LA punk legends X: ‘The violence didn’t bother me as much as the spitting!’

LA punk legends X: ‘The violence didn’t bother me as much as the spitting!’

They chronicled 1980s Los Angeles as a nihilist nightmare and became a key voice in the city. Releasing their final album, they recall the wild parties – and rocky romances

Los Angeles was so foundational to punk-rock pioneers X they named their 1980 debut album after it. For Brooklyn-raised bassist/singer John Doe, the city held all the promise of a new frontier. “I’d seen Talking Heads at CBGBs, the Heartbreakers at Max’s Kansas City,” he says. “I wanted to be in a band, and I packed up my shit and moved to LA because I loved movies and literature, and because there was no punk scene there, yet.” For singer Exene Cervenka, it offered salvation from a deadening existence in St Petersburg, Florida. Restless, an inveterate hitchhiker, she was “always searching, my antennae open, just looking to see what was out there in the world”.

At 20, Cervenka followed those antennae to Hollywood, where she met Doe and Illinois-born guitarist Billy Zoom, and they formed one of the first – and certainly the most enduring – of LA’s punk-rock groups, in 1977. Documenting a nihilistic LA, and soon namechecked in Bret Easton Ellis’s similarly minded Less Than Zero, they became local, then national punk heroes before losing their way amid friction, divorce and major label misdirection.

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