Valley Below: The story of a Welsh town and the belief that the Sex Pistols were a Biblical prophecy
It really is difficult to put into words just what a cultural firestorm punk rock was upon its mainstream breakthrough in the late 1970s. Sure, by that point, there had been conservative doomsayers and cultural gatekeepers wringing their hands over what young people liked all the way to the bank for about half a century. However, unlike jazz, comics and the early forms of rock ‘n’ roll, punk music actually promised the kind of moral corruption and societal chaos these freaks had been wailing about since before the Great Depression.
If you look back at all those early forms of youth culture from a 2024 perspective, there’s something absurdly quaint about the whole charade. It’s legitimately funny to picture grown men with suits and degrees spending days in boardrooms, sweating pints and smoking more than an entire season of Mad Men, trying to work out how to quell the riots that Bill Haley’s Rock Around The Clock movie will inspire. Then, large numbers of those same men had to work out how to deal with the Sex Pistols. No wonder folks got a little weird about it.
Suddenly, the radical subtext those previous crazes alluded to with all the subtlety of a whisper at a Slipknot concert were now the text. You had songs that were unabashedly about societal change and railing against cultural norms, and they were as sonically shocking as the artists making them, which were visually shocking. Then Steve Jones (accurately) sneered that Bill Grundy was a “fucking rotter” on primetime TV, and this teen fad became national news that your parents and grandparents didn’t just know about; they had opinions about.
The best example of just how insane people were about punk, and the Pistols in particular, comes from the tour that they were due to perform after the whole Grundy kerfuffle. Most venues that had booked them cancelled the shows in disgust, including a concert in Cardiff at the Top Rank. However, a replacement show in Caerphilly’s Castle Cinema was offered instead, and decades later, a fan who went to the show, Dave Smitham, wrote on a Pistols fan site about just how mental the town went when it became clear this show was in fact, going ahead.
According to Smitham, if you dropped into Caerphilly on December 14th, 1976, you’d think the town was preparing for the apocalypse itself and not a pop concert. All the towns’ pubs hadn’t just closed. They’d barricaded their windows. Seemingly believing that the punks descending on them for the gig had the destructive power of a legion of Uruk-Hai from Lord of the Rings and not some teenagers from Swansea giggly from their first tin of cider. The sight opposite the cinema had to be seen to be believed, too.
Set up in the car park opposite the venue, a fire and brimstone preacher spat venom at the small queue of teenagers shivering in the December cold, which was probably preferable to the choir of carollers that occasionally took over from the padre during his tea breaks. A leaflet was passed around to the gig-goers as well, one that has been lovingly preserved on the Pistols’ official website that read, “Even though apparently just a passing fad… such trends are clearly part of the fulfilment of Jesus’ prophecy that before his return to earth, wickedness would multiply beyond all previous limits.”
The irony of it all was that these moral guardians were, by a mile, the angriest and most obnoxious people in Caerphilly that night. Smitham writes: “Valley’s punks and the curious gathered themselves in the cinema’s seven front rows. Row upon row of empty seats tiered to the back of the unheated, seedy auditorium… In marked contrast to the anticipated mayhem, everyone was exceedingly well-behaved.”
John Lydon, as per, had the last word on all this, telling a local fanzine, “Well, I’m just surprised that many grown-up adults can behave so ludicrously childishly. Don’t they know their papers tell them lies? I don’t think they do – they live in a twilight zone. That’s alright, they can be happy in their own way, but I don’t think they’ve got the right to interrupt my way; each to their own, God loves all kinds.”
Maybe this is the most shocking thing about the whole endeavour. That at the height of “The Filth and The Fury”, the most level-headed voice in the room was that of Johnny Rotten.
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