The Sex Pistols’ Christmas Party: The end of a punk phenomenon
By the time of their final UK tour, the country’s most infamous punk band were mired in such notoriety that they were forced to operate in secret. Banning their debut LP Nevermind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols from major retailers and forced to cancel the majority of their 1976 Anarchy Tour, the following year’s S.P.O.T.S. tour (Sex Pistols on Tour Secretly) saw the group adopt pseudonyms such as ‘The Hamsters’ or ‘Acne Rabble’ to covertly bypass the stuffy local authorities who didn’t want the treasonous rabble in their hometown.
Council objection to the Sex Pistols’ still raged on near the band’s demise, fuelled by incessant tabloid hysteria and clouded with the Bill Grundy Today show controversy. Closing their final UK date (before their 1996 reunion) at Huddersfield club Ivanhoe’s, the gig was so spun together last-minute and shrouded in secrecy that over half the £1.75 tickets were printed with no date or venue but merely listed with a phone number to ring on December 23rd for location information.
Taking over the former Grand Picture Theatre on Christmas Day, the Sex Pistols organised a benefit gig for the children of striking firemen and miners, with a conventional ‘adult’ gig that evening. The kids present knew nothing of the band’s infamy, singer Johnny Rotten handing out T-shirts, buttons, records, and posters and organising a pogo dancing competition with a skateboard as a prize and a booming sound system pumping out disco hits of the day.
Entertaining an audience that got the band more than most adults, Rotten’s giant ‘Sex Pistols’ cake was joyously pushed into his face, prompting a food fight keenly encouraged by the Pistols.
Tearing through six songs much to the delight of the children present, Rotten, real name John Lydon, would recall the set with deep affection: “Fantastic. The ultimate reward. One of my all-time favourite gigs. Young kids, and we’re doing ‘Bodies’, and they’re bursting out with laughter on the ‘fuck this fuck that’ verse. The correct response: not the shock horror ‘How dare you?’ Adults bring their own filthy minds into a thing. They don’t quite perceive it as a child does. ‘Oh, Johnny’s used a naughty word’.”
As much a piece of Pistols lore as their Manchester Free Trade Hall gig or their ill-fated San Franciso implosion, the Ivanhoe matinee shows punk at its most socially conscious and liberatory, leaving the nihilism aside in favour of a bit of common humanity.
Captured on an old U-matic camera, filmmaker and future The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle director Julien Temple told The Guardian: “In a way, the Pistols seem the only thing that’s connected with today. Everything else seems halfway into the Victorian period, whereas the Pistols seem very modern and aware of what’s going to happen.”
He added: “Hopefully, there’s resonance in the fuel bills and firemen’s strikes of today. Even though it’s a different planet, people face the same problems.”
He concluded: “I hope kids watching it today will go: ‘Fuck me, bands like that just don’t exist.’”
