The Sex Pistols First Gig (Even Before The Manchester Gig Everyone Claims To Have Attended)
- Nov 6, 2022
- 7 min read
It was a Thursday evening in November 1975, and anyone who wandered into the Common Room at Saint Martins School of Art on London's Charing Cross Road that night had no real reason to expect anything out of the ordinary. They'd paid about 50 pence to see a pub rock band called Bazooka Joe. What they got instead was the opening salvo of the British punk revolution, delivered by four scruffy young men who'd shown up without any equipment, borrowed everything they needed, and then smashed some of it up.
The Sex Pistols played their first ever gig on 6 November 1975. The world hadn't heard of them. Most of the people in that room hadn't heard of them. And by the time they finished, roughly half the audience wished they still hadn't.
How It Came Together
The band that became the Sex Pistols had been kicking around under various names and configurations for a while before that night. It had started life as The Strand, a group loosely assembled around guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook, two working class lads from West London who'd been in each other's orbit since their school days. Jones had a well-documented habit of stealing equipment, which partly explained the band's gear situation in those early years. Their guiding hand was Malcolm McLaren, a restless cultural provocateur who'd been running a boutique on the King's Road called Sex, which sold fetish-influenced clothing and had become a gathering point for London's more outrageously dressed youth.
Glen Matlock, an art student who occasionally worked shifts at Sex, had joined as bassist. By the summer of 1975, a previous frontman named Wally Nightingale had been pushed out by McLaren, and the band was still missing a singer. The story of how they found one has become legend. A mutual acquaintance named Bernie Rhodes, who'd go on to manage the Clash, spotted a teenage John Lydon loitering near the shop wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words "I Hate" scrawled above the band's name in marker pen, his hair dyed green. Lydon was brought in, asked to mime along to a jukebox as an impromptu audition, and walked out the other end with a new name: Johnny Rotten, courtesy of Jones commenting on the state of his teeth.
The band name itself was still in flux right up to the weeks before the Saint Martins gig. They'd considered Le Bomb, Teenage Novel, Kid Gladlove, and, remarkably, The Damned, before settling on Sex Pistols. McLaren later said the name was meant to evoke "a pistol, a pin-up, a young thing, a better-looking assassin." He'd launched, in his own telling, "the idea in the form of a band of kids who could be perceived as being bad."
It was Matlock who sorted out the actual gig. Still officially enrolled at Saint Martins, he talked the college social secretary into letting them play as support to Bazooka Joe on 6 November. McLaren was sceptical about whether they were ready, and his promotional push amounted to telling a couple of people who worked at Sex. His rehearsal support had been slightly more substantial: he'd rented the band a space behind Zeno's bookshop to practise in, having spotted an ad in Melody Maker.
No Equipment, One Mandrax, and a Borrowed Backline
The band arrived for soundcheck with instruments and very little else. No amps, no PA, no drums. Bazooka Joe guitarist Robin Chapekar recalled the appeal with some sympathy: "They pleaded with us. All they had was their guitars, and they wanted to use our amps and drums. We felt sorry for them, we related to them, it had happened to us before."
What witnesses at soundcheck remember most vividly, alongside the borrowed equipment, was McLaren. He'd turned up in peg-leg trousers and spent the afternoon running back and forth across the room in a state of barely contained excitement, directing the band on where to stand and trying to whip up trouble where none was yet needed. Gene Krell, one of the Sex shop staff McLaren had tipped off about the gig, stood next to his boss when the band finally started playing. He remembered McLaren looking "perplexed and then curious" as the volume hit.
Jones, for his part, had taken a Mandrax tranquilliser to deal with his nerves. The sedative was kicking in as they started playing, which may explain what happened next. He cranked his borrowed amp up to full volume in a room with no stage and a ceiling low enough to feel every frequency in your chest. "It was a 100-watt amp in a little room with no stage," Jones recalled, "and it was great. Everyone was looking at us. It seemed like millions of people at the time."
It wasn't millions. Most estimates put the crowd at somewhere between 20 and 40 people. Just before they went on, McLaren had produced a bottle of the band's favourite alcohol by way of encouragement. The booze, the Mandrax, and the adrenaline made for an interesting combination.
