David Nolan - I Swear I Was There - Sex Pistols, Manchester and the Gig that Changed the World

To Katherine. No one else. Just Katherine. P hotographs and images by John Berry, Paul Burgess Archive, Ian Cartwright, Rachel Joseph, Peter Oldham, Andrew Orlowski, Cathryn Ormrod, Phil Singleton and Paul Welsh. For interviews and content, thanks to Gary Ainsley, Wayne Barrett, Howard Bates, John Berry, Will Birch, Dawn Bradbury, Steve Shy Burke, Gordon Burns, Vanessa Corley, Howard Devoto, Steve Diggle, Dave Eyre, Eddie Garrity, Iain Grey, Phil Griffin, Alan Hempsall, Neal Holden, Peter Hook, Dave Howard, Jordan, Lorraine Joyce, Howard Kingston, John Maher, Terry Mason, Glen Matlock, Ian Moss, Paul Morley, NWA, Peter Oldham, Chris Pye, Mick Rossi, Pete Shelley, Phil Singleton, Mark E. Smith, Bernard Sumner, Peter Walker, Paul Welsh and Dick Witts. Some folks are sadly no longer with us: thank you Jon The Postman Ormrod, Malcolm McLaren, and Tony Wilson.Lucy Atkinson, Julian Coleman and especially Richard Makinson can swear they were there first time round, Martin Roach squared up for round two and the Italian version, but this time its down to James Hodgkinson.There are good people out there in punk rock land Phil Singleton at sex-pistols.net, Paul Satellite Burgess and Moz Murray are top of the pile, along with Matthew Norman at MDMA, Dave Gibson and Mick Wilkinson.Thanks to all the authors and journalists who have credited I Swear I Was There over the years. As for those who should have but didnt CONTENTS A hundred or so punters turn up and Malcolms quite pleased with me. Not too bad for 50p on a Friday evening. Inside, they like the Pistols all the way. The demand for an encore is insistent, even if they didnt get Woolly Bully like some wag keeps shouting for. This is called Problems. Where do you all come from?Johnny Rotten is being friendly back.Were some of the assembled on their feet by the start of the second encore? Cant remember. But theres a delay and Glen Matlock is saying into a mic something about the guitarist needing to change a guitar string.Who caaaaares?! someone yells. See? Theyve already got the idea. Well, one of the ideas. Ideas .Six weeks later. Tuesday. 1. Me and Pete Shelley have finally got our band together. Ive scribbled the Buzzcocks set-list on the inside cover of one of my Castaneda books. Now its come to it, Ive realised Im not up to stubbing cigarettes out on my body like Johnny reputedly does sometimes. And I had been planning to wash out a dog food tin, fill it with Fray Bentos pie filling and eat it on stage with a fork to bait Slaughter and the Dogs. Hadnt got round to that either somehow.Now the Pistols are due on. I stick my head round their dressing room door.You ready?Fuck off, Johnny snarls at me.Oh, right.Howard Devoto Price 50p: A poster for the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 4 June 1976. Paul Burgess Archive I m not a great one for foreplay so lets get straight to it, shall we? Thousands of people claim to have attended the Sex Pistols gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 4 June 1976 the gig named by the NME as the most important musical event of all time. But how many were really there? How many people splashed out to see a group of virtually unknown London lads playing a few tunes in a small, upstairs hall on Peter Street on a Friday night in Manchester all those years ago?Well, as a great man once said, you can prove anything with facts. And records held in the archives of Manchester City Council couldnt be clearer in terms of clearing up one of rock musics great mysteries. The records show that 14 was generated in ticket sales and at 50p a pop, that means that just twenty eight tickets were sold.Not many for a show that has since been named by the NME as the greatest gig of all time. Modest for a concert celebrated in films like 24 Hour Party People and Control . Pitiful, given that half the population of Greater Manchester lays claim to attendance.Because this is that gig, the famous gig, the one that everyone claims to have been at dare I say it the I Swear I Was There gig. Famed not so much for the quality of the performance dished out by the Pistols that night but by the reaction of the audience that would spark a series of musical and pop-culture detonations that are still delighting and annoying people in equal measure today. As Sex Pistols singer John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) would later point out, In Manchester, youd play to half-empty halls but theyd all be there with notepads . TONY WILSON (audience member/TV presenter/Factory Records founder): Manchester was the fertile breeding ground, the field was ready-ploughed, ready-tilled, just ready to receive these seeds. It was the perfect punk city. The history of rock