Ey Up! It's The Sex Pistols

For Radio 4 documentary Punk, the Pistols and the Provinces, author Mark Hodkinson investigated the overlooked influence of a pair of Sex Pistols gigs in Yorkshire. He discusses what he learned.

Punk is viewed principally as a London phenomenon. The Sex Pistols in particular are synonymous with the capital – forming at SEX, the boutique run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood at 430 King's Road, Chelsea; debuting at the Saint Martin’s School of Art in Charing Cross Road; holding a weekly residency at the 100 Club in Oxford Street; signing to A&M Records outside the gates of Buckingham Palace; sailing down the Thames on a hired boat to celebrate the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.

Mark Hodkinson outside Club Amadeus, formerly Sayer's, in Northallerton

So, their story would appear to be centred wholly on London but, largely unknown, their touring career outside the capital was book-ended by two shows more than 200 miles away from the capital, and both in Yorkshire.

On Wednesday 19 May 1976 – six months before the release of their first single and their notorious appearance on the Today show with Bill Grundy – the Sex Pistols performed at Sayer’s nightclub in the sleepy market town of Northallerton in North Yorkshire. Just 19 months later, on Christmas Day 1977, the band made their last UK appearance, at Ivanhoe’s, a small club in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire.

I visited both towns and found people who attended the gigs. I also plotted the impact of punk in the provinces where thousands, if not millions, of disgruntled and discarded teenagers heeded The Clash’s entreaty to the ‘faraway towns’ to ‘come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls’ on London Calling. I was a few years too young for punk but have always been interested in how it formed an ideology; an ideal for living. While many remain ambiguous or divided about what this is exactly, there seems to be an agreement that it is fundamentally about self-empowerment.

Brian Simpson was the DJ at Sayer’s which, in the weeks leading up to The Sex Pistols' visit, had played host to strictly non-punk acts Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders and The Searchers. Along with Steve Williams, who was also at the gig, he remembers people leaving the club in ‘droves’ when the Sex Pistols began playing. “We had no idea who they were,” he says. “Northallerton was suddenly at the forefront of punk rock but we had no idea that we were. It was about two weeks later when I saw their picture in one of the music papers that I realised I’d seen them play.”

Andy Thorley, aka Andy T

For Peter Jackson, who was a young teenager at the time, seeing the Pistols had a major impact. “That gig changed my life to this very day,” he says. “I’m still a punk. They were taking away our parents’ jobs and shutting everything down. Punk was a way of telling the lot of them where to go.”

In my hometown of Rochdale, Andy Thorley (better known as Andy T) defined punk. He recorded a ‘song’ that involved him telling everyone to ‘just do it’ while he sped up and slowed down a jazz record on a turntable. He showed me and many others that valid music and art could be conjured from anything at hand. He was also a grafter – organising concerts, writing poetry, putting together compilation tapes, contributing articles to fanzines. I visited him for the programme and he’d just got back from touring his punk poetry in the United States.

Paul Cook, the drummer with the Sex Pistols, recalls first-hand the experiences of playing outside London and how their music ‘brought them out of their terraced houses and council flats’. He also well summarises the ‘message’ of punk: “It was saying if you didn’t like the status quo, do something about it.”

A £1.75 ticket for The Sex Pistols last UK gig

One of the people I tracked down who attended The Sex Pistols last ever concert in the UK was Mark Burgess who later formed his own band, The Chameleons, and has spent the last 35 years touring the world. Burgess was responsible for setting about Johnny Rotten with a giant cake at the afternoon concert in Huddersfield which was held mainly for the children of striking firemen. Commenting on the incident, Mark say: ‘‘He was singing about being a bloody mess, so I thought it would be a good idea to turn him into one!’’

Mark Hodkinson is the author of the The Last Mad Surge of Youth, a novel about punk and its legacy.

Listen to Punk, the Pistols and the Provinces on Radio 4 on Tuesday 24 May at 11.30am and then online.