by Paul Morley
Those who like to nourish the legend favour an audience of around forty; other less romantic minds suggest a number closer to a hundred. The year on the flimsy paper ticket was misprinted as ‘1076’. The small wood-panelled lecture theatre contained around 350 seats and had been booked by Howard Trafford and Pete Shelley of Bolton’s Buzzcocks, playing the role of visionary impresarios. It cost twenty-five pounds to hire the hall, next door to the larger Free Trade Hall, an entertainment venue named after an economic principle, the first home in 1868 of the new Hallé Orchestra, which grew to national prominence after the Second World War, and a grand symbol of once-mighty Victorian civic pride, where bands like Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Wings and Little Feat played.
Howard Trafford, soon to be Devoto, an Iggy, Can and Samuel Beckett fan, student at Bolton Institute of Technology, had read a review that promised ‘chaos’ not music. Trafford and his college friend Shelley travelled to see the Pistols in High Wycombe. They had already been inspired – by the chaos, which promised a new order within new, unplanned urban and mental spaces – to form a group, which would be from Manchester and sound like it was from Manchester, intelligent, radical and provocative outsiders, and which in its own way invented the very idea of an indie world with the release of its self-financed, self-recorded, self-released four-track debut EP Spiral Scratch. These songs were a combination of journalism, philosophy, pop music and mental glamour, were local thinkers organising a new presence of mind and turning it into an object, a seven-inch disc inside a riveting slightly solemn black and white sleeve, and seemed as original, as unrepeatable, as the generosity of Chetham, the mischief of Laycock, the spirit of Oldknow, the invention of Lewis Carroll, the natural philosophy of John Dalton, the meritorious determination of Cobden and Pankhurst, the timing of Frank Randle, the presence of Lowry and Hepworth, the observation of Auden, the romantic organisation of Hallé, the crunching smartness of Turing, the future-forming lines of L. C. Howitt and Edgar Wood, the neighbourhood comedy of Coronation Street, the self-promoting brilliance of Burgess, the purpose of Stephenson, the drug-fuelled quest of De Quincey, the cosmic certainty of Lovell, and the brain of Sterne – seeking experience for its own sake, finding new ways to refresh his memory.
I was there, I was a witness, although not enough of one to notice at the time that what was taking place was ‘history’. I had no idea I would talk and write about the gig for what is turning out to be the rest of my life, finding new ways to point out from anniversary to anniversary that the evening was something of a revelation because it instantly suggested that: (a) there were other people interested in music that made you feel, think and want to do/be something radical/individual, (b) you could make music without the usual support systems of London record companies, promoters and showbiz managers and, (c) there was an exciting way to effectively and importantly assassinate Emerson Lake and Palmer, who indifferently perpetuated like cruel eighteenth-century landowners various demoralising forms of alienation, elitism, pomposity and complacency. The slick, remote sincerity of the pompous prog acts could be sensationally sabotaged.
I’d gone on my nineteen-year-old own. I’m not sure what I actually recall or what I filled in using data acquired later as the gig was talked up into legend, each subsequent Manchester moment and scene amplifying its apparent importance. I seem to recall lots of empty seats and the Sex Pistols solemnly trying to copy and/or mock slack rock musician poses with slapdash panache. The audience was mostly male, although the exotic Pistols entourage included some women, costumed in a style that to the long-haired flared-trouser still-fairly-cobbled-barely-Roxy’d northerners of the time was somewhere between Fosse’s Cabaret and Clockwork Kubrick. Enigmatic but earthy collagist and artist Linder Sterling, then Devoto’s girlfriend, future muse and friend of Morrissey, would have been there, but behind the scenes, not stuck out front with the music-paper-reading lads. The Pistols seemed more intuitively aware of Manchester’s nineteenth-century status as the world-shaking Shock City than the audience. They were for change. There must be change. There was change, and there should be more change, because, without change, the ones with power remain in control, abusing that power, blocking progression. You didn’t get that at the Stoneground.
