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Sex Pistols in America: A Brief, Raucous History of the Punk Icons’ Doomed U.S. Tour

The brief 1978 run was marked by musical incompetence, audience antagonism and physical altercations — with occasional flashes of raw punk brilliance.

By Steve Knopper

Steve Knopper

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Renowned in the U.K. for tearing down rock ‘n’ roll and reinventing it as something thrilling, profane and unpredictable, the Sex Pistols arrived in the U.S. on Jan. 3, 1978, for a tour — not of major cities like New York and Los Angeles but run-down ballrooms throughout the South. The tour was doomed — bassist Sid Vicious had a drug problem, and the band’s label, Warner Bros., had to put up a $1 million bond in order to secure two-week visas.

Thus began a spectacle, “deep in enemy territory” — as tour manager Noel Monk put it in his 1990 memoir 12 Days On the Road: The Sex Pistols in America — of out-of-tune instruments, grumpy Johnny Rotten tirades and band-vs.-audience spitting and jeering that transformed into physical violence and, every now and then, moments of greatness . Two dates were canceled and seven went on, including the biggest, an ill-fated finale at Bill Graham ‘s Winterland Ballroom.

To mark the release of FX’s new Sex Pistols series Pistol , now streaming on Hulu, below is a summary of the band’s U.S. tour during that mythically brief period.

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Jan. 5, Great SouthEast Music Hall, Atlanta. Located in a former shopping mall above a bowling alley, the 523-capacity Great SouthEast Music Hall Emporium & Performing Arts Exchange Inc emulated the Bottom of the Barrel club in Union, N.J., booking punk bands like the Restraints, Angelust and the Nasty Bucks, one of whose members occasionally performed in trash bags. Pistols tickets, as one of the club’s managers, Sharon Powell , later told Mick O’Shea in 2018’s The Sex Pistols Invade America: The Fateful U.S. Tour, January 1978 , were marked with a hole-punch and safety pin, hand-stamped, “numbered, and had to be checked out of the safe.”

Sex Pistols Aim to Give Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee a Touch of Punk

Local fire marshals showed up to the gig due to the press attention, says Powell, and “every single person was counted whose head went through that door.” She adds that more press — from the Village Voice ’s Robert Christgau to TV reporters from all three networks — showed up than paying fans. “They were pretty much as you would expect punkers to behave: radically punkish with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” says Powell, who today owns an Atlanta entertainment company called Swirl Girl Productions. “On stage, they actually, honest to God, were fairly professional. I’ve had worse trouble on stage with bands than we had with them.” The Great SouthEast Music Hall moved to another location later in 1978, then closed for good after two Arlo Guthrie shows the following year.

Jan. 6, Taliesyn Ballroom, Memphis. Razed in 1979 in favor of a Taco Bell, according to The Sex Pistols Invade America , the 725-capacity Taliesyn was what one fan called “a lovely old mansion originally built for debutante coming-out parties and wedding receptions.” Years of high-school graduation and fraternity parties, though, meant it “always smell[ed] a little like vomit.”

Promoters oversold the show, and fire marshals showed up to tell the late promoter Bob Kelley to restrict the overage and leave 200 unlucky fans out on the cold Memphis streets. (Kelley was said to have undercut the marshals by escorting certain ticketholders to the back entrance, through the kitchen.) Many in the crowd had shown up looking to spit, fight and generally raise hell, but halfway through the loud, screechy concert, the Pistols had driven half the crowd away. “You’ve really done something, in my opinion,” the late producer Jim Dickinson , who attended, said in 2017 , “especially in Memphis, where people will basically watch anything — paint dry, or dogs fight, or whatever.”

Jan. 8, Randy’s Rodeo, San Antonio, Texas. Randy’s Rodeo started out as a bowling alley on a “ two-lane, no-shoulder paved road .” It turned into a 2,200-person concert venue when soil problems made the ground shift and the bowling lanes uneven.

Billing itself as “the finest western dance hall and night club in San Antonio,” Randy’s Rodeo drew roughly 1,200 people for the Pistols show — a couple hundred punk fans, plus locals and metalheads. “It was instant mayhem,” Jesse Sublett of The Violators told the Austin Chronicle in 2003. “Cups, beer cans, food, trash, spit flew toward the stage. The sound was loud, extremely lo-fi, but the band was tight — for about 10 seconds.” The show was mostly famous for Vicious screaming a homophobic slur at the crowd — “You cowboys are all a bunch of fucking f—–s!” — and hitting an attendee with his bass.

Racism on the Road: The Oral History of Black Artists Touring in the Segregated South

Jan. 9, Kingfish Club, Baton Rouge, La. Another club in a shopping mall, the 1,000-capacity Kingfish took the nickname of former Louisiana Sen. Huey Long and made space for bands who were somewhere between playing bars and arenas., “It looked to us like there was a crying need for such a place,” said one of the owners, Robert Day , in The Sex Pistols Invade America .

The Pistols show, “mostly made up of rubberneckers and jock-types looking for trouble,” as an attendee told O’Shea, included many journalists and a few handfuls of New Orleans punk rockers. The show became infamous due to Vicious allegedly receiving sexual favors onstage from a member of the audience, although accounts differ on whether that occurred.

Jan. 10, Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas. A Dallas millionaire landowner, O.L. Nelms , built this kitschy club in 1950; an early marquee above a 21-foot longhorn statue reads, “America’s Finest Western Ballroom.” Western-swing hero Bob Wills was an early host of the 1,900-capacity club, which had a barbecue restaurant and, over the years, would promote Loretta Lynn , Willie Nelson , George Jones , B.B. King , Nat King Cole and Al Green . Wills gave up his lease in 1958, and another country singer, Dewey Groom, took it over, partnering briefly with Jack Ruby, who gained infamy in 1963 for shooting Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV

Groom’s daughter, Saran Knight , took the call from an agent about the Pistols and agreed to hold the date. The club sold beer in plastic cups, “due to fear of people either cutting themselves or others,” Knight told O’Shea. “Unfortunately, the punk rock band was not favored by their audience of 800,” the now-closed ballroom’s website reports . “They made headlines when a woman head-butted band member Sid Vicious after he taunted the crowd.”

Jan. 11, Cain’s Ballroom, Tulsa. Larry Shaeffer , a Jimi Hendrix fanatic who named his Tulsa company Little Wing Productions, had no idea who the Sex Pistols were until friends alerted him that they were touring the U.S. “There were seven shows, and I had No. 6, which was the last good show,” he says. “The agent cold-called me and said, ‘Do you want a date on these guys?’ I said, ‘Heck, yeah.'” They negotiated a $1,000 band fee, until the agent called later and requested $1,500, prompting Shaeffer to raise ticket prices from $2.50 to $3.50 — crossing out the old price with a Sharpie and ensuring decades of collectors’ items .

The club’s capacity was 1,500, and Shaeffer recalls selling 800 tickets. “There was a small segment of pseudo-punk guys, musicians and a lot of regular straights who would come to a Jerry Jeff Walker show,” he says. “It was a mixed crowd, but it wasn’t an edgy crowd.” Although Shaeffer detected a mass of undercover cops at the show, one attendee told O’Shea the band was “blazing hot,” avoiding on-stage sexual favors and head-butting for loud, fast rock ‘n’ roll.

Jan. 14, Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco. The late San Francisco promoter Bill Graham agreed to a Sex Pistols date at his 5,400-person Winterland, renowned for legendary concerts by The Who , Hendrix and the Grateful Dead , after he called manager Malcolm McLaren and requested a show. Tickets cost $5, and one member of the Avengers, an opening act, would claim to O’Shea that the Sex Pistols made just $66 out of the $2,800 in door receipts. Local reviews were mostly positive, and Graham, in his 1992 memoir Bill Graham Presents , recalled it as “pure raw hard core energy” — although Rolling Stone would later say, “The sound was absolutely atrocious, and Johnny Rotten’s voice started to give out.”

After the last number, a cover of The Stooges ‘ “No Fun,” Rotten ended the show, tour and the Pistols’ career with this line: “Ah-ha-ha, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night.”

