Credit: Alamy

What was the first-ever punk gig in Britain?

Sun 13 July 2025 12:00, UK

From London’s dark and dingy 1970s underground, a cultural revolution was born.

Bedecked in bondage trousers and safety pins, punk rock gradually took hold of Britain’s youth subculture, armed with buzzsaw guitars, provocative fashion, and an unwavering hatred of authority. The movement was a reaction against the complacency and banality of mainstream rock at the time, but soon the movement grew to encapsulate an entire way of life for many young revolutionaries.

But when was the exact point that long hair morphed into a mohawk, and Rod Stewart took a backseat to Johnny Rotten?

Punk, as a musical movement, has an endlessly disputed origin story. Depending on who you ask, the roots of punk can be found in anything from the Beat generation of the 1950s, to the shock rock of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the DIY rock of the American garage scene in the 1960s, mod rock outfits like The Kinks, or the late-1960s abrasion of The MC5 and The Stooges. In most cases, though, these glimpses at punk were brief and isolated; it didn’t become a full-on movement until the mid-1970s, and its roots then were in New York City.

Pioneering bands like the New York Dolls, The Patti Smith Group, and, a little later, The Ramones, helped to establish the scene in Manhattan’s East Village, and their influence quickly translated across the Atlantic. The UK’s core punk scene in London was a lot smaller than its US counterpart, but it managed to produce an unparalleled wealth of incredible groups, from the political defiance of Crass, to the genre-defying sounds of The Clash, the proto-goth leanings of The Damned, and the pioneering post-punk of The Slits, the scene was always incredible sonically diverse.

At the forefront of the UK’s punk scene was, of course, the Sex Pistols. Formed by budding music mogul Malcolm McLaren, from the customer base of the store Sex, which he ran alongside Vivienne Westwood, the Pistols paved the way for virtually all subsequent UK punk outfits, inspiring the formation of X-Ray Spex, The Clash, The Slits, and, later, Joy Division, The Smiths, and countless other pioneering groups.

It was in 1975 that McLaren began to lay the foundations of the Sex Pistols, taking the pre-existing band The Strand, featuring Paul Cook and Steve Jones, and recruiting Glen Matlock on bass. A teenage John Lydon was recruited in August 1975, after he visited the Sex shop wearing a modified Pink Floyd t-shirt, with the words ‘I hate’ scrawled above the band’s name.

So, when was the first UK punk gig?

Not wanting to waste any time, the Sex Pistols played their very first gig on November 6th, 1975, marking the early beginnings of the UK’s blossoming punk scene. Although the setting for the show was a pretty low-key affair, taking place in the common room of Saint Martin’s School of Art, the Pistols certainly made an impact.

Over the course of the show, the band rattled off various hastily thrown together punk anthems and covers of various tracks by the likes of The Who and The Small Faces, but it wasn’t their music which captured the attention of the sparse audience.

John Lydon, by then rechristened as Johnny Rotten, confronted the audience with his typically piercing gaze, adopting an attitude that few – if any – frontmen of the time had ever adopted prior. On top of all that, he physically attacked the PA system, belonging to the main act of the evening, Bazooka Joe (featuring a young Adam Ant).

They didn’t know it at the time, but that small gig at Saint Martin’s marked the first proper punk gig in Britain, kicking off one of the most important and enduring scenes in the musical history of the nation. The Sex Pistols might have been eclipsed in terms of musical quality by other outfits in the scene, but there is no escaping the fact that they were the first to bring punk to UK venues.