Sex Pistols at Lesser Free Trade Hall, 1976: Every band or artist who witnessed the pivotal concert
It was May 1977, and the Sex Pistols were being discussed in parliament under the Treason Act. That’s certainly proof that they had made an explosive impact like only Guy Fawkes before them. Only a few months earlier, they were playing to barely anyone in a tiny venue in Manchester, though a few different rumours might have shaped the rhetoric since.
Brian Eno once said: “I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”
The same can be said about the Sex Pistols’ iconic concert at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976, now known as ‘the gig that changed the world’. The difference between the domino influence of The Velvet Undergound and the Sex Pistols, is that when it comes to the mayhem of British punk’s first incendiary flashpoint the evidence is a lot easier to corroborate.
On February 21st, 1976, a piece in NME written by Neil Spencer ran with the headline: ‘Don’t look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming’. Therein, it documented tales of band members cavorting with half-dressed members of the public on stage, chairs and tables being utterly Chernobyled in a mutiny against anything perceived as banal, and a Frenchman shouting to Steve Jones, “You can’t play!” to which the guitarist flippantly replied, “So what?”
Perhaps most importantly, the article contained a small snapshot of a band who looked like they were on time-travelling day release from an asylum in the future. A gaunt-looking villainous character with nothing in his eyes, barring a clear determination to bedevil everything before him in an angry besiegement of his own sui generis and unfathomable design, sat at the centre of the piece. What’s more, that mad-looking bastard, with a face like an angry wasp, went by the barmy name Johnny Rotten, no less! A generation of British music fans were sold in an instant. Hoardes were set to flock to their next gig.
Who did the Sex Pistols concert inspire?
The eponymous punk poet John Cooper Clarke was one of them. In his memoir, I Wanna Be Yours, he details his first experience of seeing the band live and the profound impact it had. “After reading the reviews I was expecting ineptitude,” he writes, “That never materialised. All concerned seemed reasonably proficient in their respective capacities… The Steve Jones I heard was a one-man orchestra, a high-voltage practitioner with no visible equal. In fact, the sonic overload had me scoping around for the other nine hundred and ninety-nine guys. The gig couldn’t have been a better introduction to the punk phenomenon.”
Prior to this Promethean point in culture, the bandwagon of prog has been coasting along through the council estates of Great Britain like a Rolls Royce’s touting unrelatable notions of ayahuasca epiphanies and the search for inner peace in the drone of the universe. Punk pulled up alongside it in a Mad Max-style convoy, and it had a generation of disenfranchised youth clambering to be there to witness the birth. In a few short years, this snarling omen child was ubiquitous, and most of its weird-looking siblings were at one single gig.
In truth, punk had already climbed out of the plashy depths of pop culture over in the States with the likes of Ramones, Patti Smith and even proto-punk acts like The Stooges and New York Dolls, but none of these acts had established themselves as anything more than cult oddities, lucky to get a curious sideways glance from the sedated masses of the mainstream.
The Ramones’ debut album only sold around 5,000 copies in the first year of its release, hardly a figure that can be said to have changed the world. As John Lydon recently told us, “Now, an awful lot of American journalism is saying that New York punk is where it all comes from. Oh, go fuck yourselves; it is talking shit. I was brought up in Britain!” Lydon expressed.
While the American groups certainly set the tone, they were just a collection of cool bands, not yet an entire oddball movement. The Sex Pistols, however, found themselves riding the crest of the perfect wave that finally broke upon the shore of pop culture, and punk rose up like a mohawk following one fateful night in Manchester.
So, when did the show actually take place?
The infamous gig occurred on June 4th, 1976 at The Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. The band had barely played any shows at this point. Their first gig with Lydon as a frontman was at St Martin’s College of Art in London on November 6th, 1975. They played around 15 minutes in front of 20 people.
19 shows in London followed over the next seven months, with their reputation steadily building during that period. By summer, there were enough rumblings rippling beyond the capital for them to head to the north, debuting in Northallerton, Yorkshire. A small band of the first punk converts attended in a very small crowd. They played in Scarborough the next night and Middlesbrough after that before returning to London. But then came a call from Howard Devoto to join Buzzcocks in Manchester.
And how many people were there?
Well, according to David Nolan, author of I Swear, I Was There: The Gig That Changed The World, something seems to be amiss on this front: “It’s funny because I think you can get 150 people in the Lesser Free Trade Hall and by my reckoning seven and a half thousand were there supposedly so something must have gone awry with the ticketing, apparently!”
In truth, if the venue was beyond capacity, it was only the bar staff who had pushed it beyond that number. While some say only 40 people actually turned up, others claim it was closer to 160. The only surviving footage from the show that sold for £15,000 in 2021 seems to put the whole debate to bed to some degree, showing a fairly packed room but with more than enough space to sip a pint before spilling it in the melee.
Who was in the crowd?
Aside from Buzzcocks and Slaughter and the Dogs, who opened the show, the list of notable attendees is as follows:
- Joy Division
- Factory Records founders Martin Hannett and Tony Wilson
- Mick Hucknall
- Mark E Smith of The Fall
- Morrissey
- John Cooper Clarke
However, there is a notable asterisk to add here. Around this time, the Sex Pistols began playing an avalanche of shows, and they were back in Manchester on July 7th, so several folks have admitted that they could’ve been at either.
Does that dampen the ‘gig that changed the world’ narrative? Hardly. In fact, it feels more fitting of the punk movement that followed that the whole thing came steamrolling through in one breakneck blur that can barely be deciphered, with word of the Pistols billowing by the time they returned to Manchester, having played eight gigs in between.
What have they said about it?
Morrissey penned an entire epistle to the gig in the NME, which he recalled: “Despite their discordant music and barely audible audacious lyrics, they were called back for two encores.”
Steve Diggle of Buzzcocks seems to also disavow the earlier assertion that punk began in the States by remarking, “That was the day the punk rock atom was split, no doubt about it. It was amazing to see. That’s where it exploded from, it changed Manchester and it changed the world.”
Without directly giving credit to the Sex Pistols for the inspiration, Mark E Smith remarked when recalling the gig that it set in him a mantra. “When I was 18, the vision was to make music that didn’t exist, because everything else was so unsatisfactory.”
Peter Hook told the Manchester Evening News, on the 40th anniversary of the concert, “It’s my 40th anniversary, too, because I walked out of that gig as a musician. I came home with a guitar and told my dad, ‘I’m a punk musician now’, and my father said, ‘You won’t last a week’. Here I am 40 years later.”
Not bad for a show that cost £32 to book, and tickets were sold for 50p! That’s about £3.20 in today’s money (2024). Bring back those bloody days.
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