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The Sex Pistols Riotous 1978 Tour Through the U.S. South: Watch/Hear Concerts in Dallas, Memphis, Tulsa & More

in Music | September 23rd, 2019 3 Comments

The Sex Pis­tols “start­ed out as an elab­o­rate Sit­u­a­tion­ist -inspired per­for­mance art piece dreamed up by mega­lo­ma­ni­ac man­ag­er  Mal­colm McLaren ,” wrote Jonathan Crow in a post here at Open Cul­ture about one of the band’s sto­ried, dis­as­trous final shows in Dal­las of 1978. After begin­ning as the cre­ation of McLaren and part­ner Vivi­enne West­wood, how­ev­er, they “evolved beyond just being a stunt.”

The state­ment is objec­tive­ly true by music his­to­ry stan­dards. The band’s ear­li­est gigs were direct­ly respon­si­ble for almost every major band that took British punk in sub­se­quent post-punk, goth, new wave, dub, etc. direc­tions, includ­ing the Buz­zcocks, Siouxsie and the Ban­shees, The Clash, Joy Divi­sion, Wire, and too many oth­ers to list.

Lat­er came the huge­ly influ­en­tial post-punk of John Lydon’s (for­mer­ly Rot­ten) own project, Pub­lic Image Lim­it­ed, which reflect­ed his seri­ous inter­est in mak­ing exper­i­men­tal, cere­bral, music with oblique lyrics deriv­ing as much from sym­bol­ist poet­ry as the “deep sim­mer­ing well of cul­tur­al dis­con­tent” he’d tapped into with the Pis­tols.

Lydon retired the char­ac­ter of John­ny Rot­ten when the band broke up at the end of their first and last U.S. tour, famous­ly end­ing things at San Francisco’s Win­ter­land Ball­room  by sneer­ing “ever get the feel­ing you’ve been cheated?”—a bit­ter com­ment on the band’s col­lapse, its very exis­tence, and a press and audi­ence will­ing to buy the act. No mat­ter how influ­en­tial they may have been, the Sex Pis­tols’ archi­tects always main­tained they were a cyn­i­cal prank to the end.

The “one-time hip­pie haven of the Win­ter­land in San Fran­cis­co,” as Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock describes it , may have been the per­fect venue for their demise, a final screw you to the self-sat­is­fied 60s rock cul­ture Rot­ten loathed. But it was their tour through Atlanta, Mem­phis, San Anto­nio, Baton Rouge, Tul­sa and the for­mer­ly Jack Ruby-owned Long­horn Ball­room in Dal­las that made the most press, just as McLaren had designed it to do, book­ing coun­try & west­ern venues express­ly to pro­voke, enrage, and scan­dal­ize.

Rot­ten had more com­pli­cat­ed feel­ings about what would become a series of vio­lent spec­ta­cles. He seemed half in on the joke, and half hop­ing that “real peo­ple” out­side of coastal cities would become real fans. “We’re play­ing these cities because these are the peo­ple who will either accept us or hate us,” he said at the time. “They’re not as pre­ten­tious as they are in New York.”

He main­tained in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy that McLaren had also fore­seen the U.S. tour as savvy mar­ket­ing. “It wasn’t a ques­tion of throw­ing the band to the wolves when we chose to just play the South…. We felt that if we were ever going to be tak­en seri­ous­ly in Amer­i­ca, it would be from a base we built down south. The cow­boys seemed to take it for the joke it was meant to be. We weren’t there to destroy their way of life or any­thing like that.”

Of course, he must have seen the U.S. press accuse the band of doing just that before their arrival—corrupting the youth, etc. Did he real­ly hope for a warmer wel­come from “the cow­boys”? Was it all the glo­ri­ous train wreck every­one thinks it was? Reports from eye­wit­ness­es vary wide­ly, as Alt­press and The Dal­las Morn­ing News point out, with some express­ing seri­ous dis­ap­point­ment and oth­ers awe. Noel Monk’s book 12 Days on the Road  describes “out­ra­geous behav­ior, and con­certs that fre­quent­ly degen­er­at­ed into near-riots.”

You can see for your­self what those unprece­dent­ed, at the time, shows looked and sound­ed like in the record­ings here from the entire sev­en-city run . (Begun after a can­celled Decem­ber 1977 gig in Pitts­burgh). At the top we have “Anar­chy in the U.K.” from the Jan­u­ary 1978 tour open­er in Atlanta; then audio of the entire show in Mem­phis days lat­er; film from Randy’s Rodeo in San Anto­nio (in which Sid Vicious hits a fan with his bass); audio of the Baton Rouge con­cert; film of the entire per­for­mance at the Long­horn; film from Cain’s Ball­room in Tul­sa, OK, with audio from the Win­ter­land finale, and, final­ly, the Win­ter­land itself.

After their flame-out in the first month of 1978, and Sid’s alleged mur­der of Nan­cy Spun­geon and his over­dose and death, John Lydon “claimed the Pis­tols had ‘killed’ rock and roll,” notes the site Randy’s Rodeo (named for the riotous Texas show fur­ther up). The whole tour “was a per­verse, provoca­tive joke.” McLaren’s “intent was not to sell tick­ets, but to incite con­tro­ver­sy and may­hem.” The band, frac­tious, burned out, and eager to escape McLaren’s machi­na­tions, would have been more than hap­py to make some mon­ey for their trou­ble. Ever get the feel­ing you’ve been cheat­ed?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sex Pis­tols Play in Dal­las’ Long­horn Ball­room; Next Show Is Mer­le Hag­gard (1978)

Watch the Sex Pis­tols’ Very Last Con­cert (San Fran­cis­co, 1978)

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

Related posts:

Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

It’s incred­i­ble now to think that they out­raged so many at the time. But they real­ly did.

Quite sim­ply the band! The most influ­en­tial ever: musi­cal­ly, fash­ion­ably, polit­i­cal­ly. Peri­od.

They may have been a slop­py band as far play­ing instru­ments, but THAT DIDN’T MATTER!. They had some unfor­get­table songs with songs & lyrics that were SO pri­mal (along w John­ny’s singing / per­for­mance, which amped the audi­ence mood over the top)! Even now if I hear “Anar­chy”, my heart pumps faster, I need to Move, my thoughts turn toward every offi­cial or gov­’t that has held me down over the Many years. It wakes me up Again! Would have been a per­fect time for them to have been Here & Now in the USA. With­out explo­sions like this in Any Art thru the ages peo­ple were becom­ing, then & now (2021) bland, stuck in a rut, repet­i­tive­ly liv­ing their lives with­out orig­i­nal thoughts of their own, just what they were told, day after d!ay after, numb­ing day The Sex Pis­tol­s’s music was not made to be ana­lyzed. It was made to go over the top, wake peo­ple up from their change­less no hope futures. And they got part of their attempt to “Wake the Mass­es” accom­plished. Peo­ple Did start real­iz­ing how their lives could be, not what they were told to do, but what They them­selves want­ed to do. But no one came for­ward to car­ry the momen­tum for­ward & far­ther. Some bril­liant music burst out from the punk atti­tude, but much of the scene was became fash­ion. God Bless the Sex Pis­tols! Who will car­ry the flag now?

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This Day In History : June 4

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Four dozen people witness historic Sex Pistols set

It seems millions of people claim to have been at Woodstock when only 500,000 or so were really there, but the biggest pop-culture event of the 1960s has nothing on one of the most pivotal of the 1970s: the Sex Pistols’ appearance at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, on June 4, 1976. Proportional to the actual crowd in attendance, perhaps no event in the history of pop music has enjoyed greater retroactive audience growth than the one that’s been called “The gig that changed the world.”

By June 1976, the Sex Pistols had been playing together under that name for only seven months, and though their look, their sound and their nihilistic attitude were already in place, they and the entire British punk scene were still a few months away from truly breaking out. They had drawn just enough attention in the British music press, though, to inspire two young men from Manchester named Howard DeVoto and Pete Shelley to go down and see them play in London in February. From this experience, two things happened: DeVoto and Shelley arranged for the Sex Pistols to come up north and play the Lesser Free Trade Hall; and then they formed their own new band, called the Buzzcocks. News of the June 4 gig in Manchester spread mostly by word of mouth, such that on the night of the show, perhaps as few as 40 people showed up in a room that could hold hundreds. In that small crowd, however, were some names that would help shape the course of pop music over the next decade:

Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley: Their band, the Buzzcocks, would go on to enjoy enormous popularity and influence in the UK both during and after the punk era.

Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook: The very next day, Hook would buy his first guitar, and the three young Mancunians would become a band. That band—originally called the Stiff Kittens and later Warsaw—was Joy Division, one of the best-known and most influential of all the early New Wave bands.

Mark E. Smith: Following the Sex Pistols gig, he started The Fall, a post-punk band that never had a true hit record but influenced generations of followers from Nirvana to Franz Ferdinand.

Steven Patrick Morrissey, aka Morrissey: The last of these notables to make a name for himself, but one of the most successful, both as leader of The Smiths in the mid-1980s and as a solo artist thereafter.

Tony Wilson: Manchester TV news presenter who would be inspired to start the record label Factory Records, which would help create the thriving Manchester scene of the 1980s and early-90s.

Just a few days after the Sex Pistols stormed Manchester on this day in 1976, they visited Sheffield for gigs on July 4 and 6 that featured two brand-new bands as opening acts: The Clash and The Damned. Three weeks after that, their return gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall (featuring opening act the Buzzcocks) drew hundreds, as the punk era unofficially opened.

Also on This Day in History June | 4

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This Day in History Video: What Happened on June 4

Operation dynamo at dunkirk ends, congress passes the 19th amendment, giving women the right to vote, communist activist angela davis acquitted.

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Anarchy in High Wycombe! The real story of the Sex Pistols’ earliest gigs

The punk band are famous for culture-changing gigs in Manchester and London, but what about ones in Keighley and Dunstable? Attendees at their first UK tour remember the protests, raw power – and cider-drinking hippies

I n late 1975, just after her 18th birthday, Shanne Bradley went to a party at St Albans School of Art in Hertfordshire. Unbeknown to her and her friends, there was musical entertainment: a band from London no one had heard of. She suspects the group had just phoned up and asked if they could play. “They were so bad,” she says. “We were dancing, having a good laugh. We thought they were a piss-take of a 60s band. Someone said they saw the drummer afterwards and he was crying because they were so terrible.”

Afterwards, the singer came over and asked Bradley about her clothes: “If I dressed like that all the time. I’d had a difficult childhood and I think I expressed that through my clothes. I’d butchered my hair: I’d tried to use henna and peroxide and it came out wrong – bright orange. I was wearing ripped fishnets and a holey jumper. I had 11 ear piercings. I asked him what his name was. ‘Johnny Rotten.’ I was like: ‘What?’”

Bradley had just seen one of the Sex Pistols’ first gigs and was about to become one of their first fans. She liked them, terrible or not: “There was an energy, a sense of humour, a dissatisfaction with the world that fitted mine. I went to see them in Welwyn Garden City, but they’d had a row during soundcheck and didn’t play. They used to give me lifts. It was all quite sweet. We were all teenagers. On Valentine’s Day, I walked round St Albans with John, hand in hand, wearing a dustbin liner.”

The story of the Sex Pistols tends to hinge around a handful of legendary gigs in major cities: the Screen on the Green and the 100 Club in London, their horrible last stand at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, and especially their June 1976 show at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall, famously the spark that ignited Joy Division, the Fall and the Smiths among others – The Gig That Changed the World, as one subsequent book put it, with very Mancunian self-confidence.

But the Sex Pistols played dozens of other shows, many in locations that now seem faintly improbable: way off the map of today’s limited touring circuit and peculiar even by the more expansive standards of the time. It’s hard not to look at their 70s gig listings and boggle: what happened when the Sex Pistols played Cromer, Keighley or Dunstable? What was the impact of their appearances in Whitby, Runton and Northallerton? What might have happened had the infamous Anarchy tour been allowed to fetch up, as planned, in Paignton?

Depending on who you believe, the weirdness of the Sex Pistols’ touring schedule was either a brilliant masterplan by manager Malcolm McLaren to reach disaffected youth across Britain or the result of a clueless manager’s desperation to get a gig anywhere. “There was no strategy involved,” John Lydon complained in his autobiography Anger Is an Energy , “it was all happen-chance, fly by the seat of your pants.”

Sometimes the results were tragicomic. Peter Smith was 19 in 1976, an inveterate gig-goer from Sunderland. His interest piqued by reading early articles on the Sex Pistols, he drove to Whitby to see them. But the staff at the Royal Ballroom had never heard of the band. “They suggested trying a little place around the back. There was a poster that said: ‘Saturday night disco featuring top band the Sex Pistols.’” It was empty, bar the band in a corner. Rotten ordered chicken and chips at the bar. Then the disco fans filed in, dancing to Abba before the Pistols got on stage. “I think they started with Anarchy in the UK. John was wearing a tam and bondage gear, hanging off the microphone, sneering. Me and my girlfriend loved it – the energy, John’s stance, the way he looked, the amateurishness of it, the raw power.”

They were in the minority. “There were people with their hands over their ears, and after half an hour at most, the DJ turns their sound off and the disco back on. The Sex Pistols just stood there looking at each other then walked off. People started dancing and I drove home. I met John years later at a book signing and he said he didn’t remember. He was adamant nobody had ever thrown him offstage, which was quite funny.”

It’s a characteristic story. In Pistols mythology, if these gigs are even mentioned, it’s as provoking hatred, fury and violence. Shanne Bradley recalls a gig in High Wycombe that turned into “a bit of a bundle … there was more of a laddish element. Rotten used to take the piss out of the audience. [The band] started getting a load of abuse, Rotten lent over the stage and somebody jumped on him and thumped him.”

Yet everyone I speak to says the Pistols were met with widespread lack of interest: the most virulent reaction they provoked was confusion. Chris Sullivan had seen them in London, but when they played in his native Wales, at the Stowaway Club in Newport in September 1976, he says: “It was a Monday night, very under the radar. There were maybe 40 people – a load of hippies drinking cider and [future Visage frontman] Steve Strange in a ripped-up rubber T-shirt. People were just bemused.”

But at every gig, there was someone who would end up converted. Pauline Murray first encountered the band in Northallerton in May 1976, at “a small nightclub called Sayers at the end of a row of garages. It was the normal clientele, 30 people sat at tables, waiting for the turn. They were in a state of shock. But for me, the energy really hit, in every single way. It was so primitive compared to everything else I’d seen.”

Two nights later, Murray would see them supporting glam band Doctors of Madness in Middlesbrough town hall. “It was a real turning point, because they absolutely destroyed the Doctors of Madness. It was like they knew that something new had overtaken them. While they were on, the Sex Pistols went through their dressing room and nicked all their stuff.”

Murray was absolutely right: something new had overtaken glam. Talking to people who saw the Sex Pistols play, even in unlikely locations, you can plot their astonishing trajectory. Three months after the Newport gig, Chris Sullivan saw them again in Wales, at the Castle Cinema in Caerphilly, and everything had changed. It was two weeks after the band’s infamous appearance on the Today show, where guitarist Steve Jones called interviewer Bill Grundy a “dirty fucker” and “a fucking rotter”.

Seventeen out of 24 gigs on the ensuing Anarchy tour were cancelled, or rather, banned by town councils and university chancellors. The Caerphilly show went ahead, but pubs and shops in the town shuttered early, and it was picketed by religious groups: huge crowds singing hymns, making speeches, trying to block entry. “When we drove past, we were like: ‘Fucking hell, what’s going on there?’” says Sullivan. “We had to go through a gauntlet of middle-aged women in raincoats with pointy glasses and curlers, singing Onward Christian Soldiers, who were trying to grab us and hit us.”

He laughs. “It’s quite uncomfortable when you’re a 6ft 2in teenager and you’re being manhandled by someone who looks like your granny – what do you do? The gig was great: they were much better than in Newport. But the audience was basically the same – 10 bloody hippies and us lot, Steve Strange pogoing at the front.”

It’s strange, he says: the people outside were angrier than the Sex Pistols, who were supposed to be overturning Britain’s moral order in a fit of nihilistic rage. Maybe the pickets were expressing a similar impotent fury in a very different way. “In Wales in the 70s, there was no work. The mines were shutting, it was really poor. People were angry and they directed it at us. It wasn’t just bible-bashers: it was thugs who specifically came to beat people up. When we left, there was a running battle. Somebody could have got killed.”

