How a Utah firing squad shaped a UK punk classic
Amid America’s macabre history of capital punishment, one notorious execution in Utah lent a grisly hand in inspiring a gem of the original UK punk explosion.
Their catapult to brief stardom was swift. Loosely formed in Devon by frontman TV Smith and bassist Gaye Advert, before finally cementing the band in London in 1976, it only took their second single to suddenly thrust The Adverts to the charts and a Top of the Pops slot with dizzying pace.
Cracking the top 20, ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ would stand as their defining hit, a furiously hooky punk attack dripping with feverish snarl while bottling a keen pop anchor at its whirlwind centre.
It was ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ lyrical snapshot that caused the most disquiet. Smith spits an almost EC Comics horror tale of a patient awakening in their hospital bed with a new pair of transplanted eyes as the doctors and nurses around him freeze with terror, only to realise that his new sight has been gifted from a recently executed spree killer and now must spend the rest of their life “Looking through Gary Gilmore’s eyes.”
Gilmore was no lyrical fiction. Gripping the nation at the time, the American criminal was the first person to be executed for nearly ten years after the US Supreme Court had briefly suspended all uses of capital punishment, commuting over 600 outstanding death sentences to life imprisonment.
Living a life of petty crime and repeat offending, Gilmore had already been in and out of the US prison system by the time he committed his first murder. Across two evenings in July 1976, Gilmore robbed and murdered Brigham Young University students Max Jensen and Bennie Bushnell in northern Utah. After attempting to dispose of his .22 calibre pistol, an accidental self-shooting left a trail of blood to the service garage where he’d left his truck for repairs. Soon enough, Gilmore was apprehended by the police after attempting to drive out of Provo, giving himself up without issue.
Found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, Gilmore rejected all avenues to appeal, seemingly intent on ensuring his own execution. After several stays brought about by civil rights groups, Gilmore was finally taken to Draper’s Utah State Prison in January 1977 to see through his chosen method of execution, being the firing squad.
Receiving five rifle bullets to the heart on the morning of January 17th, Gilmore’s medical wishes were granted; his pituitary gland was donated to help treat hormone disorders, and his kidneys and liver were packaged for research. Capturing the eerie imagination, however, was the donation of his corneas, kept fresh by a nurse in the station wagon after his death by placing water drops in the eyes to prevent drying out.
A grim return to capital punishment across the Atlantic, coupled with its unsettling transplant details, proved the perfectly gruesome fodder for The Adverts’ punk smash, ‘Gary Gilmore’s Eyes’ still burning with creepy drama from its lyrical reportage of America’s dark side nearly 50 years later.
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