Richard Hell and the Voidoids

Richard Hell had already been through the Neon Boys, Television and the Heartbreakers by the time he put his own name on the marquee, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids, formed in New York City in 1976, were the band built to carry it. He was born Richard Meyers in Kentucky, quit high school in 1966 and came to New York to be a poet; he and his old school friend Tom Miller started the Neon Boys, which turned into Television in 1973, and both took new names. Miller became Verlaine, after the French poet, and Meyers picked Hell because, as he tells it, the word summed up his state.

Television were the first rock outfit on the CBGB stage, and Hell's look there, torn clothes pinned together with safety pins and hair spiked up, went on to shape how punk dressed.

With the Voidoids he took that jagged energy to Sire, and Blank Generation arrived in 1977. The title track is punk at its most nervous and brainy, a lurching, half-starved song with guitars that twist and snap like live wires: art punk that cares less about three chords than about what you can wreck with them. Robert Quine, Ivan Julian and Marky Ramone are among the players who passed through the ranks before the name was retired in 1983.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.