon’s report on the Pistols’ trip to Paris early in September.

The provocatively dressed Sioux, Severin and Simon Barker, had driven down there in Billy Idol’s ex-Post Office Morris van. When the Pistols were hastily invited to appear on LWT’s Today show, hosted by Bill Grundy (pictured below), on 1 December, there they were again, their peculiar glamour teased into view by the scheming McLaren.

It was Grundy’s ill-judged attempt to flirt with Siouxsie (“We’ll meet afterwards, shall we?”) that set in motion the “foul-mouthed” outbursts that stunned a nation.

The Bromley Contingent were fast becoming cult anti-heroes, but the moral panic that followed cruelly curtailed their reign of terror.

Within days of the Grundy appearance, Siouxsie was plastered over the front of the Daily Mirror alongside a “SIOUXSIE A PUNK SHOCKER’ headline.

“I hated that,” she remembers. “It was like a handbook of how to be a punk: they drink brown ale, and they spit. Total rubbish. ”

Bromley’s style warriors had effectively been mugged. Their mix-and-mismatch attitude to style had become a prototype, there to be aped.

“It became a uniform very quickly,” says Billy Idol. “Everyone looked like The Ramones.

“Look at The Damned, pur-leeze!” pouts Berlin. “I wouldn’t have wiped my bum on them. Sid Vicious hated us, too. He called us a bunch of poseurs, and in a way he was right. Looking from the outside, all we did was stand around, give off attitude and look incredible. What is posing, besides standing there being yourself and presenting your creation?”

But by late 1976, posing was no longer enough for Siouxsie Sioux and Steven Severin. They’d hastily assembled Siouxsie & The Banshees and opened the first night of the 100 Club Punk Rock Festival – with Bromley-baiter Sid Vicious sitting in on drums.

Within months, and with the similarly elegant (and suburban) Kenny Morris and John McKay joining them, Sioux and Severin made the leap from larger-than-life obscurity to the fast lane of international rock stardom.

There was, insist the Bromleys, no alternative. Says Simon Barker: “Soon, anyone who was seen out with us was described as a member of the Bromley Contingent”.

The Banshees’ fame gradually loosened the ties between the old Bromley crowd, but Berlin has nothing but admiration for the pair who became as famous as they always imagined themselves to be.

“They did everything with such aplomb, style and integrity,” he says, recalling values that were no less crucial 30 years ago. And Siouxsie? A genuine icon, he reckons. “Just like those old Hollywood glamour stars.”

A timeless classic: Made In Bromley.