We, the yokel audience, were scruffy isolated obsessive music fans motivated by John Peel and the weekly music papers to search out new music; tribe-less fans of the Stooges, MC5, maybe Can and Roxy and definitely the garage bands of Jac Holzman and Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilations. Many audience members have since become well known. So well known it appears now that the show was attended by a host of rock celebrities – members of Joy Division, New Order, The Fall, the Smiths, A Certain Ratio, Ludus, Simply Red, Buzzcocks, Magazine, the poet John Cooper Clarke, the producer Martin Hannett. It was in fact attended by unassuming nonentities drawn to the gig from within a twenty-mile radius of Manchester city centre, drizzling in like the sixties mods and dancers had rained down on the Twisted Wheel, having caught the bus and train from Salford, Stockport, Oldham, Bury, Stretford, Wigan, Urmston, Macclesfield, Collyhurst, Leigh, Fallowfield and Wythenshawe. I shyly found a seat among empty seats all around me. I might have sat near Morrissey or Bernard Sumner or Peter Hook or Mark E. Smith, but I wouldn’t have recognised them. We were all avant-garde music fans craving something new, noting a message from the south that something was stirring that might be especially for us, tapping into the general youthful impatience with our repressive, perpetual provincial impotence.
We were perhaps frustrated by our stranded nonentity status and seeking new purpose, but not really expecting to find blatant clues about how to break out of that post-war, post-sixties, post-industrial breakdown limbo. The Sex Pistols’ deviant pop-art rage and indignation was an immediate clue. They played rock music, but they questioned it, reviewed it, toppled it, tore it up and pieced it back together, dressed it up like artists. Artists not using paint and sculpture, but pop music, media manipulation, surrealist humour and appropriated and adjusted conceptual art.
I seem to recall no one in the audience looked as though they were in a group and ever would be, because of course at the time no one (a) local, (b) regional and (c) provincial, who looked a little ordinary even dull and dressed a little second hand, a little charity shop, formed pop groups. This was to change, quite quickly, because the Sex Pistols themselves did not as such look like a band, not as bands were perceived at the time, whether Genesis, Mott or Free, or even those early hints of a certain form of energising cultural and musical correction about to take place, the Ramones and Dr Feelgood.
Would another group of forty have ended up forming the kind of groups that came into being because there had appeared these perverse educators, these militant cultural critics possibly influenced as much by deviant conceptualist Marcel Duchamp and gladitorial philosopher Guy Debord as the Small Faces and the Who, and sensationally branded by wound-up folk-devil-seeking tabloids as grubby nuisances, bringers of vicious punk rock and associated loutish scandals? Or were they the obvious forty or so who would end up forming those bands – and writing those words/taking those photographs/designing those sleeves/managing those bands/starting those labels – because they attended the gig in the first place and had agitating within them all those songs, ideas, words, images, plans, beliefs, manifestos, and just needed some sort of cabalistic psychic trigger, a dressed-up sign, a fearless look in the eye, as delivered by that haughty and amused intellectual hooligan Johnny Rotten? (And what happened to those of the forty that did not form bands, etc., etc.? The ensuing myth does not allow these gaps to be filled in.)
The support at that first show, when the Buzzcocks, despite being billed to play, weren’t ready, were Solstice from Bolton, who were more Allman Brothers/Stoneground hippy than Richard Hell surreal. We sat politely, a little non-plussed, through their guitar-dull, long-haired, deeply non-punk show before, abruptly, the Sex Pistols arrived, looking like they were looking for trouble, playing familiar pop songs by the Who,
Small Faces and Monkees but also other songs that seemed weirdly charged with a tantalising even shocking new form of bitterness and resentment with words like anarchy and Antichrist exploding out of the top, songs that seemed closer to something futuristic and fantastically English and Dada than ancient irrelevant American blues. They were dead ordinary, really, as English as treacle pudding and freshly mown lawns, but somehow they seemed as exotically extraordinary as the descendants of Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Wyndham Lewis, Peter Cook and the Spiders from Mars, and gorgeousness and gorgeosity was made flesh.