Perhaps no band could expect to last long under that kind of scrutiny and pressure, particularly one this combustible. By the time Simon Parker saw them in the Winter Gardens, Penzance, in summer 1977, he says: “They were nearly finished.” The end-of-the-line town had a thriving punk scene and had already hosted the Ramones, the Damned and the Adverts, but “the Pistols gig was almost the end of that, the close of a very brief era”.

By now, the band could only avoid having their gigs cancelled by playing under pseudonyms. But in Penzance, the show – by “A Mystery Band of International Repute” – was dangerously crowded. “The local council were the only people who didn’t know the secret,” says Parker. “They were mythic figures by that stage. There was a guy using the telephone box outside, and Sid Vicious knocked on the door because he wanted to use the phone. That seemed very exciting, that they did ordinary things.”

The “explosive” gig barely lasted 30 minutes. “Johnny Rotten came on stage and glared to get the DJ to stop the music. There was a lot of spitting, which I don’t remember at any other gig. A shower of it, really bloody awful. People further back had brought plastic spoons that they were spitting in and wanging it at the band. Maybe it wasn’t the best gig ever, but it was the best event – there was so much excitement, people queueing up the street.”

These might not have been gigs that changed the world or spawned an era-defining scene, but they each had an impact on at least a handful of people. Peter Smith remained a long-haired hippy but says it opened his mind musically. Pauline Murray formed punk band Penetration; Shanne Bradley – who fell out with the Sex Pistols, and later discovered to her indignation that she was the subject of Satellite, the scathing B-side of Holidays in the Sun – formed the Nips with Shane MacGowan.

Chris Sullivan became a fixture of London clubland, the co-founder of the Wag Club, the capital’s hippest 80s night spot. “Seeing the Sex Pistols and that DIY attitude gave me and Steve Strange the impetus to do what we did,” he says. “Because we saw that people like us could do it. I think that was the most important thing about those Sex Pistols gigs. It gave you the strength to have a go. You saw punk fail miserably after the Grundy thing, but then you think to yourself: ‘At least if you have a go, you don’t go to bed at night saying: I wish I’d tried.’”

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Sex Pistols in America, 1978

A fabled tale of excess, personality clashes, and managerial manipulation, the Sex Pistols’ seven U.S. shows in January 1978 reward revisiting even at so many decades’ distance.

The Sex Pistols’ 1978 U.S. tour looks like attempted homicide. Malcolm McClaren, the band’s 31 year old manager, was hungry for the photogenic controversy that might arise if — instead of playing America’s liberal cities — he sent the world’s most controversial group to country ‘n’ western venues across the Deep South. This was less than ten years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and yet, relying on stereotypes of Bible Belt religiosity and conservatism, McClaren wanted to acquire audiences who might protest, attack the band, maybe even riot if he was lucky!

From the perspective of 2020, the level of callous disregard for his 20-to-22 year old charges is pretty breath-taking. Even on home turf McClaren knew the band’s reputation made them a lightning rod for violence. Back in June, frontman John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), was stabbed in the hand and knee, and had his face slashed; drummer Paul Cook was attacked by a gang wielding iron bars; then Lydon was assaulted again outside a night club. All Sex Pistols’ management learned was this was a trusty approach for the acquisition of press coverage. If it occurred to him that his strategy for the U.S. could wind up getting someone seriously injured, it was of only passing concern.

The band — Lydon, Cook, Steve Jones (guitarist), Sid Vicious (bassist) — went along with it. Suffering from both the naivety and the idealism of youth, they agreed to put themselves at an unknown level of risk for obscure rewards. The tour itinerary perhaps felt reminiscent of Sex Pistols’ parochial rambles around the U.K. where — after starting off playing London colleges, then the minor club circuit — the band strayed way off the beaten path into small towns like Whitby, Dunstable, Cleethorpes, Penzance, Keighley, Cromer. There was some method to the madness: Sex Pistols’ notoriety short-circuited the traditional route to legend status because few people ever saw them play.

McClaren was also relying on the band’s ability to make the law enforcement community a co-conspirator in the stoking of publicity. In a single year, Sex Pistols had been ordered to leave Guernsey after one night ; their celebration on a boat in the Thames was halted ; their first album wound up in court charged with obscenity; and Lydon and Vicious had been arrested in separate drug busts — all of which was deemed a manageable cost of doing business. These were bizarre lessons to draw from Sex Pistols’ experiences in late 1976 through 1977 and only made sense if no one really cared about being a real band anymore.

Sex Pistols had certainly started out with genuine intentions. The arrival of Lydon in August 1975 made the band a functioning entity able to rehearse. Playing their first gig on Thursday November 6, they were industrious with as many as ten shows under their belts by Wednesday December 10. At that first show they played a set of rough covers and just two originals — ‘Did You No Wrong’ and ‘Seventeen’ — impressively pulling together three more — ‘Pretty Vacant’, ‘Submission’, and ‘New York’ — by end of the month. From then on song-writing proceeded steadily, if unspectacularly, with set-lists beefed up by as many as half-a-dozen covers. Going by their live appearances, ‘Problems’ appeared on February 14; ‘Satellite’ and ‘No Feelings’ on April 3; ‘I Wanna Be Me’ and little-known improvised noise opener ‘Flowers Of Romance’ entered the set on June 29; ‘Anarchy In The UK’ debuted on July 20; ‘Liar’ appeared on August 14; ‘God Save The Queen’ by December 6…

But Sex Pistols’ September-October tour would be their last moment of calm. An already flammable reputation was ignited on December 1 by the appearance with Bill Grundy on the Today show . 17 of their 24 December dates were canceled and they were hounded across Britain by press and protestors; signed on October 8, they were dumped by EMI in early January; Glenn Matlock left the band in February and they had to start teaching Vicious the bass; they signed to A&M on March 10 and were dumped within the week; signed with Virgin in mid-May. After a short run of shows in The Netherlands ending on January 7, the band only played another three times before mid-July.

After writing ‘E.M.I.’ with Matlock somewhere in January 1977, Sex Pistols were overwhelmed by events and essentially over as a creative entity. At least they managed to end the tedium and repetitive sessions and get Never Mind The Bollocks recorded in fits and starts between March and August. The final year of the band would see only two new songs emerge: ‘Holidays In The Sun’ whipped together in April-June, then a revived song from a former band of Vicious’ called ‘Belsen Was A Gas’ which was rehearsed in September. Nothing is predestined, but by the time the band hit America and Lydon was trying to persuade them to attempt a new song in soundcheck, to accompany his lyrics under the name ‘Religion’, no one wanted to know.

Banned, sacked, assaulted, arrested, protested, shell-shocked, and fed-up — Sex Pistols had had sufficient drama in a single year to last other artists a lifelong career. And on a personal level it was just getting worse. Vicious had become a heroin addict, the rest of the band had more than a casual penchant for various drugs, the Lydon/Vicious versus Cook/Jones axis of the band had split again with Vicious aligning with his girlfriend and dealer Nancy Spungen. In the background, McClaren was both a focus of annoyance, and busy maintaining his position by spreading lies and gossip to poison the air between the band still further.

The tour was a predictable mess from the start: the four shows scheduled from December 29 to January 3 had to be canceled because the band’s criminal records caused Visa issues. These shows would have been in Homestead, Pennsylvania; Chicago, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; and Alexandria, Virginia — which makes the claim of a ‘southern strategy’ look like retrospective justification for the silliness of the remaining week-and-a-half tour program. On the other hand, the intention to play a 600 capacity venue in Chicago — when this and San Francisco were the largest cities on the tour — looks like an attempt to guarantee a riot. The desired publicity had an effect too in that the Holiday Inn chain pre-emptively declined the band.

The frayed logic of the tour was on full display when contemplating Winterland. Prior to their departure for the U.S., Sex Pistols had never played for a crowd of more than a few hundred. Now, a mere week after touchdown, they were going to scale up to a 5,400 capacity venue. One could maybe credit a ramshackle attempt to prepare the band, with venue capacity stepping up from 500 in Atlanta, to 700-800 in Baton Rouge and Memphis, to 1,800-2,200 at the other three venues…Except the original tour schedule would have thrown them on in front of 2,000 attendees a night (with the exception of Chicago). It’s more likely an absence of mid-sized venues, rather than managerial benevolence, that gave Sex Pistols some vague hope of acclimatising.

