JANUARY 1977 was an auspicious month for The Adverts. As the new year broke, the band’s singer, Tim “TV” Smith, made a phone call to the Roxy – the sweaty little club in London’s Covent Garden where Andy Czezowski and Susan Carrington had recently started booking bands like The Clash and The Damned.
“I had Andy’s phone number, so I rang him up and tried to get a gig there,” Smiths remembers. “He said, ‘What’s the name of the band?’ As soon as I said ‘The Adverts’ he went, ‘OK, then.’ What I didn’t know was that one of our mates – I think it was John Towe, who played drums in Chelsea – had also called up and got us a gig there. So we ended up playing twice in that first week.”
The first Roxy gig – in fact, The Adverts’ first gig anywhere – was supporting Generation X on January 15. “It got a fairly bemused reaction from the 40 or 50 people who were there,” laughs Smith. But the second show – just four days later supporting Slaughter & The Dogs – proved more significant. In the audience that night was The Damned’s guitarist, Brian James.
“The Adverts were original,” he tells Uncut. “They weren’t trying to copy the Pistols or The Clash. They were pretty ramshackle, but they had songs with huge potential.”
Before too long, James wasn’t the only one paying attention.
From the stage of the Roxy, The Adverts were a compelling twin threat. In Smith the band had one of the era’s finest lyricists, able to articulate disaffected teenage feelings and package them in memorable punk anthems. Meanwhile, in black-clad Gaye Advert – born Gaye Black – they had Britain’s first female rock-star bassist, whose influence extended far beyond punk.
“I still get people coming up and saying, ‘You’re the reason I started playing,’” she laughs. “It’s a nice feeling, but I never considered myself mould-breaking. I’d always worn jeans