The Set, the Chaos, and the Punch-Up
The set was short, loud, and built almost entirely from covers. The Pistols hammered through the Who's "Substitute", the Small Faces' "Whatcha Gonna Do About It", and "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone", which most people knew from the Monkees. They weren't playing these songs out of reverence. They knew how they went, more or less, and that was sufficient. One eyewitness, Sebastian Conran, who was a Saint Martins student at the time, later recalled Johnny Rotten spending much of the performance blowing his nose into the microphone with a handkerchief. It bore very little resemblance to what Pete Townshend got up to on stage, but it had a similar level of controlled destruction.
Cook's summary was blunt: "Total chaos. None of us knew what we were doing."
The trouble started when the Pistols began taking out their energy on the equipment they'd borrowed. Danny Kleinman, another Bazooka Joe guitarist, was watching from the side of the room when Rotten started kicking the speaker cabinet. Bazooka Joe were still paying it off. Kleinman ran in and manhandled Rotten to make him stop, which was the spark that lit whatever altercation followed.
The scale of what happened has been disputed ever since. Kleinman insists it was a minor scuffle, nothing more than a school playground moment. Others remember it differently. Photographer Paul Madden, who was there, noted that the tension had been building all afternoon, partly because the Pistols' attitude was so thoroughly hostile that Bazooka Joe had already told them to get their own amplifiers. The plug was eventually pulled after about 20 minutes.
Rotten himself would later admit there "was not a single handclap" when they finished.
The Man Who Quit the Next Morning
Not everyone in that room was appalled. One person, standing in the audience watching the support act tear apart his band's equipment, felt something shift in him permanently. Stuart Goddard was Bazooka Joe's bassist. He'd later become considerably better known under a different name.
"I'll never forget it," he told journalist Jon Savage for Savage's definitive punk history England's Dreaming. "They came in as a gang; they looked like they couldn't give a fuck about anybody. The impression they left on me was total. They had a certain attitude I'd never seen: they had balls and they had very expensive equipment and it didn't look like it belonged to them. They had the look in their eyes that said, 'We're going to be massive.'"
Goddard quit Bazooka Joe the following morning. He went home, thought about who he wanted to be, and eventually settled on a name. He chose Adam because Adam was the first man. He chose Ant because, in a nuclear explosion, ants survive. He became Adam Ant, one of the biggest pop stars in Britain by the early 1980s. He's said that the Sex Pistols' first gig was the direct cause of his entire career taking the direction it did. The idea that a single chaotic support slot could redirect someone's entire creative life recalls similar sliding-door moments in rock history, like the night Lennon met McCartney at a Woolton fete in 1957, or the moment the Isley Brothers gave Jimi Hendrix his first real gig and changed what popular music thought a guitar could do.
What Came Next
The Common Room where it all happened is now a luxury apartment block. The 50 pence entry fee and the borrowed amp and the nose-blowing into the microphone belong to a world that's thoroughly gone. But the ripples from those 20 minutes of chaos spread in ways that nobody in that room could have mapped.
The Saint Martins gig was followed by a string of college performances around London as the Pistols sharpened their set and their attitude. The early followers who latched on to them in those months before they became notorious included Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin, and a young Billy Idol. Their look, much of it pulled from McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's Sex boutique, ignited what became punk's visual language. By December 1976, they'd dropped the f-bomb live on television during an interview with Bill Grundy, triggering a tabloid panic that made them nationally infamous overnight. The Daily Mirror ran the headline "The Filth and the Fury."
The Clash, the Damned, and the Buzzcocks all formed in their wake. The Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall performances in 1976 became almost as mythologised as the Saint Martins gig. Punk spread to American shores too, and the 1977 debut of the Ramones at CBGB showed how the same energy had been fermenting on both sides of the Atlantic. Back in Britain, the people who'd been at those early Pistols shows, or claimed they had been, went on to form Joy Division, the Smiths, and the Fall.
Jones wrote in his autobiography that standing on that makeshift stage at Saint Martins and watching the room react felt like opening Pandora's box. He wasn't wrong. Though he was on a Mandrax at the time, so perhaps his judgment was somewhat impaired. Either way, the box was open, and there was no putting anything back in it.
The Sex Pistols played together for just two and a half years. They recorded one studio album. They barely toured outside the UK. They broke up messily in January 1978 after a disastrous American tour, with Rotten announcing from the stage of the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco that he felt cheated. And yet the argument that punk changed British culture, and that British punk started in a small college common room on a Thursday evening when a band showed up without any equipment and borrowed someone else's, is one that's very hard to make a case against.
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