n roll is the history of small cities. GLEN MATLOCK (bass guitar Sex Pistols): We never saw ourselves as a punk band. We hated the term punk. We were the Sex Pistols. PETER HOOK (audience member/Joy Division/New Order): It was absolutely bizarre. It was the most shocking thing Ive ever seen in my life, it was just unbelievable. We just looked at each other and thought My God! They [Sex Pistols] looked like they were having such a fantastic time. It was so alien to everything. You just thought, God we could do that! And I still to this day cant imagine why on earth we thought we could do that, cause Id never played a musical instrument. STEVE DIGGLE (audience member/Buzzcocks): That was the day the punk-rock atom was split, no doubt about it. The Pistols were glamorous and they didnt give a fuck. You got that vibe and the music was twice as fast as anything. It was amazing to see. Thats where it exploded from, it changed Manchester and it changed the world.Because I Swear I Was There is not a story about the Sex Pistols but a portrait of an audience booted into action by their response to four young men playing a few cover versions and some self-penned garage tunes. Its also a tale of myth-making on a grand scale; a series of escalating fibs and exaggerations that have become so potent that theyve been accepted as fact for decades. Many tall tales have developed over the years about the 4 June gig, the Pistols second appearance at the Lesser Free Trade Hall six weeks later and the bands first ever television appearance at Granada Television some five hundred yards down the road. Because of these myths, another great thing about this period is the lovely Mancunian cattiness that surrounds the whole story. I was there he wasnt she was there they definitely werent there. One interviewee was asked if Simply Reds Mick Hucknall was at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on that first night. I didnt see no Charlie Drake lookalikes, he replied.One of the other myths surrounding the Sex Pistols is that they hardly played any gigs either because they couldnt actually play or because they were forever being banned by local councils. In fact, the first incarnation of the Sex Pistols played 124 gigs before they imploded in an onstage, premeditated tizz at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on 14 January 1978.But, of those 124 gigs, the most important were the 27th and the 36th. The two gigs they played at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in the achingly hot summer of 1976. Because these gigs inspired a new shape for rock - a new way to pick it up and a new way to run with it. What came out of the two gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976 became a blueprint for the UK music scene that has stood us in good stead for forty years. Not punk-a-likes, sound-a-likes or spike-a-likes, not suburban boredom clones and public schoolboys faking angst, but new music; post-punk music with legs that would influence bands across the country and then throughout the world.Without gigs number twenty seven and thirty six there would be no Buzzcocks, Magazine, Joy Division, New Order, Factory Records, no indie scene, no Fall, Smiths, Haienda, Madchester, Happy Mondays or Oasis. Think then about the ripples of inspiration that came as a result of the bands and situations that sprang from those Pistols gigs. Maybe there would be no Nirvana or Green Day, no Suede, no Killers, no Arctic Monkeys, no Editors or Interpol, no Blur, no Pavement, no Radiohead, no Prodigy, no Arcade Fire all acts that owe a debt to bands formed in the sticky-carpeted aisles of the Lesser Free Trade Hall. PAUL MORLEY (audience member/writer): Funnily enough, Ive often done it for practice: join the line from the Sex Pistols all the way up to Mr Scruff and Badly Drawn Boy. Everything that happens is still a fall-out of the Sex Pistols coming to the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Theres no doubt about it all the way through Joy Division to The Stone Roses, from The Fall to Happy Mondays, all the way through to the dance stuff, anything mad that happened at The Haienda, you can draw it all back to that little explosion at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. Its not hard at all.Without the Sex Pistols gig on 4 June 1976, we would still be listening to everything and anything that the mid-1970s had to offer. And we all know what that entailed: leaden, overwrought and overlong public-school rock, faceless disco-dance music and pretty-boy assembly-line pop groups aimed at the pink and pubescent markets. Thankfully, that kind of nonsense could never rear its collectively unpleasant head again could it? Of course notToday, theres actually very little to show for this most famous of musical events: a