Meanwhile Sid Vicious came undone. It’s hard not to feel a degree of pity for a young man, battling heroin addiction, being challenged to live up to his stage name again and again. There’s a ‘boys don’t cry’ sadness to his actions as he becomes the focus of so much violence and stays dry-eyed trying to prove he could take it, daring people to do their worst. This doesn’t make him any less stupid or indiscriminately violent — he embraced his role with self-destructive gusto. In Atlanta he headed to the hospital after slitting his wrist with a letter opener; he wrote ‘Gimme A Fix’ across his chest (rumours state he cut it in with a razor but there’s no sign of it by Winterland which makes that unlikely); in Memphis he disappeared again — another hospital visit plus a knife wound to his arm; in Dallas he assaults a photographer and security before being beaten by his own bodyguard; before Winterland he stuck a steak knife into his hand when accosted while eating a meal, then after the show he OD’ed in a shooting gallery on the corner of Haight and Ashbury.

McClaren busied himself making things worse. There’s suspicion that he gave Vicious money for heroin, and he relentlessly egged on Vicious’ worst instincts while refusing to get his hands dirty by intervening to look after Vicious either. He also put Jones and Cook on planes between venues — though the two of them behaved so badly on a flight from Tulsa that they were banned by American Airlines — while Vicious and Lydon continued on the bus which felt like favouritism to band members already used to being wound up. There was also resentment of apparent favouritism in the matter of which hotels or motels band members would wind up staying at. By the time of San Francisco, the band knew their shows in Finland weren’t going ahead, there was a grim rumour stirred by McClaren that Charles Manson would produce their next album from prison, now the hairbrained whim of flying to Rio De Janeiro to meet with the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs.

The one thing that remained undimmed, however, was the innate talent within the band. Steve Jones is comparable to Ron Asheton in terms of having such a colossal, immediately recognisable, and oft-underrated guitar technique. Similarly, Lydon sounds simultaneously incandescent, hilarious, and thoroughly pissed off at every show — a quintessential frontman. The Sex Pistols in America are reminiscent of the Terminator in the finale of the 1984 film: stripped down, falling apart, still relentless and unstoppable. There are audio recordings, and even video, of quite a substantial quantity of the tour and they remain fascinating documents of that rarest of things in the music business — genuine unpredictability.

January 5, 1978: The Great Southeast Music Hall — Atlanta, Georgia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSjK7y9ztTI

In front of an audience of 500 primarily made up of journalists, the bating and the technical issues kick-off from the very first minute. Jones’ guitar cuts out, feeds back, and requires interminable pauses for tuning throughout the show. The solo on ‘God Save The Queen’ is perfunctory, the drums are a methodical clattering din, then the guitar cuts out during ‘I Wanna Be Me’ while ‘Seventeen’ has a false start. At times Lydon’s vocals run headlong into the slightly panicked rush of the other instruments, everything coexisting rather than coalescing, he seems to be straining to keep up. Vicious’ bass seems to have been turned down, at its loudest it’s a dull clumping in the background of a song — occasional cussing (and the cracking line “this one’s about you, it’s called ‘Problems’”) is the biggest impression he makes. “That’s God that is and he don’t like us,” Lydon announces while — to his credit — trying to cover for the band’s issues. Things stabilise from ‘New York’ onward — ‘Bodies’ is pure exuberant nastiness including an incongruous ‘step up’ where the anti-harmonising of Vicious and Jones backs Lydon’s pleas — but then the guitar dies again during ‘Submission’, returning beset by feedback. At their best, there are moments like the solo on ‘Holidays In The Sun’ which is like sheet metal tearing, or the final pairing of ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Anarchy In The UK’ which sounds like gaskets exploding somewhere inside Chernobyl. There’s no way the band could have lived up to their reputation but instead they stooped down and undermined it by the simple virtue of being just another band, albeit one that was undeniably above average.

Finest Rotten-isms of the Evening:

“Now. We came to dance. What did you come for?”

“See the fine upstanding young men Britain is chucking out these days? Just never join an army.”

“Aren’t we the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”

January 6: Taliesyn Ballroom — Memphis, Tennessee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLOJcuP930U

The audio source for Memphis is in such wonderfully dissolute condition that the sound from the stage is a thick fug, splintered moments penetrating consciousness through sheer volume while an incoherent blizzard pushes and shoves. Ironically, in that light, at the start of ‘I Wanna Be Me’ Lydon asks for more monitors because “I can’t hear myself! Hello, ‘ello, ‘ello…” Most songs become untamed cyclones that twist and whirl through the speakers. The show itself further stoked Sex Pistols’ reputation for chaotic events with the police sending investigators to Atlanta to check on reports of the band having live or simulated sex on stage, the fire department telling the crowd outside that the show had been oversold and was cancelled, a small riot among the couple of hundred attendees who couldn’t get in and began smashing windows, and the band getting on stage substantially late. Hammering rhythm is the most visible feature throughout with most songs on the tape compressed down to a juddering roar. Lydon’s vocals would feel at home in the poesia sonora scene. The tape seems to cut or pause at points so there’s barely any visible conversation with the audience, which perhaps contributes to the sense of pace and a band back on track after a bad first show, except a good portion of the audience walked out — amusing in light of the battle outside to get in.

“I’m not here for your entertainment, you’re here for my entertainment.”

J anuary 8, 1978: Randy’s Rodeo — San Antonio, Texas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSxf50yG8fU&t=894s

Near constant whistling and hassle, San Antonio was the kind of nastiness that must have sent McClaren into raptures. Vicious shouting “you cowboys are all faggots!” hardly helped matters and likely served to increase the hail of material hitting the band and the accompanying verbal goading. What’s tragic is it’s one of the few gigs where Vicious’ bass work seems coherent and things are moving forward with intent…For a grand total of four songs. Then Vicious yells, “you faggot fucker!” hauls his bass strap off, inverts the guitar and chops it down into the crowd just missing his intended target — Brian Faltin who attended specifically to protest and provoke the band. Billowing clouds of bass-heavy pulse reduce Lydon’s voice to a scratchy edging with one’s memory of songs filling in the indistinctness of the lyrics, then the second half of the tape he’s suddenly more audible while the instrumental clarity disintegrates. The drum sound is remarkably separated with the cymbals a lightning clash of static, while everything else is a distant rumble. The marching beat that opens ‘Holidays In The Sun’ is gloriously leaden and it’s the most straightforward moments, like Lydon’s screaming during ‘Belsen Was A Gas’ that penetrate.

Sid bass incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXCvQDCc0Zc

“I see we’ve got a lot of real men out there tonight…”

“Oh dear, Sid’s guitar fell off!”

January 9, 1978: Kingfish Club — Baton Rouge, Louisiana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_UdGtCXkxs

A sub-1,000 venue formerly part of a grocery store, the atmosphere at the Kingfish Club is hostile with audience members screaming “fuck you!” and “throw something at them!” Normally live albums are a grotesque way of fleecing fans into paying for inferior copycats of studio tracks, by contrast, this bootleg quality studio recording buries you somewhere in the crowd with blown out walls of overdriven electricity billowing on all sides. It’s wonderful seeing the rough outline of a well-known song still visible but cracked and pulled apart. The band are on a high all night despite the usual rain of coins and object hitting the stage (and the band), indeed Lydon ad-libs less because there’s so little dead time between songs. Cook shows himself to be the powerful and stolidly dependable core of the band, while Jones is feeling secure enough he can toy with feedback on the outro of ‘Seventeen’. The bass-heavy recording even flatters Vicious on songs like ‘New York’ where there’s no audible indication of the attempt by one fan to give him an on-stage blowjob and he keep stolidly strumming. Lydon is deluged by the band’s raw power, working hard to be heard amid the torrent smacking down on the audience. ‘Belsen Was A Gas’, for all its bad taste, shares a military precision and thuggish pummelling with ‘Holidays In The Sun’ which makes one wonder what the post-Matlock Sex Pistols could have done if they’d made it through January 1978.