It was the abruptness. I still remember the mean funny look on Johnny Rotten’s face and his short ruffled hair as he strolled on to the small stage, all snot, sneer and leer, with a layer of unstable boyish sweetness and a hint of intellectual raffishness, and looked down on us, most if not all scruffy boys with long hair and suddenly stupid flapping flares, and then dragged us away with him. He dragged us away into the future and a world where books and hundreds of articles have been written, and films made, about what happened that night, as if there was some kind of fiery mass orgy and everyone there lost their virginity all at once, and then set out on a deliberate mission to change everything, to do and be the same roughly transcendent reality-checking culturally significant thing. He dragged us into a future where we’d get to know most of the names of the people who turned up, because Rotten and his crooked cohorts made it clear that the best way to get on, to make things happen, was to do it yourself, and think for yourself, and see for yourself. He didn’t want us to agree with him. He wanted us to agree to differ.
We couldn’t yet articulate it – those in the way of Rotten’s piercing gaze – not in special, novel ways, but we were bored in the city, although not bored with what we could find in the city, by what came into it, and out of it, symbolising how the city itself throughout history had combined the energies of those who had settled there with those who brought their outsiders’ energy and talent. The city was done for, so something else must happen. Pessimists can be such bores, and it’s lazy to believe the worst. We were searching for new passions, and living in and around this particular city had conditioned us to look for those new passions in a particular way, with a particular point of view embedded in a northern history we knew little about but which had soaked into our beings. Our emotions and behaviour were what they were because we lived in an orbit, in a place of flux, around Manchester, pulsating the other side of the Pennines from Yorkshire, at the other end of the Mersey from Liverpool, in one county or another where Lancashire and Cheshire intertwined or where Lancashire set off further north and Cheshire weaved towards Liverpool. Manchester started to speak to us, and we found that we had something to say connected to what it was saying.
Six weeks later, on 20 July, the Pistols returned, stronger, faster, harder, darker, officially nationally notorious, quickly, accidentally and intentionally discovering an astonishing way to transmit tricky subversive messages to a wider audience than the avant garde typically reached. The Lesser Free Trade Hall was now full of more knowing fans, already with shorter hair and narrower trousers and a tougher edge each paying a pound to see the Pistols, the debut of abrasively smart Buzzcocks and rowdy, not so smart Wythenshawe chancers Slaughter and the Dogs who had the gall to promote the show as though they were sharing the top of the bill.
The two shows caused a little confusion, as many who turned up for the second show would claim to have seen the first. For a while the two gigs were compressed into one memory. There was, relatively speaking, someone famous at the second show – passionate local Cambridge-educated TV personality Tony Wilson, obsessed with Manchester’s pioneering and progressive credentials. He claimed he was at the first one, but he definitely wasn’t – he would not have been missed – although his eventual Factory Records comrades Martin Hannett, Rob Gretton and Alan Erasmus were, not yet knowing each other, and Richard Boon, Buzzcocks manager, who organised the precursor of Factory, New Hormones, was obviously there. Peter Saville, the fifth Factory Man, was at both, or neither, or the first, or the second. Joy Division’s Ian Curtis was at the second show not the first, meeting people he had something in common with and totally ready to let the ordinary but uncanny Rotten inspire him.
Rotten stared at us like he hated us but could grow to love us, although that love would pretty soon grow into disgust, so he might as well hate us, and get it over with – we only had ourselves to blame – but even though he hated us, he was going to entertain us, to show us what a wonderful cage-rattling mind he had, and what great taste in music. The bastard made us believe in the dark, menacing, anti-conformist fairy tale of punk, its ability to exercise our intuitions, explore our sensibilities and sort out the modern world in ways that suited our personal, local interests, and the rest was post-punk history.
Manager Malcolm McLaren, the missing link between Don Arden and Marshall McLuhan, a lover of situationism and stunts, fashion and thinking, words and images, and London punk scene queen Jordan were at the first show, part of an extravagantly clad Pistols London entourage that made us locals seem to be wearing flat caps and clogs. They were calling us – dissatisfied individuals not yet knowing how dissatisfied we were – to the circus, to the zoo, to a freak show, to a political rally, to a fight, to a piece of astonishing theatre, to an art exhibition calculated to make our eyes and ears burn, to one other Manchester night that could have gone nowhere.
