TEENAGE RAMPAGE!

With The Runaways the subject of a Hollywood movie, Kris Needs charts the turbulent story behind the trailblazing female rock’n’roll band

The arrival of The Runaways in 1976 should have been as seismic as the rise of the Sex Pistols that same year. Maybe they would have been taken more seriously had they been boys from the wrong side of the tracks, instead of adolescent females plucked from LA’s teaming teenage night club scene. But The Runaways paved the way for girls with guitars and attitude.

The band came from disparate backgrounds involving juvenile delinquency, surfing and no doubt the odd pink bedroom, living for weekends spent revelling in LA’s decadent early-70s club scene. Initially still mastering their instruments, they dealt with punk’s common themes of boredom, escapism and rebellion, but from a Californian female perspective.

The fact that they were the first high-profile female rock’n’roll band not to sound or look like they were trying to out-macho Black Oak Arkansas would not be acknowledged for years, the credit for busting down female musical stereotypes usually heaped on the likes of Debbie Harry, Chrissie Hynde, Siouxsie and The Slits.

If the basque and suspenders sported by 16-yearold singer Cherie Currie when The Runaways made their UK debut at London’s Roundhouse would now be regarded as passe, in 1976 she provoked the kind of shock and outrage peculiar to the 70s, when taboos …

by Kris Needs
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