Metallic KO

July 7, 2026 Peter Stanfield

After the Stooges imploded in February 1974, having played their final show, Iggy’s acolytes did just enough to keep the band’s name and reputation, good and bad, alive. Among the items drip fed into the life support machine were an April ’74 Creem cover story, the announcement of a never-to-happen UK tour and Nick Kent’s tireless championing of the band in the NME.

By 1976 the band’s back catalogue was out of print with specialist record shops, Rock On and Bizzarre in London and Open Market in Paris feeding whatever small demand there was with imported cut-outs. Released only three years earlier, factory fresh copies of Raw Power were nowhere to be had in the year of America’s bicentennial.

Sounds letter page, Stooges and Groovies mixing it up with the Hot Rods to provide some zip-gun teenage punk thunder (May 8 1976)

The gap between Raw Power and Iggy’s return with The Idiot was filled in great part by the release of Skydog’s Metallic KO. Word of the album began sneaking out in April ’76:

Paris-based Skydog Records claiming to have signed Iggy And The Stooges. Though there are those amongst us who would doubt such a tale the label reckons it'll be releasing a live album in April and that there'll be a Paris concert in June. ‘Teazers’ NME (April 4 1976)

Two weeks later, Roy Carr interviewed Larry Debay for NME’s ‘Junkyard Angels’ colum. It was illustrated by images of Gene Vincent and Vince Taylor, Dion, the MC5 and Iggy from the King’s Cross show; a small congregation of cult rockers.

*NME* April 17 1976, the three chart listings are a good example of what some other specialist stores were offering in Spring ‘76

From Josephine Baker to Le Jazz Hot to film noir to Chester Himes to Sam Fuller and Jim Thompson, the French love of American outsiders was an established convention when Carr talked about the latest iteration with the Parisian love for the Flamin’ Groovies. London based Frenchman Debay, he wrote, has a ‘fixation with mid-60s American garage bands and has turned his hobby into a business. If his shop, Bizzarre, didn’t exist it would be ‘impossible to buy records by the Groovies, the Stooges, the MC5 and other urban rock guerrillas’.

Carr tracks some of the artists Debay favours [see HERE] before discussing Metallic KO:

Though Debay expects healthy sales (if only on curiosity value) for this item, he feels that his big breakthrough will come with the release of a live Iggy And The Stooges album recorded in ’73 at the Michigan Theatre and including such tracks as ‘Raw Power’ and ‘Louie Louie’. Debay is adamant that he'll have little difficulty in moving the entire initial pressing of 10,000. And half of that quantity, he insists, will be accounted for by British sales alone.

Somewhat prematurely, Debay took out a full page advert in Zigzag magazine (June ’76) that gave a July 21 release date and a list of stockists in London and around the country, ‘Ramones Records’ anyone?. As it happened, Bizzarre would not receive copies until early in September when NME reported it would retail at the exorbitant price of £3.75 – a 50p mark-up on a standard UK LP.

From September 11, the album was advertised weekly in the NME’s ‘Records Wanted’ classifieds and a couple of weeks earlier in the 2 by 2 inch block in the back pages of Sounds.

For an additional £2.50 you could also get a Stooges t-shirt; just like the Damned’s Brian James.

Sounds’ Giovanni Dadomo was first out of the block, September 18, with his four star review which amply makes the case for why you needed to hear this album, the evidence was the transcription of great chunks of Iggy’s between song interaction with his audience:

So there you go. I'm a tasteless little bastard and I really enjoy it. I don't really want to have to break my balls trying to justify it if people buy it and don’t enjoy it. Like I said at the start, it's no great rock 'n' roll record per se. What I do believe is that it’s an astonishing piece of documentary work, revealing as it does the face of rock ’n’ roll that few singers/musicians would ever be rude, angry, wrecked or impolite to reveal. Sure, it’s crass, conceited and unjustifiably vulgar plus a hell of a lot of other singularly ‘unpleasant things’, but still I like it. A record that quite literally has to be heard to be believed. Unique like.

Nick Kent had acted as the intermediary between James Williamson and Marc Zermati and his review in NME followed Dadomo’s a month later, October 16: ‘FACE UP, fight fans, this is one shoddy package of a vinylised memorial to the gore-bespattered piss ’n’ unholy thunder spirit of the accursed Iggy and the Stooges’.