Or somewhere. Because, as is obvious once time has passed, one surprising thing leads to another: the first Pistols show led to the second Pistols show led to Wilson’s experimental pop TV show So It Goes, to the bored, alive and anxious Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP on their own independent New Hormones label, to the estranged, endless, side-splitting, crying-out-loud Fall, to the utopian disorganisation of Factory Records, to the Hacienda nightclub, the ideal alchemical combination of structure and event, craving to turn life into sheer play, which was the next stage on in the margins of pleasure, of high spirits, of the fortifying spirit of leisure (from the nineteenth-century Bolton Star and Ohmy!’s Th’ Owd Circus, the free and easies, from Gracie’s lungs, Formby’s teeth, Lowry’s fairs, Mancunian Films’ horseplay, Savile’s Ritz, Manning’s Embassy, from Belle Vue, the Golden Garter, Talk of the North in Eccles, Moss Side’s rough and ready Nile and Reno touting the riveting, pungent pulse of the exiled and reviled, the pepped-up northern soul of the Twisted Wheel, the dolled-up disco of the erotically multi-roomed Pips behind Manchester Cathedral and its Roxy Room dripping with quiffs, fringes and eyeliner, to the worked-up places where punk went – Rafters, the Ranch, the Electric Circus – to Marr and Morrissey of the Smiths, giving such voice to local desire and universal torment, to Madchester, Manchester roughly transformed into myth-making playground, into temporary perfect place, to the Stone Roses at Spike Island, to Oasis, setting rock rebellion and a fascination with novelty in stone, to a postmodern brand of civic pride, a new faith in progress and, what with one thing and another, to I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here.
The momentum caused by the event has now perhaps died down, or paused for thought. Or, ultimately, the momentum has turned into a constant nostalgic commentary on the momentum – what caused it, how we remember it and what happened because of it to Manchester and its regenerated sociocultural history. (When the Free Trade Hall was converted into a Radisson Hotel in 2004 L. C. Howitt’s cleverly rendered post-war hall was demolished, but a few architectural remnants of the theatre were retained, scattered around the generically sparkling five-star hotel: the plaque commemorating its reopening after the war in 1951 by Princess Elizabeth soon to be Queen, a framed piece of wall plaster autographed by previous performers, Edward Walter’s original decorative outside cladding, and the letters showing you where the stall entrance doors were located. Under pressure from energetic intellectual celebrity and Factory Records impresario Tony Wilson, representing the local concern that such a historical building was to be turned into a bland, luxury chain hotel, inheriting
if only in his own mind the moral energy of Anthony Burgess and the populist-historian mantle of A. J. P. Taylor, some of the conference rooms were named after local historical figures, including Cobden, Dalton and Howitt, and suites were named after performers who had appeared at the hall. There are Bassey, Garland, Valentino and Fitzgerald Suites – reflecting the American owners’ taste – and one of the penthouse suites, with views over the old Central Station, now the Manchester Central convention complex, was named after Dylan. There is no Judas Suite – for the greatest heckle of the twentieth century – no Sex Pistols Suite despite firm requests from Wilson and, shamefully, no Rotten Suite.)
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Complete with hurriedly inserted mentions of the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks, I sent my magazine, Out There, professionally typeset and printed for fifty pounds at an Offerton industrial estate printers, which my dad helped me pay for, to the editor of the NME, Nick Logan, with a terse note suggesting with what must have been Manchester arrogance, Stockport bluffness or reckless Cheshire cheek, that I could do better than him. He took the challenge well, and because I neglected to put a telephone number on the note, sent a telegram to our new house in Heaton Moor, where we now lived after another move within Stockport.
It was a bigger house, with rough, scrappy hints of something once hoping to be grand, but a step or two down from the soft suburban limbo of Offerton. My dad, now perilously close to being unemployed, finding uncomfortable work as a travelling salesman, chased by indeterminate figures demanding payment, had needed to cash in some of the value of the Offerton house and we moved the other side of the Mersey, technically into Lancashire, although still in Stockport and therefore, more or less, Cheshire. My dad’s mood darkened further because he’d slipped across the murky river border and further away from where Cheshire turned semi-rural, pointing through lush trees and gentle roads towards elusive peace and quiet. One more move, and we would be in flat, slack Levenshulme, mysteriously stinking of something biscuit-y, tangled up in that done-in ring of rot and ruin which circled central Manchester like a desiccated doughnut, which only Lowry and Morrissey could turn into any sort of poetry. He didn’t even make it there.