The Date: June 4, 1976
The Event: The Sex Pistols play Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall
The Result: English music is changed forever
It's 1976. British punk is entering its halcyon days. The Sex Pistols have earnt an infamous reputation playing around London's dive-bars and rock clubs, and now their first out-of-the-city show has been sorted. It's at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall. They play in front of a small smattering of impressionable kids. It becomes of the most singularly influential shows in music history. When you take into account that only about 40 people were there.
The show had been organized by Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto, two local youths who were just starting their own band, The Buzzcocks. In the audience was a young Stephen Patrick Morrissey, who'd go on to be hailed as the voice of a generation a decade later as frontman of indie-pop icons The Smiths. Also in the crowd stood another soon-to-be infamous Mancunian musical personality, Mark E. Smith, the longtime leader of shambolic art-rock outfit The Fall, a hyper-prolific band from whom Stephen Malkmus would liberally pillage on his early Pavement singles.
Also in attendance that night were Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook. The two impressionable lads were so taken by the Sex Pistols furious energy and demystifying DIY ethos that the very next day they'd go out and buy a guitar and a bass, and form their first band. They were called Warsaw. Later they became Joy Division. Then New Order.
And, if you're willing to believe such a bold-faced braggard, the audience was also believed to contain Tony Wilson, the enigmatic figure largely responsible for the ongoing success of highly-conceptual record-label Factory Records, the imprint who'd release Joy Division, amongst others, unto the world.
Given the ripple effects felt from this performance, many have suggested that this sparsely-populated show was the most important single event in British music history. Michael Winterbottom's comic half-fictional history of Factory Records, the movie 24 Hour Party People happily furthered that notion.
The legend attached to the night has meant that, in the years since, thousands have surely claimed they attended. These dreamt-up recollections inspired one English journalist, David Nolan, to write a book (I Swear I Was There: the Gig that Changed the World) investigating who exactly was in the audience. Yet, rather than keep the legend in check, Nolan's work has only served to mythologize this seminal event even moreso.