handmade poster, some Super 8mm film, a few snatched photographs from the audience and, of course, a ticket. The date printed on it is actually 4th June 1076. It claimed to be for Sex Pistols + Buzzcocks. It stated that it would admit one. On the admittance front, that much, at least, is correct. The ticket did what it said it admitted one. The rest of the ticket details like so many aspects of our story are wrong.That aside, it is, indeed, a ticket for the Sex Pistols, live at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, 4 June 1976. Its a ticket to see Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook young men barely out of their teens perform live on stage. The date stamped on the ticket (1076) is 900 years out of whack, thanks to some careless hand-printing by the promoters. No matter. In a way, the mistakes make it all the more special.It is a noteworthy ticket for the first of two gigs that changed the world. Buzzcocks never actually got their act together to play at the first one. The band that actually appeared in their place is one of a hundred stories youre about to read. Youll find out who was there, who wasnt there, and what they went on to do. Youll also see pictures and memories that have never been seen or heard before about those three events during the summer of 1976: the two gigs and that first ever television appearance.Who told a handful of young, hirsute Mancunians to Fuck off out of it? Who threw peanuts at Slaughter And The Dogs? Who called Clive James a Baldie old Sheila? And who the hell are Gentlemen?All in good time.Sex Pistols did not elect to come to Manchester Manchester invited Sex Pistols to come to it and for that we can thank two young men who shared a mutual dissatisfaction with the music that was being offered to them at their college in the north of England. Peter McNeish and Howard Trafford were, essentially, responsible for everything that is about to unfold: two students who, after seeing the Pistols twice in February 1976, helped change the face of music the way we access it, the manner in which we dance to it and the extent to which we will pursue it. And that, brothers and sisters, means that this gig changed the world. While all this was going on, these two students changed their names as well, to Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto. HOWARD DEVOTO (singer Buzzcocks/Magazine): I spent my early childhood in the Midlands and then my teenage years in Leeds, so those were the years the hormones hit. My first ever love was The Shadows. After that I liked The Rolling Stones and after that I liked Bob Dylan, I liked Jimi Hendrix things like The Mothers of Invention and then David Bowie. I went to college, the Bolton Institute of Technology, in 1972, messed around trying to do a Psychology degree for a year and a half, packed that up, went back and did a Humanities degree. This brings us to the more pertinent years. What I always remember of my time then really is buying Fun House [1970] by The Stooges. I didnt really know any Stooges fans and their records were very hard to get hold of, although Raw Power had come out in 1973 and I did manage to get a copy at the local record shop in Bolton. That was about it. Then I managed to pick up a second-hand copy of their first album [ The Stooges , 1969] from somewhere or other. But Fun House was proving quite hard to track down. I wasnt quite sure I liked The Stooges that much. I liked the story, I liked the legend but, for me, Raw Power was a bit messy and the first Stooges album was a little simplistic. But then when I finally managed to get an import copy of Fun House it all fell into place. It just kind of hit me at the time when I was starting to get really pissed off again in life. I have this memory of myself at this place I was living an ex-convent that had been taken over for student accommodation in my room playing Fun House and loving the primitive nature and anger. I really connected with it and started thinking, I could just about do this. PETE SHELLEY (singer Buzzcocks): Albums by Yes were getting longer and longer longer than most peoples entire recorded output. TONY WILSON: Its hard to describe how bloody awful music was, how desperately bad it was, how our Sixties heroes had become boring and useless and how the stuff that was happening then was not only was it bad, they were badly dressed. The only music I was listening to in late 1975 was Austin, Texas country music. The rest of it was a wasteland of boredom and [TV show] The Old Grey Whistle Test . Between Christmas and New Year [197576] a kid called Dennis Brown who was a deadhead from university, a mate of mine, gave me the Patti Smith Horses album. God, it was fantastic and different and wonderful.
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