Kent spent the early part of the review explaining that the album is not a bootleg but a legitimate release. Like Dadomo he bemoans the poor audio of side one and concentrates on side two, which for ‘audience-artiste friction’ has Dylan’s Royal Albert Hall ‘harangue beat to a frazzle’.

The Michigan Palace confrontation put the violence at London punk shows into some kind of relief – the real and the pretend: ‘Talk about sorting the men from the boys – the Sex Pistols wouldn’t have 16 bars under such horrendous circumstances!’

Whatever the downsides of the album, the hefty price tag, the unimaginative packaging (which many would dispute, the designer was Michael Beal who came up with the classic Hot Rods’ poster of the suicidal punk pistoleer), the poor audio, the dud side one, Kent was nevertheless ‘convinced that side two is a masterpiece’ (no argument here).

Bizzarre filing false reports of sales for *Metallic KO* hyping its own product to the top of the charts . . .

Now advertising weekly in NME on page 2 adjacent to the chart listings, Bizzarre finally acquired import copies of Raw Power. They were not cheap at £4.15. These were, I recall, Dutch Embassy pressings [HERE]. It will finally be reissued in the UK at the end of June retailing at the much more reasonable £1.99. It was also on CBS’ budget Embassy label. UK reissues of the debut and Fun House had been reviewed by Max Bell in NME, April 2.

A Bizzarre History of Punk

May 21, 2026 Peter Stanfield

In the Spring of 1976 Rock On and Bizzarre record shops started advertising in the Record Mart section of Sounds. Back in the day, what caught my attention was the listing of Flamin’ Groovies discs. I’d not heard of them but here they were getting lumped in with the Stooges, the MC5 and, most importantly to me at the time, Eddie and the Hot Rods, so it didn’t take much prodding to jump on board

As May turned into June, armed with their debut single and some effusive write ups in the music press, Eddie and the Hot Rods were fast becoming an obsession. I’d already made one trip into to London to see them, but failed to find the venue. I finally got lucky on June 12 when they played a University College, London, ‘Superball’, which advertised the band alongside a Punch and Judy show and Morris dancers. I can’t recall seeing either of those attractions but watching the Hot Rods was like looking into a mirror: same age, same dress-style, same class, same aspirations – all of us out for a real good time. For this 18 year-old, the Hot Rods were the ultimate pent-up energy release valve. For real, 1976 began here – blast off!

Giovanni Dadomo, Sounds, (May 1 1976). Michael Beal pic

Writers like Giovanni Dadomo made the links and connections between bands like the Groovies and the Hot Rods, but the adverts by Rock On and Bizzarre amplified them and, I reckon, set something of the agenda. Chiswick’s Count Bishops EP, Gorillas and 101’ers releases were an important part of the story and in the ads for the two shops they got linked to rock n’ roll revivalists, British R&B groups and American psychedelic punk, all of which I punched straight into my mainline. A connoisseur’s taste for the rarified was fast being acquired and these two shops fed my growing appetite for the sound of speed.

Dadomo\s Punks Rool! singles column; four pieces of vinyl perfection

It wasn’t just about the music, it was also about the stance you took and the clothes your wore — the fad for well-dressed singles began here. Copies of ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ and French Hot Rod’s debut, purchased for a premium price and maximum credibility at Rock On, were among my highest acts of discerning consumption in those penniless days.

The arrival of Stiff in the Summer took things altogether to another level with Nick Lowe’s ‘So It Goes’, followed by Lew Lewis’ mighty ‘Boogie on the Street’ starting a run that culminated in ‘76 with the Damned’s ‘New Rose’.

Whatever the impact these shops did have on the scene, one thing is for certain, they helped turn record buyers into record collectors – pic sleeve singles a pop equivalent of Panini football stickers or Batman and Monkees bubblegum cards. There would be no going back . . . Hello RSD

August 21 1976 and the French Flamin’ Groovies 45s still holding their own even at double the cost of a standard UK release

For a couple of weeks in October Bizzarre placed quarter page ads in *Sounds*. They were obviously feeling more confident about things.

