Publications > Scream City > Scream City Issue #2 > The Gig That Drives Me Mad by David Nolan

The Gig That Drives Me Mad
by David Nolan

The legend of the Sex Pistols gig at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade in 1976 has taken on a life of its own through books and film. Everyone knows the story of how the two shows changed Manchester music forever... don't they?

In an exclusive extract from the new book I Swear I Was There: The Gig That Changed The World, we see how confusion surrounding the first gig started even before the show took place, after Buzzcocks played a disastrous debut gig at their local college.

But first, author David Nolan details the bizarre back story to the book and why the Lesser Free Trade Hall has obsessed him for nearly three decades.

For some reason, documenting rock and roll has never adhered to the same rules as other subjects of reportage. You don't get political / social / murder stories where the writers paid to record it seemingly get into a huddle and decided 'see these bits here... I can't be arsed with these, shall we just leave them out?'

Sport sometimes waives the rules in certain cases – George Best is probably the most clear example, but then he was always a pop culture figure first and a footballer second. Coverage of a recent memorial service for Best held in Manchester was full of the usual homilies.

He was a genius, he was the world's first popstar footballer, he was the Belfast boy with ... ahem ...the world at his feet. No mention of the donated organ that he chose to piss up the wall. Scant reference to the friends betrayed. Little said about his willingness to use a hand on a woman.

As Steve Coogan / Tony Wilson says in 24 Hour Party, 'Between the truth and the legend, print the legend.'

Sorry, but that's bollocks.

If the legend isn't based in fact, maybe it doesn't deserve legendary status. The story of the Sex Pistols performance at the Lesser Free Trade hall on 4 June 1976 ...the true story that is ... is quite beguiling enough as it stands without being twisted, spun or spruced up.

But it's the sprucing that fascinates me – far more than even the music. I'm not even a particular fan of the Sex Pistols. It's the mists and mirrors around them that fascinate me.

The strange thing about 4 June 1976 is that the Sex Pistols are probably the least interesting part of the story. Four London lads, barely out of their teens, play a bunch of 60's cover versions and a smattering of originals to a group of mutton-chopped longhairs in an upstairs theatre on Manchester's Peter Street. Kerpow! Everybody in the audience runs from the building and buys a guitar/forms a group/starts a record label/creates a fanzine/changes the world. You couldn't make it up. Well actually old thing, yer fucking could make it up, as it happens. You could spin tales around the event which would be accepted as fact for 30 years. You could write a few people out of the story because their faces didn't quite fit. You could get just about every book on punk rock ever written to fall into line. You could even make it the starting point of a fantasy film.

Alternatively, you could tell the truth. The Sex Pistols gigs at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on 4 June 1976 – and the fanciful tales that surround it – drive me mad. This is a problem I have suffered from for quite some time.

When I was sixteen years old I left school. It was a Friday and I celebrated by throwing my tie out of the bus window on the way home. On the Monday I put on one of my dad's ties and started work on a magazine called Link Up as a trainee journalist. A photographer named Peter Oldham was assigned to look after me and we would whittle away the time between covering Golden wedding anniversaries and talented pets by talking about music. Especially punk rock music. Peter told me he had seen the Sex Pistols twice at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976. This was 1981 and the legend of the gigs was already at saturation point. Everyone in Manchester claimed that they were at the two Pistols shows in June and July five years back. When I questioned Peter's honour on the matter, he whipped out some negatives and promptly printed off the photographs he'd taken from the audience. Shit. I hate it when people do that.

I kept those photographs for twenty years and made a TV documentary about them for Granada Television called 'I Swear I Was There' in 2001. Now they're part of a book too.

Despite what the myth would have us believe, Peter didn't rush out the next day and buy a guitar. He never formed a band, founded a fanzine or started a record label. How inconvenient. That doesn't fit the legend. Shall we leave it out? The thing is, Peter never needed to say I Swear I was There ... he could prove it. He had nothing to gain from the whole I Swear I Was There shtick. People with nothing to gain can often provide the most telling evidence. So just this once, let's be arsed putting the true bits in. It's time the truth was told. After all, we've had 30 years of the legend.

