From The Cure to Arctic Monkeys: The venues where legendary bands played their first show
Every band begins somewhere modest and usually to an audience of friends and family in a sparsely populated local pub. These are the days that become the stuff of legend, and even though it was only 30 people in the room, 3000 will claim to have been.
In the pre-social media age, playing live was the only way for new bands to road-test their material by seeing if it would fly or flounder in front of a live audience. These early shows are an opportunity to fail and learn from these daunting experiences. Very rarely do they go perfectly, but that doesn’t stop the bands from becoming addicted to the adrenaline rush of performing.
Nobody can start on The Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury. As much as people look like an overnight success, it almost always takes years of hard work, which largely goes unnoticed, before they gain recognition.
Below, we take a trip down memory lane to a time before these bands became arena-dwelling titans. Everyone starts from the same point, and these shows are where these legendary groups cut their teeth, allowing them to evolve into superstars.
The first shows performed by legendary bands:
Arctic Monkeys
Sheffield heroes Arctic Monkeys first stepped on stage together as a four-piece on June 13th, 2003, at The Grapes. Their set was packed with covers and also included future cult favourites such as ‘Ravey Ravey Ravey Club’ and ‘Curtains Closed’, which both appeared on their unofficial debut album, Beneath The Boardwalk.
“We had practised so much beforehand, and it was a major deal just to go and play somewhere,” Alex Turner recalled to The Telegraph in 2013 about the concert. “I’d never been on a stage in my life before that”.
The frontman had no grand plans for what the band could become, and he admitted his only aim was “just to get to the end of the night and pull the bird that I fancied that I’d got to come down! I don’t think I opened my eyes for the whole set. But that 25 minutes – wow”.
The Rolling Stones
It’s been 60 years since The Rolling Stones introduced themselves to the world on July 12th 1962, at The Marquee Club in Central London. It was here where these five individuals built their chemistry and learned to understand each other as musicians. The Marquee Club was one of their regular haunts for the next two years and played a crucial part in the band’s first chapter.
Once Charlie Watts joined the group, they found the final piece of the jigsaw, and they were ready for world domination. Looking back at that first show, Jagger said: “Still the same name. It’s only Keith and myself that are the same people, I think. I’ve tried to find out when Charlie’s first gig was, and none of us can really remember, and no one really knows. But it’s an amazing achievement”.
While no setlist exists from the performance, some of the songs that the band played included Little Richards’ ‘Kansas City’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights Big City’, and Robert Johnson’s ‘Dust My Broom’.
Led Zeppelin
Unlike the other bands on this list, Led Zeppelin didn’t exactly start from square one because of Jimmy Page’s work with The Yardbirds. Before their split, they had been booked for a tour of Scandanavia, and Page didn’t want to disregard the booking. Therefore, he used it as Zeppelin’s first shows, although they performed under the name of The New Yardbirds.
On September 7th, 1968, the story began for Zeppelin at the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Copenhagen. Jorgen Angel was one of those in attendance, and he later recalled to RAVE Magazine: “First of all, I was pretty disappointed because The Yardbirds were supposed to play that night. It was sometime in the evening that I heard a band called The New Yardbirds would perform”.
He added: “I thought maybe that has nothing to do with The Yardbirds. Maybe there’s just one person left from The Yardbirds which turned out to be right. It was only Jimmy Page from The Yardbirds who played that night. And the others I had never seen or heard of”.
Thankfully, it didn’t take long for that disappointment to dissipate and awe to transpire in its place. He added: “But when they went on stage, it was something very special and different and spectacular. They were full of energy, and they were different. I had no idea they were going to be big”.
Metallica
Metallica’s first concert happened in August 1982, and remarkably, they recorded their debut album mere months later. It was a frightening experience for the group as they performed in front of anybody they knew, but Metallica soon found their feet as performers.
“The first gig was at Radio City, and I was just singing,” Hetfield told Kerrang! in an interview. “There were a lot of people there, maybe 200, because we had all my school friends and all Lars’ and Ron’s and Dave’s buddies”.
He continued “I was really nervous and a little uncomfortable without a guitar, and then during the first song, Dave broke a string. It seemed to take him an eternity to change it, and I was standing there really embarrassed. We were really disappointed afterwards. But there were never as many people at the following shows as there were at that first one”.
Oasis
Technically, Oasis’ first show was at The Boardwalk in August 1991, when they supported Birmingham shoegazers Sweet Jesus. However, Liam Gallagher brandished this show as a “disaster”, and the Mancs didn’t really get going until Noel’s arrival, which changed their fortunes.
A reinvigorated Oasis would re-emerge with Noel in tow at The Boardwalk on October 19th, and their set included ‘Columbia’, which would become one of the group’s beloved tracks. Years later, Noel reminisced about his first Oasis gig and said: “There were about 20 people there, and we did four songs [including] a song called ‘Take Me’ that Liam and Bonehead had wrote that I still wish to this day they would record and they won’t”.
The Cure
The Cure’s first gig was far from a glamorous occasion and was under the name of Obelisk at an end-of-year school performance in 1973. Three years later, they started playing shows sporadically under the name of the Easy Cure and decided in 1978 to change their name once more to become The Cure.
Robert Smith later recalled their first show as The Cure and said: “I mean it’s been longer than that since we’ve been playing; the band itself first played in ’76, but we dropped the Easy Cure name and became The Cure went down to a three-piece on July 9th. I still have the poster from the Rocket Pub in Crawley; I found it in a box which is quite weird that I would have kept it”.
The Smiths
The Smiths’ first show came towards the end of 1982 at The Ritz in Manchester. However, their line-up over the next few months was at The Hacienda the following February when they truly got going once the band had acquired the services of Andy Rourke on bass, who was the glue they needed.
Speaking about the concert with The Guardian in 2012, Mike Joyce said: “Morrissey had started yodelling by then, and he’d get down on his shoulders and put his legs straight into the air… None of this was rehearsed. I remember watching the faces of the people at the front. It was just shock: What the hell is this?’”
Rage Against The Machine
In 1991, Rage Against The Machine announced themselves with a free performance at California State University, Northridge, which showed their intentions to shake up the world. Remarkably, footage from the show on October 23rd, 1991, made its way online, and Tom Morello since confirmed it was the band’s first-ever public performance and the footage is legit.
Their set includes the anti-establishment anthem, ‘Killing In The Name’, albeit without the lyrics, and the killer line, “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me”. The band also have run out for the early sketches of future classics such as ‘Take The Power Back,’ ‘Bullet In The Head,’ and ‘Know Your Enemy’, which you can check out below.
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