The Gig Nobody Agrees On: Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, 1976
Alejandro De LunaManchester, June 4th, 1976: Sex Pistols play a room called the Lesser Free Trade Hall to somewhere between thirty and fifty people. The support act, Solstice, were a group from Bolton nobody remembers for any other reason. Ticket sales were bad enough that the promoters, two students named Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, nearly lost money on the room. And yet this is the show that gets credited, more than any other single date in British music, with starting punk in the north of England.
Devoto and Shelley had seen the Pistols in London a few months earlier, read about them in the music press, made the trip down, and come back convinced Manchester needed to see this. They booked the Lesser Free Trade Hall themselves, mostly because the city had nowhere else that would touch a band like this, and in the process of organising the night, they started a band of their own: Buzzcocks. They came back on July 20th with a second show, this time on a proper bill: Buzzcocks, finally with a full lineup and making their live debut, alongside Slaughter & the Dogs, an already-established Manchester band who'd been playing since 1975 and had nothing to do with the Pistols beyond getting booked as support. The second night was bigger, louder, and better attended, but it's the first one that became legend, mostly because of who was standing in the room and what they did afterward.
Who was actually there
This is where the story gets slippery. Depending on which account you read, the crowd across the two nights included Ian Curtis and Bernard Sumner, not yet in a band together; Morrissey, five years from The Smiths; Mark E. Smith, who'd have The Fall together within two years; Tony Wilson, then a Granada TV presenter who hadn't founded Factory Records yet; and Martin Hannett, who'd go on to produce most of the records that came out of it. Add Malcolm McLaren, Linder Sterling, photographer Kevin Cummins, and Buzzcocks' own circle, and you get a room that's been credited with seeding half of Manchester's post-punk scene.
Nobody took a register at the door. Attendance figures for both nights combined run under a hundred, and the exact guest list has been argued over for decades, most notably by David Nolan, whose 2006 book I Swear I Was There: The Gig That Changed the World is the closest thing to a definitive account and the obvious source of the title I've borrowed for my own print. Some of the names on it are certain. Some are self-reported, decades after the fact, by people who had every reason to want to have been in that room. That gap between the documented and the "alleged" is part of what makes the story worth telling honestly instead of just repeating the tidiest version of it.
Here's the full list of 'alleged' attendees to either gig:
- Alan Hempsall — later fronted Crispy Ambulance, and briefly stood in as Joy Division's live vocalist after Ian Curtis's death
- Bernard Sumner — Joy Division, later New Order
- Eddie Garrity (aka Ed Banger) — Slaughter & the Dogs
- Howard Devoto — co-founder of Buzzcocks, later Magazine
- Ian Curtis — Joy Division
- Ian Moss — fronted the Manchester band The Hamsters
- Jon the Postman (Jonathan Ormrod) — Manchester punk fixture, famous for commandeering stages to sing "Louie Louie"
- Kevin Cummins — photographer, later NME's chief photographer
- Linder Sterling — artist, designed Buzzcocks' Orgasm Addict sleeve, fronted Ludus
- Malcolm McLaren — Sex Pistols' own manager
- Mark E. Smith — The Fall
- Marc Riley — The Fall, radio DJ
- Martin Hannett — producer, Factory Records
- Mick Hucknall — later Simply Red
- Morrissey — The Smiths
- Paul Morley — journalist, NME
- Pete Shelley — co-founder of Buzzcocks
- Peter Hook — Joy Division, later New Order
- Richard Boon — Buzzcocks' manager, ran the New Hormones label
- Steve Diggle — Buzzcocks
-
Steve Hanley — The Fall
- Tony Wilson — Granada Television, later founded Factory Records
From the archive
The 7-inch pictured alongside this piece is from my own collection, one of the small pieces of ephemera picked up along the way while researching this period. The notebook page next to it is the actual working sketch I used to sort out who belonged on the record and who was just a persistent rumour, before any of it made it onto paper.
That research became part of my Greater Manchester music map and the I Swear I Was There, a print mapping more than 40 concerts between 1952 and 1981 that changed the direction of music rather than just soundtracking it: Elvis's Memphis debut, Dylan going electric at Newport, Bowie retiring Ziggy Stardust mid-tour, the Ramones storming the Roundhouse, and this one, the Manchester show with the guest list nobody can fully agree on.
It's one night out of more than 40 on that print. I'll be working through the rest here, one at a time.
