Trouser Press, Punk Journalism, and the Long-Lost 101’ers Manifesto

Trouser Press was the bridge between the underground and the mainstream before the internet gutted print journalism and transformed music coverage into an algorithmic echo chamber. Co-founded in 1974 by Ira Robbins, the late Karen Rose and Dave Schulps, it didn’t just cover music—it evangelized the unheralded, the obscure, and the genre-bending. Unlike Rolling Stone, which by then had settled comfortably into the cultural mainstream, Trouser Press operated on the fringes, sniffing out the newest sounds, from the pub rockers of London to the no-wave lunatics in New York’s Lower East Side. It was an indispensable lifeline between the underground and those desperate for something real, something raw, something that couldn’t be bought or easily categorized.

It was also, in those early days, a gloriously chaotic operation—one without a brick and mortar office, where unsolicited manuscripts arrived in a PO box and, if they had enough venom and vitality, ended up in print.

In 1976, Robbins received a submission from a young London writer named Pete Silverton. It was a long, sprawling, vividly detailed deep dive into a pub rock band on the verge of extinction: the 101’ers. The writing was incendiary, capturing the raw urgency of London’s squat rock scene. But there was a problem—by the time the piece was submitted, the 101’ers had already imploded, leaving behind little more than a single and a handful of blistering live gigs. Publishing 6,000 words on a defunct band with no records and no future was, at the time, a non-starter.

So Robbins put it in a file. And there it sat. For decades.

Until 2021.

That was the year Robbins realized what he had: an eyewitness account of the moment before the fuse was lit. A snapshot of a band on the edge of something seismic. Because, of course, one of the 101’ers didn’t fade into obscurity. He became Joe Strummer. And his next band changed everything.

But you wouldn’t know it—not from the rock historians who churn out the same tired war stories, slurring their way through pub interviews about how they were "there, man," while real history rots in the margins. Not from the smug gatekeepers who’d rather stroke their own legacies than amplify the voices that actually documented punk’s genesis. And definitely not from the current crop of music journalists, who flood the internet with pompous, self-indulgent reviews that exist less to inform the reader and more as a barbed testament to their own self-loathing. Silverton’s piece should have set the record straight. Instead, it’s been buried under a landfill of half-baked nostalgia and disposable hot takes. Nobody’s talking about this like they should be.

What Silverton captured in his long-lost manuscript wasn’t just the story of a pub rock band on its last legs. It was a dispatch from the front lines of a seismic shift in music—a moment when the old ways were burning out and something newer, sharper, and more violent was clawing its way to the surface.

He opens with a bus ride through London, where graffiti on a corrugated iron fence announces the arrival of the 101’ers in crude, hasty spray paint: Letsagetabitarockin’. That phrase—also the title of a Strummer-penned anthem—sets the tone for everything that follows. Named after their home in 101 Walterton Road, Maida Vale, the young band is not aiming for chart success. This is not music for the soft or the sentimental. The 101’ers are playing for the squatters, the drinkers, the dispossessed. And at the heart of it all is a maniacally intense frontman, a guy named Joe Strummer, thrashing a near-dead Telecaster and howling through Chuck Berry songs like they were punk manifestos waiting to happen.

Silverton’s descriptions of Strummer are electric: “He swoops, dives, stumbles, duckwalks and bumps all over the stage — and always makes it back to the mic in time for the next line.” He compares him to Gene Vincent, but insists Strummer isn’t just some rock’n’roll revivalist. He’s something new, something volatile.

By the time Silverton writes his coda, the band is already splintering. A new guitarist is auditioning, there are vague plans for a revamped lineup, but there’s no real future. Strummer is restless. Then the band disintegrates entirely. The 101’ers vanish, except for one last single, Keys to Your Heart, released posthumously. And just like that, the story ends.

Except, of course, it doesn’t.

If you wanted to pinpoint the exact moment when British punk’s first major shockwave rippled through London, you could do worse than the night of April 3, 1976. That was when the 101’ers played at the Nashville, a pub in West Kensington. Their opening act? A sneering, snarling band called the Sex Pistols.

Strummer watched Johnny Rotten that night and saw the future. He saw a new language of rock’n’roll, one even more stripped-down, more brutal, more confrontational. Though Silverton does not explicitly allege causality, within weeks, the 101’ers were over. In the wake of the Nashville gig with the Sex Pistols, a lineup reset found the band facing an existential crisis. As Silverton writes, “The first serious rupture in the unit had forced those left to face the problem they’d been studiously avoiding. Y’know, the classic trite big one: ‘Where’re we going?’” By June, Strummer was fronting the Clash.

What makes Silverton’s piece so vital now is that it captures Strummer in the wild, before the industry got its hooks in him, before punk’s mythology solidified, before the Clash became The Clash. The 101’ers were the bridge between two worlds: the last great band of the pub rock circuit and the first real glimpse of punk’s explosive energy. Other than a one-off reunion in 2003, the 101’ers faded into the mists of time. But without them, there is no Clash. And without this article, we don’t have the same visceral, firsthand document of that transformation. Silverton gives us punk rock before the manifesto was written, before Malcolm McLaren crafted his narratives, before anyone realized what was about to happen.

This was the moment before impact. And now, at last, we have it in writing. Please make the time to check it out, and while you’re at it, poke around Trouser Press— their archive of alt rock, punk and decades of British rock is a wormhole worth the tumble.