“I’ve had it with coins!”

“This song is by an old hippie…” (The Stooges ‘No Fun’ follows)

“That’s all because I’m too lazy to do anymore. Good night.”

January 10, 1978: Longhorn Ballroom — Dallas, Texas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq3Q8uFJMRs

Another ugly atmosphere awaited in Dallas with the venue owner (whose most notable predecessor was Jack Ruby) trying to cancel — Warner Bros. sternly warned him they would sue — while the police kept a SWAT unit on standby. The night is all about Vicious. Suffering withdrawal and woozily drunk, he drifts about the stage oblivious to his bandmates’ glares. Jones has another night of guitar trouble — he breaks a string early, there’s a plethora of errors, and his usual chunky power is subdued — and he’s increasingly antagonised by Vicious. During ‘Bodies’ he has to stop playing to storm across and plug Vicious’ bass back in, he shouts at Vicious during ‘Belsen Was A Gas’, then resorts to his mic, “Look what you’re doing, not at them!” Every time the band come close to achieving momentum something derails it. After ‘Holidays In The Sun’ Vicious is sucker-punched in the nose and, in their disgust for Vicious, this is the only time Jones (“See the wanker fall over? Big tough Sid falls over!”) and Lydon (“Look at that, a living circus!”) seem to acknowledge one another or agree at any point in the tour. For the next 25 minutes Vicious looks like he’s wearing lipstick, is pink-tinted down to the waist, and engages in spitting contests back-and-forth with the audience. There’s a resurgence as the band rallies on ‘Bodies’ — Jones’ finest solo of the night with Lydon skanking in the middle of the stage — before audience-winning runs at set stalwarts ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Anarchy In The UK’. For the encore, Vicious, whose face is so blood-spattered it looks like warpaint — is flicking V’s while being tailed onto the stage by a minder. ‘No Fun’ looks like finishing the night on a raucous high then suddenly a visibly angry Jones is launching himself at someone in the audience with his guitar and gets at least a shove in before bouncers intervene. The rest of the gig plays out with a man-mountain stood squarely at centre-stage monitoring the crowd and, even after the song ends, Vicious is in a shoving match with security who are simultaneously handling the crowd and him.

(For the full audio including the opening numbers missing from the video check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMq26X3RaK0 )

“Any more free gifts?”

“I see that we have a whole section of the silent majority over there”

January 12, 1978: Cain’s Ballroom — Tulsa, Oklahoma

Unfortunately, only a single minute of audio from the Tulsa show has surfaced along with a few minutes of visuals from the film D.O.A. A Rite Of Passage which is as much focused on the religious protests taking place outside and the police presence both in the parking lot and inside. The venue now has a framed portion of the green room wall with a hole supposed punched by Vicious. The opening band, Bliss, was essentially there because the owner of the venue wanted to give his friends exposure, not because they were simpatico with Sex Pistols — they apparently played the ‘William Tell Overture’ as part of their set. On the day of the show, the ticket price increased because, unsurprisingly given the ridiculous logistics and barely viable sizes of the venues, the band needed more cash. Apparently Lydon started the show by asking: “all you rednecks have come to see the circus?” But then the show itself was apparently tight — a shame it hasn’t survived.

January 14, 1978: Winterland — San Francisco, California

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBVDSz5Qd6g

Winterland was neither the ultimate desecration of rock ‘n’ roll, nor the freak show anyone might have hoped for. Police patrols up and down the ticket lines outside, meticulous frisking by the security before entry, a DJ orchestrating audience participation in the form of swearing, and a screen projecting Sex Pistols’ quotes, it all heightened the drama of the night…Then the band walked on and sleepwalked through the show. A large space to fill given Sex Pistols’ impact came entirely from their unique stage presence, it was significantly harder to make a dent when the band were all sick. The flu subdued Jones; Vicious was smacked up (though as a consequence it’s actually the sprightliest he’d looked all tour); while Lydon was visibly exhausted and periodically wiped his nose or face on a spool of tissue or in the crook of his arm. The band were further hemmed in by professional staffing: bouncers led audience members out calmly across the stage, at one point in the encore a member of staff cleared things away from Vicious’ feet. A greater separation from the crowd confined the usual antagonism to a tsunami of nuts, bolts, coins, pantyhose, and spit. Sex Pistols were further plagued by technical issues with Jones breaking strings, his amplifiers cutting out altogether to suck the energy from ‘Bodies’ and ‘Liar’, while every pause was filled with interminable tuning. Possibly a deliberate act by snobby venue personnel, the PA was a mess and Lydon had to call out from the stage, “the monitors are completely off…Hello, they’ve just come back on.” This is the rare recording where the bass is genuinely audible and Vicious, while posing constantly, holds his own more than adequately. There’s a disconnect, however, between the sheer energy of the songs which carries the first half of the show, versus the descending arc in Lydon’s enthusiasm. The band’s figurehead on stage, his usual physical gyrations are suppressed, he clings to the microphone stand, or hangs an arm over it as if struggling to stay upright. ‘Problems’ seems to telegraph trouble and he sings much of it with his arms firmly crossed, maintaining his statue-still stance, his look of intense boredom, until well into the introduction of ‘Pretty Vacant’. For the encore, ‘No Fun’ becomes utterly pointed as Lydon essentially curls up into a ball and croaks out whatever’s left of his visibly shredded vocal chords. But then that moment of brilliance. It’s exceedingly rare an artist says anything from a stage that isn’t trite or uninteresting, few words spoken into a mic have had such resonance they’ve become legend: Lydon’s last words at Winterland are the rare exception and the perfect casual punctuation closing Sex Pistols’ wild ride.

(The soundcheck has also become available in recent years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GX-PZNig70 )

“If you can put up with that, you can put up with anything.”

“There’s not enough presents. You’ll have to throw up better things than that, this ain’t good enough…That’ll do. Can we have a couple of cameras?”

“I think it’s fun. Do you want your ears blown out some more?”

“Tell us, what’s it like to have bad taste?”

“Ah haha, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night.”

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2 thoughts on “sex pistols in america, 1978”.

I love reading about the Pistols. And you can almost see the logic of the American tour, but then it ended in the group not just breaking up, but splintering in enough bitter acrimony to last 20 years – so maybe it wasn’t the wisest brainstorm on McClaren’s part. Still it’s great fun to imagine what in the world the players were thinking. Have you ever been to Texas? To Baton Rouge? The audacity, the naivety, the gaul in conspiring to bring those kids to places like that is just mind melting.

I loved Lydon’s autobiography “Rotten” – so much fun. He’s such a character and quite a good writer. Steve Jones book is less exciting, but still interesting. I really enjoyed the “12 days in America” book as well. Gives a great sense of the chaos of that fantastic terrible idea that was the American tour. We here in Los Angeles were treated to many years of “Jonesey’s Jukebox” on terrestrial radio, all through the oughts (sp?), perhaps he’s still plugging away on the internet. He’s a wonderful DJ and a hilarious dude.

Bollocks was THE album. The Pistols may not have invented punk but that refined it to a razor point and injected the world. And to think this was all happening in THE 1970’s!

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Sex Pistols in the ATL

In January 1978, the Sex Pistols embarked on an ill-fated first tour of the U.S. It would last less than two weeks. By the time they finished their Jan. 14 gig at San Francisco’s Winterland, Johnny Rotten uttered these words on stage: “Ever get the feeling you’re being cheated?”, and walked off. Three days later, Rotten announced the breakup of the Pistols. They would go on to record some material without him, but the Sex Pistols as they were – Rotten, Sid Vicious, Steve Jones, and Paul Cook – were done.

The Pistols’ first gig ever under that name took place November 5th, 1975 at Central St. Martins College of Art & Design in London. Earlier that year, Malcolm McLaren took the helm as the band’s manager. It’s been debated to what degree he influenced the band, but he was very much responsible for their style and image. As former manager of the New York Dolls (1974-1975), and a fan of Richard Hell’ s Neon Boys and Television, he knew that image and appearance could be major factors in a band’s success (though the Dolls broke up while he was managing them). He was also co-owner of a clothing shop in London call Let It Rock, later renamed Sex. This would become the gathering spot for the alternative / soon to be called Punk set in the London area. Members of the Pistols, the Clash and the Damned hung out there, as well as a pre-Pretenders Chrissie Hynde.

