They are here to see and hear live music. They check every action from the side and rear of the stage, looking down to inspect their watches.

It’s after eleven, and this is a school night for Nick. I am in my first year at college and wonder how many nights I have had to lie to my parents, who think I’m doing work at Nick’s house. On the stage, roadies check mics, keyboards, amps. We go up the steps to the bar, order two Cokes, and I light a cigarette. A Player’s No. 6, “The Schoolboy’s Choice.” This is the best view of the stage and there’s no danger of getting showered in spittle, which has happened to me a few times watching the Clash and Generation X.

Tonight the club is as full as I’ve ever seen it. It’s Blondie’s first headline show in Birmingham, and they are about to explode. This is February 1978, and tomorrow they’ll film their new single “Denis” for a spot on Top of the Pops. Debbie Harry will become an overnight sensation.

Time ticks by slowly. We are making these Cokes last. More cigs get smoked. Both of us secretly hope the band won’t be on too late, that we can maybe make the one o’clock night bus. The opening act has been and gone. The night now belongs to the headliners. The crowd has grown and no one is interested anymore in what DJ Wayne is playing. Every new song just means another three minutes before the lights go down and the band hits the stage. The kids down front are chanting, “Blondie, Blondie, Blondie . . .”

Nick and I smile to each other.

We’ve made it.

14 Ballroom Blitz with Synthesizers

I don’t know whether it was the times we were living in or if that’s just what it is like being seventeen, but it seemed to us there was so much music happening at that moment; punk rock had transitioned into new wave, which was a catchall phrase that seemed to embrace just about anything made by anyone under the age of twenty-two. There were so many new forms of music that were inspiring us. Siouxsie and the Banshees were a favorite, and I felt I had a stake in them because I had watched them play to sixty people, then to a loud hundred, then to a thousand, then they got a record deal, which put them on Top of the Pops.

Another band I loved to follow was the Heartbreakers, formed by ex–New York Doll Johnny Thunders. Malcolm McLaren flew the Heartbreakers over to the United Kingdom to play with the Sex Pistols on their Anarchy in the UK tour, and they never really went home. They connected with the British punks and found they could play to much bigger audiences than in the States. There was something about Thunders onstage that was thrilling, dangerous, and unpredictable. That New York attitude. Maybe it was his heroin habit. He came over as the real thing.

Steve Jones is open about the influence Thunders’s playing style had on him. In the documentary The Filth and the Fury, there is a hilarious sequence where film of the two guitarists is intercut, showing quite clearly just how much of Thunders’s attitude Steve knocked off.

Something similar could be done with me. I would learn to take Thunders’s signature slurs and guitar runs and transpose them to bass, along with the accompanying sneers. The first time I saw the Thunders’s magic was onstage at Birmingham University. The opening act was a band I had not heard of before, The Police.