The Sex Pistols finally appeared in Bizzarre’s inventory just as Chiswick hit snags with supplying demand. Meanwhile, Rough Trade, who had imported around a hundred copies of the Saints’ 45, are now acting as promotion agents for its UK release

If this is where the year ends with the Saints and Rough Trade, here’s where it began with a profile of the Count Bishops in Sounds (January 10 1976). Bizzarre’s mainman, Larry Debay, was their manager at this point. He was someone with major connections back into France, the Open Market, Skydog records and Marc Zermati who, at this point in time, was, without doubt, the hippest man in the world [HERE] and [HERE}

The stories of Stiff, Chiswick/Rock On and Rough Trade are all well known, but Larry Debay’s contribution to the nascent punk scene with his Bizzarre shop, distribution and mail order business, still flies under the radar, just like the records he once hawked.

Glitter and Glue – Dave Twist's Trove of Treasures

April 28, 2026 Peter Stanfield

A tome, not a tomb, filled with relics, revenants, remnants first acquired in the hot fleeting minutes of teen fandom and then added to and curated in the cool age of later years. It’s an extraordinary assemblage that Dave Twist first amassed for himself and then shared on his ever wonderful Instagram page [HERE].

When the platform messed with his layout grids he went back to a print culture, which is how these images are best consumed. We should be thankful to Meta (and for not much else) that Dave turned away from the screen and back to paper and paste

Others might have a larger collection of third-generation rock n’ roll ephemera than Dave Twist, but I doubt they could pull it together to tell quite such an aesthetically compelling story. Tumbling out of the plan chest, portfolio, attic and basement, Dave Twist puts his heart and soul on open display in Glitter and Glue, a gallery of splendid delights.

The book acts like a tripwire that causes you to fall over memories of things owned, lost, gifted and stolen. Surprisingly, nostalgia doesn’t feel part of the equation. What pours out is rather a sense of awe at the sheer creative achievements of musicians, designers and everyone else involved in the glorious conspiracy to attract the eye of the ever fickle teenage consumer.

So much of the memorabilia of the prepunk era, Alice, Roxy, Slade, SAHB, I just let go, but as I moved out of my teens I held fast to records bought on the day of release, the Pistols, Damned and Clash and all the post-Dr. Feelgood bands I still love, the Count Bishops, 101’ers, Gorillas, Eddie and the Hot Rods, Lew Lewis. They are still with me and still played. Meanwhile, I’ve restocked the lost records from 1972–76 and added those I could not then afford or had no awareness of, the Streak, the Jook and all the rest. But when I flick through this book it is Alice Cooper that has me pause the longest. For a hot moment he really was what mattered the most in my fevered teen brain and when you see what Dave Twist has amassed you’ll know why he had that effect.

You got to ask how many unique pressings of the Heartbreakers LAMF do you need? Dave has six and I hope the answer he’d give is ‘one more’. A completed collection is a dead collection. What’s on display here is an archive, a map of times past, but one that still connects. Its vitality can’t be ignored or its impact go unrecognised.

This is not a horde to be locked away and guarded but a trove spilling out its treasure for all to admire. Dave Twist gets my vote for curator of the year, what an achievement, what a gift he has given to us.

It’s a beautifully produced book and has been printed in very limited numbers so grab one quick [HERE]

The Private Life of Peter Green as told to Jackie

January 26, 2026 Peter Stanfield

Between April – May 1970, the teenage girls magazine Jackie carried a serialised comic strip of the life of Peter Green. It’s a telling attempt to navigate the shift in popular music from second to third generation rock, for both teen mags and their subjects.

Romance, boy meets girl, is marginalised in Green’s story, suppressed by the tale of a sensitive young man’s desire to find his own way through life.

The basic storyline had been earlier outlined in a November 1969 for a profile by Samantha, which highlighted his love of dogs and the suburban home he’d bought for his parents.

Green and Fleetwood Mac are unlikely subjects for a comic strip, way too ugly, unkempt and far too serious about their music. Nevertheless, since the band’s formation, Jackie had featured them on a number of occasions – their hit singles demanded inclusion.

You can see the shift from second to third generation in how the magazine moved from asking ‘what sort of girls do you fancy?’ to seemingly less frivolous concerns. When the comic strip ends, Green is buying a cello, classical LPs and is planning to write a symphony . . . The world of pop would never be the same again.

Oh well, and who in 1970 knew that Peter Green played bass in the the Tridents? Samantha did . . .

T-Shirts Optional – Led Zeppelin, Orlando, Fla (1971)

July 13, 2025 Peter Stanfield