So it wasn’t long before the Sex Pistols had taken Britain by storm. The years 1976 and 1977 saw the UK punk revolution take flight. The Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Damned, and the Buzzcocks were shaking up the establishment. In that same span, the Pistols zipped through three record labels (EMI to A&M to Virgin) before they finally released their debut, ‘ Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols ‘ in October 1977. Their relationship with A&M lasted a week. I guess it didn’t help that Sid Vicious trashed (and vomited all over) the Managing Director’s office after the signing ceremony.

So after the release of Bollocks, things were looking up, amd it was time to go stateside for their first tour. They were booked to appear on Saturday Night Live in December ’77, but because of passport issues, that gig fell through (Elvis Costello & the Attractions took their place). They finally made it over in early January.

Now, I want you to take a look at the cities they played….

Jan. 5: Great Southeast Music Hall, Atlanta, Ga. Jan. 6: Taliesyn Ballroom, Memphis, Tenn. Jan. 8: Randy’s Rodeo, San Antonio, Texas Jan. 9: Kingfish Club, Baton Rouge, La. Jan. 10: Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas, Texas Jan. 12: Cain’s Ballroom, Tulsa, Okla. Jan. 14: Winterland, San Francisco, Calif.

Is there something wrong with that picture? The Sex Pistols live at Randy’s Rodeo?? A swing through the South? Nothing against the “Deep South”, but were those cities really the best place to premier the Sex Pistols on American soil? Wikipedia claims that on this short tour, the Pistols were “plagued by bad sound and physically hostile audiences, mainly at unlikely venues in the South.” Whoever booked the Pistols at these “unlikely venues” must have been on some really potent stuff.

So let’s go straight to the source and hear for ourselves. Here’s the first gig of their US tour in Atlanta. To this listener, the sound is just fine (it is a soundboard recording), I mean it’s the Sex Pistols here. I don’t sense much hostility from the audience here. If anything, it’s the reverse. Johnny Rotten is vintage Johnny Rotten in his between-song stage banter: rude, vulgar, and unapologetic.

This is from the Pistols’ Press Release regarding the show, from a cool site I recently found:

The Pistols spend a quiet day-and-a-half prior to their debut, granting a few interviews (most notably to Time and Newsweek) while hordes of British journalists scurry around the hotel lobby starting, spreading and squelching various rumors…. Channel 2 in Atlanta (WSB) reports the group as 1) having green hair, 2) vomiting and committing sexual acts on one another as part of their show, and 3) heading for Houston after the Atlanta date… Alex Cooley’s Great Southeast Music Hall is packed to the gills minutes after the doors open at 7:00 p.m..Among those in attendance are 5 television crews, approximately 50 members of the press (including such notables as John Rockwell, Bob Christgau, Wayne Robins, Kit Rachlis, Tony Schwartz and Roger Wolmuth), several police officers and vice squads from both Atlanta and Memphis…. A local band called Cruisomatic opens, primarily doing cover versions of early rock and punk standards (to our ears, they are louder than the Pistols will be later, which is not very loud, contrary to what the Atlanta papers said the next day)..The rain is coming down pretty hard by the time the Pistols go on at about 10:15 p.m.; Rotten asks, “Where’s My Beer?”… “You can all stop staring at us now,” Rotten says after opening with “God Save the Queen,” “We’re ugly and we know it… See what kind of fine upstanding youth England is chucking out these days?”..About 60% of the audience is standing and doing an Americanized version of the Pogo throughout, 20% of the audience is nasty, yelling yelling and throwing things at the band, and 20% of the crowd clearly does not know what on earth is going on..A mighty blow is struck for Punk Rock!!

Nine days later, Rotten would play his last show with the Pistols. Ten months later, Sid Vicious would be arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. After Sid spent some time in Riker’s Island Prison, McLaren convinced Virgin Records to put up the $50,000 to bail Sid out. At a party celebrating his release on Feb. 2, 1979, Sid Vicious died from an overdose of heroin that he allegedly obtained from his addict mother. Truth is stranger than fiction, my friends.

So coming to you from deep inside Lynnrd Skynnrd territory, it’s the Sex Pistols!

January 5, 1978 Great Southeast Music Hall Atlanta, Georgia

Download (zip file)

God Save The Queen I Wanna Be Me Seventeen New York Bodies Submission Holidays In The Sun E.M.I. No Feelings Problems Pretty Vacant *Anarchy In The UK *No Fun *Liar *Tracks 12-14 are from December 11, 1977, Maasbree, Holland

Bonus : Sid Vicious – My Way (mp3)

• See official Sid Vicious docs on The Smoking Gun .
• Buy Sex Pistols Music .
• See John Lydon’s Official Site .
• Silence is a Rhythm Too has some Malcolm McLaren solo stuff posted .

Sunday Jams

They blew up the chicken man in milwaukee last night, 20 comments.

Skottie Phaust

the great south east music hall is LONG gone from the atlanta scene. a brand new home depot just opened on the grounds where it once stood. it’s at the corner of piedmont and sidney marcus rds here in atlanta.

Realchildofhell

I was 14…a few years before i dove headlong into the fledging Atlanta punk rock scene…but I remember the newspaper reports and the fury and flurry that the Pistols visit caused …I have a few friends that did make it to the show and are in the DOA film footage outside the venue….

McLaren was trying to create the “punk manager” and screwed up a few bands. Not sure it could have been done any other way, but like Yoko, I blame Malcolm.

from what I’ve read about the Pistols ill-fated US tour, the dates were Mclaren’s idea, as he wanted to avoid the cool cities like New York, LA, and get away from the music hipsters. There’s a great interview with Mclaren where he refers to himself “not so much as a band manager, but a mis-manager”.

I’ll second Peter Mac that it was McLaren’s idea to deliberately avoid NYC, LA, etc. Jon Savage goes into detail about it in the book England’s Dreaming.

When Elvis Costello and the Attractions appeared on SNL, drummer Pete Thomas wore a t-shirt that read, “Thanks, Malc”.

Thanks for posting this show! I moved to Atlanta about five years after the Sex Pistols show, and I used to live around the corner from the former site of the Great SE Music Hall (on Lindbergh). Never thought I’d hear this performance!

It sounds like there are two guitars playing. Jon Savage’s book has a detailed guide to the Pistols’ bootlegs, and he says that many of them were doctored by adding backing tracks to make them sound better.

Interesting stuff, especially about adding backing tracks to bootlegs?? I haven’t heard of that before. Who would do the doctoring?

Jon Savage points the finger at Dave Goodman, who was the producer of the Sex Pistols demos (which have been heavily bootlegged themselves, as well as many of the band’s live shows, where Goodman worked the PA). Goodman apparently used studio musicians, and even doctored some of the between-song banter from the stage on at least one bootleg.

“England’s Dreaming” was reissued in 2001 with an updated appendix by Jon Savage following the Filthy Lucre reunion tour. It’s an exhaustive book (over 600 pages) but very much worth reading.

Where did you get this show? Savage says the Atlanta show came out on a Swedish bootleg called “Never Trust a Hippy”, and another bootleg called “Power of the Pistols”.

Do you hear two guitars?

Jon – yeah I guess I hear two guitars. In the opening tune “God Save the Queen”, it sounds like Steve Jones churning along, and then you hear another stronger power chord kick in. It’s a pretty full guitar sound alright. That’s really interesting that Goodman would doctor even the bootlegs.

I saw the book “England’s Dreaming” yesterday at Barnes & Noble. I’ll pick it up as soon as I finish this Clash tome that I’m currently reading. With all this internet time, it’s hard to get through a 500 page book! 😉

The bootleg I have is titled “Kill All Hippies”, which may be the same as “Never Trust a Hippy”. I recently got it from a friend of mine, not sure where he got it.

SID WAS GREAT!!!!!!!!!! YES ITS TRUE THAT HE SUCKED AT BASS…I MEAN HE ONLY HAD PICKED IT UP A FEW DAYS BEFORE HE JOINED THE BAND!!! HAHAHAAHHAAHAHAAH I KNOW THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH IT BUT HE GAVE IT ALL AND I HAVE TO GIVE IT TO HIM!!!

