THE untold story of the punk scene which rocked Brighton during the seventies and eighties is being immortalised in a candid documentary.

Film-makers Kevin Wright and Tug Phipps have teamed up to produce This Is Punk Brighton based around the long-closed iconic North Road punk club The Vault.

The inspiration for the film came after the pair met with a number of Brighton punks at a reunion at the Prince Albert pub in Trafalgar Street.

The final shots of the documentary were completed last week and it is hoped it will be released by the summer.

The Vault was based in a crypt and, according to legend, human skeletons were often discovered found and coffins smashed open by revelling punks.

The last image put to film was inspired by a story from the club where a human skull taken from one of the tombs was found in one of the city’s period red phone boxes.

Mr Wright said: “There is no footage from The Vault and very few photographs – it was beneath the Presbyterian church and we have all these stories about it.

“I just wondered: ‘How come no one has documented this before?’ “We know all about the mods and rockers, but we do not know about the second generation with the punks.

“There were gigs still going on and bands rehearsing in The Vault up until it was firebombed.”

The film, which features interviews and stories from the scene’s familiar faces, follows on from short film Front – a clash of cultures rock-opera featuring an aging punk rocker and a young rapper.

Mr Wright, from Portslade, said the he is looking to turn Front, which is accompanied by a ten-track concept album, into a feature film which he hopes can be the “new Quadrophenia”.

He said: “I was born in ’83 so I wasn’t around to see it. But I realised I was sitting on a gold mine of these stories.

“You had this whole underground scene which was thriving down there on North Street you just cannot see it anymore. You would never know about it and the stories would just die out with the old punk guys – I just can’t believe we were lucky enough to meet with them all.”

For more information on The Is Punk Brighton and Front visit showsomefront.com.

• THE HUB during the glory days of the Brighton punk scene was The Vault on North Road. Found beneath the Brighton Resource Centre the club was originally a crypt beneath the old Presbyterian church and was still home to tombs as punks moved in.

The Vault hosted gigs and acted as practice space for the city’s punk bands who took it upon themselves to turn the catacomb into Brighton’s version of The Cavern in Liverpool.

With skeletons coming out of the walls The Vault was officially closed down by the council.

But the final nail in the coffin was an arson attack allegedly by the National Front which gutted the above Brighton Resource Centre in 1980.