I Swear I Was There: The Gig That Changed The World – a special extract for Scream City:

The Pistols were heading North, expecting to get full musical support from the promised Devoto / Shelley band.

Despite – or perhaps because of - the gig in Bolton on April the 1st, they felt that they just weren't quite ready. So although the tickets had already been made and quite clearly stated that the gig would feature the 'Sex Pistols + Buzzcocks' a replacement band had to be found.

Sharpish. Howard and Pete's reputations as promoters were on the line here and there was no way they could charge fifty pence to see just one band, even if that band was the Sex Pistols.

HOWARD DEVOTO: Because we weren't ready, we needed to draft somebody else in to play support. We didn't know anybody. The only thing I could remember was this guy – I think his name was Geoff – that I worked with the previous summer at a mail-order warehouse in Manchester doing a holiday job as a student ... This guy there that was in a band.

PETE SHELLEY: There was a band called the Mandela Band or Mandala Band. Don't know which one it was. They were a bit 'hippy trippy' type thing. I never saw them because I was collecting the tickets.

HOWARD DEVOTO: It wasn't the Mandala Band. It was a group called Solstice, not the Mandala band. They did things like 'Nantucket Sleighride' which is, I think, a tune by Mountain. I just remember Geoff in this white boiler suit.

PETE SHELLEY: It could have been Solstice. It could have been. I think Howard would probably know because he conspired with them ... but we never played with them again after that.

Geoff Wild was the leader of Solstice, one of the three biggest bands based in Bolton at the time. The other groups were called Legend and Iron Maiden. Along with Geoff on guitar were 'Kimble' on vocals, Paul Flintoff on bass, Harry Box on drums and Dave 'Zok' Howard on keyboards. With Neal Holden on lights and Dave Eyre on sound, they operated as a collective, splitting the money seven ways. In 30 years, no one has ever managed to trace Solstice. As a result, they've been denied their place in the footnotes of rock history.

DAVE EYRE (SOUNDMAN, SOLSTICE) Geoff used to work at the Beehive Mill in Bolton with Howard Devoto, labouring. Howard got this gig lined with the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, but for some reason they weren't ready. They asked if we'd do it ... at the time we'd do anything.

DAVE 'ZOK' HOWARD (KEYBOARD PLAYER, SOLSTICE): We used to play at The Phoenix in Manchester, the Mardi Gras in Blackpool – which was a gay club – The Town Hall pub in Eccles and the Bolton Institute, where Howard Devoto may have seen us.

NEAL HOLDEN (LIGHTING, SOLSTICE) Anytime there was a gig, we were the sharpest. The most professional. We had a traveling fanbase of three or four hundred people who'd follow us around. We always did a professional show. We had lights. We had a smoke machine.

DAVE HOWARD: We used to do stuff like Nantucket Sleigh ride by Mountain, which went down well. A lot of Santana stuff, Deep Purple stuff, Rory Gallagher, Steve Miller, Uriah Heep, the Welsh band, Man. Typical rock standard stuff. Plus a few originals.

DAVE EYRE: There was one Zok wrote called Amnesia, that used to go down a storm, it was really good.

DAVE HOWARD: It was a pile of shite.

So, despite what the the tickets said ... the Sex Pistols were not supported by the Buzzcocks. They were supported by Howard's workmate Geoff and his group Solstice. The third biggest rock band in Bolton.

TONY WILSON: Why did I go? Maybe there was this feeling, there was an appetite ... Oh my God, there's something new. I mean now, I walk around the world, desperate and waiting and I go and see anything, because it might be the new thing. Good God... .even Leeds, I'd go to. Anyway I go ... it was in the diary, 4 June.

Extract from 'I Swear I was There – The Gig That Changed The World' by David Nolan. Used with permission. The book was published 4 June 2006 by IMP Books)

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2019 note: The gig still drives David Nolan mad but he's not shy of talking about it. 2019 saw a revival of the 'I Swear I Was There' TV documentary at selected venues in the UK including Walthamstow in London.

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