The Sex Pistols in 1977. From left: Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Sid Vicious (né John Simon Ritchie), and Johnny Rotten (né John Lydon).

“We’d Just Never Seen Anything Like It”

In the summer of 1976, the Sex Pistols played two sparsely attended shows in Manchester. Among the few who did turn up were future members of Buzzcocks, the Fall, the Smiths, and Joy Division

By Phil Tinline

There are times when culture gets so stuck and suffocating, you just want something to explode. That was how Britain felt in the mid-1970s. If you were young and working-class—receiving unemployment benefits or in a dead-end job—you might have hoped that music would help vent your pent-up frustration at a collapsing economy drowning in cream-and-brown kitsch. But unless you liked plodding pub rock, disco, or aging musos whose songs dragged on longer than some wars, you were out of luck. Especially if you lived in northwest England.

Then one day in February 1976, a student at the Bolton Institute of Technology named Howard Trafford read a New Musical Express review of a group who’d just appeared at London’s Marquee Club. The guitarist had declared, “We’re not into music. We’re into chaos.” The singer, “Johnny Rotten”—John Lydon to his mom—was all bad teeth, flared nostrils, and bug eyes. The headline read: “Don’t Look Over Your Shoulder but the Sex Pistols Are Coming.”