In this terrific essay, Nick Guthrie discusses how being in a rock band and being raised by a jazz-loving father inspired his latest story, “Where’s Pete?” from our Jan/Feb issue

I used to play lead guitar in a band. Badly. Everything we played was fast and loud, we performed in all manner of seedy dives and pub back-rooms, but we were never punk. And like many aspiring bands, we used that speed and volume to cover up our, at best, workman-like musicality.

At face value, it’s easy to accept the cliché that punk rock was not exactly a movement for music connoisseurs, being more about attitude and image than the finer points of melody. As Stephen Palmer observes in his excellent A History of Punk, when people talk about songs, particularly punk, they often just focus on the lyrics and spirit, overlooking the fact that all the successful bands, even if they were only playing three chords as fast as they could, were full of great musicians. Even the most ranty, shouty punk song has musicality of one variety or another. And so it is with the Guttersnipes, four kids from just beyond London, united by the spirit and energy of punk, but—crucially—revolving around at least one member who is a truly talented musician. But what do they do when, on the night of their big break, that musician goes AWOL?

That’s the premise of “Where’s Pete?”, in the Jan/Feb issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. It’s rooted in that period around 1976, when Britain’s punk bands were just starting to have an impact on the mainstream. The story is set in a fictional London pub, based on accounts of pubs like the Hope and Anchor where the real punks started to get their breaks. That setting, and its backdrop, is also inspired by my own youth—not as a punk rocker, but as an observer of friends who suddenly had their hair in wild cuts and colours and started to swear a lot. And there’s another inspiration, too, one that I only saw in hindsight, and which ties punk rock into a long tradition of radical music.

As my late father grew older, he often repeated the same stories, as so many older people do, the details of events several decades ago far more vivid than the present day. One of these stories was of the time when he was a young soldier who had been recruited in the early 1950s to learn Russian at a top secret language school in Cornwall. (The school was so top secret that as soon as a young squaddie turned up in the town, locals would say, “Ah, you’ll be here for that secret spy school, won’t you?”)

As a Yorkshireman, whenever he got a few days’ leave, he would head home on a long route that took him by train into London, where he would stay overnight before getting another train up to Yorkshire. The highlight of these journeys was that it gave him the opportunity to call in at the Humphrey Lyttleton Jazz Club on Oxford Street. Lyttleton’s band alone was worth the visit, but the bandleader’s reputation was so high that whenever any of the great jazz musicians of the time were in London they would turn up as guests, sometimes surprising even Lyttleton himself as they appeared at the bottom of the stairs and pushed through the crowd to get on stage and play or sing with the band. An added bonus was that if anyone turned up in military uniform they would be waved through the door, free of charge.

For a young jazz-lover this was paradise, and I remember how my father’s face would transform and his eyes light up, even 60 or more years later, as he recounted this story. His description of the little door among the shops of Oxford Street that you could so easily not notice, and the narrow staircase down into the basement, which then opened out into a surprisingly large club with the stage directly opposite, was so clear I could picture it as if I’d been there myself.

Back in 2019 I went to a gig in London. One of my favourite bands, Darts, still together some forty or so years after they first hit the big time, was playing one of their once or twice a year shows at a venue called the 100 Club. I can be a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, and this was one of those occasions.

Walking along Oxford Street, I almost missed the entrance, because it was a tiny door, sandwiched between shopfronts. Once inside, there was no space, just a long staircase heading down into the basement. And yes, those stairs came out opposite the stage, and I realised, finally, that this was the jazz club my father had talked about, albeit going under a different name now. Confirming this, the walls were covered with framed photos of the artists who had played here over the years, and sure enough, a lot of them were the jazz greats. But also there were The Who, The Rolling Stones, and The Kinks, as well as lots of more recent bands.

And there, among all the musical greats, were pictures of the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Siouxsie and the Banshees, part of that seamless tradition of music on the radical edges, running all the way from the 1940s, when American GIs did the jitterbug here even though it was banned at almost every other venue, through the decades to the 1970s, when the 100 Club became critical as a home from home to perhaps the most rebellious musical movement of the 20th Century, and beyond. That night at the 100 Club, as well as enjoying a fantastic gig, I started thinking about how even an anti-everything movement like punk could never have been anti-music because, particularly looking back, we can see how all the key bands revolved around some truly talented musicians.

I like to think that my visit to the 100 Club eventually led me to writing “Where’s Pete?” and that the Guttersnipes, if they somehow managed to get past the disappearance of their musical lynchpin, would one day have got to play at that legendary basement venue. Maybe they would even have had their picture on the wall among the greats.