I had that fucking show on vinyl and my ex-wife pawned it!

I was there at the show,it was great,theres not many of us left!!!!

maclaren was as you americans say an asshole,he attemted to indoctrinate the lads but failed miserably with lydon who to this day still shows us how stupid maclaren really was and is. i saw the pistols live a few times in their very early gigs in the uk,they definately redefined the music industry. sid was a great advert for punk but unfortunately met up with nauseating nancy and became a waster like her. glad to see that real punk is still being listened to over the water, the so called new punk that you guys churn out over there now is complete rubbish even your old school bands didnt have a patch on our punk as ours was all about the times, places and attitudes of a forgotten youth left with no jobs and no futures.

Steve Bryant

The opening act for the Atlanta Great Southeast Music Hall show was Cruis-O-Matic and the band is still active today. In fact I drum for them and original member Edward Tanner is still on lead guitar and vocals for the band. Now that the show is 30 years past, Edward (an attorney today) is still being interview about the event. In fact the AJC just did a piece this week. I wasn’t that aware of the Punk scene back then, but find in interesting that the Pistols’ US tour is still a big deal among music journalists and fans. Edward mentions the event in the History section of cruis-o-matic.com if anyone is interested.

Curtis Knapp

I was old enough- sort of, to go to Wtock. And live in Athens in 77-8. The gig at SE Music Hall for the Pistols was totally great. I had a ticket. I got near stage. All was swell. But for the rain. All this Hulla-ballu about was it good or not etc. CRAP! I think the fact they played a shopping mall is totally Like Andy Warhols 99 cents thing. I saw them insire of music fans that night. Coming from the CBGBS world of NYC, I can say I was in the right place at the right time. A wonderful ni. But we had to drive all the way back to Athens in the rain. A small price to pay or a few hours of history! Rock the F on man, Curtis Knapp

In October of ’82 a good friend of mine gave me the Pistols opening show in Atlanta on tape..dreadful sound but I still have it.

Trying to track down the remaining tour has has been difficult

Any thing from the Taco Bell in Memphis?

When you go to an ACDC concert back in the 70s you would soon realize you were watching the Angus Young talent show. The guys incredible and being impressed by his jamming just made the band entirely. I feel the same way about the sex pistols. Steve Jones just roaring on that guitar like only he could. Awesome hooks. The guitar work was primo even though most Karen Carpenter fans thought it was too noisy or something. Ridiculous. Steve rocked it and hes the sex pistol with whom nobody knows his name. It was his band.. his groove.. his talent. STEVE JONES PEOPLE.

finger cymbal

Sid spit on the fruit plate and signed my earth shoe that night…remember those ugly footwear?

Signed Steve’s drum bag too.

Didn’t seem such a bad sort, but he had only been here a day.

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The Anarchy Tour of 1976

Ray Stevenson's Extraordinary Photos of the Clash and the Sex Pistols...

The February 21, 1976, issue of the New Musical Express warned readers : “Don’t look over your shoulder but The Sex Pistols are coming”. “They were like a million years ahead,” The Clash’s Joe Strummer later told his biographer Chris Salewicz. “I realised immediately we were going nowhere; the rest of my group hated them.” In December two bands were were sharing a coach the Anarchy Tour, which also featured Johnny Thunders’ band The Heartbreakers and The Damned. Nineteen dates were booked. But the bands performed just three times, the rest of the shows cancelled by order of the authorities who were, not   completely without reason , fearful of fighting .

Anarchy Tour, L-R. Keith Paul, Jo Faul, Johnny Thunders, Ray Stevenson, Nils Stevenson, Walter Lure, Paul Cook, Leeds. Dec 1976

In 1996, Mojo magazine harked back:

Contrary to legend, the destination board on the (tour) bus did not read Nowhere. It was blank. The Sex Pistols, Heartbreakers (from New York), Clash and managers, promoters, roadies and photographers all got on board. The warm interior of the bus with its comfortably upholstered seats was a luxury. They were about to embark on the first full-scale punk tour of the UK. It was during rehearsals for this very tour – 2 days earlier – that the Pistols appeared on Bill Grundy . Anarchy In The UK had been released a few days previously. The Pistols actually arrived for the programme in a chauffeur driven limo. It was the first serious TV that the Pistols had. Malcolm McLaren’s reaction: “Fucking hell, the band have just sworn on live TV.”

Sex Pistols and The Clash – Johnny Rotten (left), Paul Simonon, Joe Strummer (right), Mick Jones (front) Anarchy Tour bus. Dec 1976

Steve Jones: You dirty sod. You dirty old man. Bill Grundy: Well keep going, chief, keep going. Go on. You’ve got another five seconds. Say something outrageous. Jones: You dirty bastard. Grundy: Go on, again. Jones: You dirty fucker. Grundy: What a clever boy. Jones: What a fucking rotter – Today TV show, December 1 1976

Anarchy Tour bus. Dec 1976, Malcolm McLaren and The Sex Pistols.

The first show was due to be held at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich on 3 December 1976. Billed as a “A Punk-Rock Evening”, tickets cost £1.25 in advance and £1.50 on the door, but collectors would pay many times that for one now. The concert never went ahead: earlier that day, vice-chancellor Dr Frank Thistlethwaite banned it “on the grounds of protecting the safety and security of persons and property”… Only three of the scheduled gigs went ahead, along with four other rearranged shows. The tour finally started at Leeds Polytechnic on 6 December, with further dates at Manchester’s Electric Circus (9 and 19 December), Caerphilly’s Castle Cinema (14 December), Cleethorpes’ Winter Gardens (20 December) and Plymouth’s Woods Centre (21 and 22 December).

Johnny Thunders, Anarchy Tour – 1976

Paul Simonon, Goodman, Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten. Anarchy Tour. Dec 1976

  “We were getting used to the idea of spending long periods in our rooms, drinking beer, watching TV and reading about ourselves in the papers… Everybody thinks the Anarchy Tour was Hey! Hey! Hey! but it wasn’t. The main thing I remember is the boredom. We didn’t know what the fuck was going on.” -Glen Matlock

The Damned, Anarchy Tour, Leeds – Brian James, Dave Vanian and Captain Sensible.

Joe Strummer and Johnny Rotten. Anarchy Tour. Plymouth. 1976

The Clash – Mick Jones with Debbie Juvenile and Tracey. Anarchy Tour, Britain – 1976

So they arrived in Derby only to be told the local council would let the other bands play, but not them – unless they were granted a private screening first. Malcolm knew that if they actually saw the Pistols play, they’d say no. But, if they refused to audition, they’d still be refused to play. Whatever, they still needed money to pay for the hotel. So, the roadie and sound man got everything ready to make it look like they’d be appearing. Meanwhile Malcolm managed to persuade EMI to pay their bills. Malcolm announced: “We’re not going to encourage censorship. If we perform for these idiots we’ll end up doing matinees for every council in the country” Everyone got back on the bus and Malcolm announced that Newcastle City Hall had been cancelled, to quote a councillor: in the interests of protecting the children. So the Anarchy tour was headed for Leeds… (ominous dot dot dot)

Johnny Rotten and Nils Stevenson, whose older brother Ray Stevenson took these photos. Nils would go on to managed Siouxsie and the Banshees

Johnny Rotten. Anarchy Tour. 1976

Sex Pistols – Johnny Rotten, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock, Anarchy Tour. ‘No publicity’. 1976

First of all the Damned left the tour. Their tour manager had said that they would audition for the council. The Sex Pistols were not happy when they heard about this. And, as a result, they got booted off the tour. MALCOLM: I sacked The Damned because they were no fucking good… CAPTAIN SENSIBLE says: When they asked us to do the tour, they needed us. We had been gigging a lot, so we had a reputation and a following. After the Grundy incident, the Pistols were the big deal and really didn’t need us to help sell tickets, so they dumped us. – Mojo 1996

Sid Vicious, Nils Stevenson and Linda Ashby at Linda’s flat. 1976

Malcolm McLaren. Anarchy Tour. 1976

Sex Pistols – Steve Jones and Johnny Rotten, Anarchy Tour. December 1976 Dec 1976

PAUL SIMONON: The tour turned into a cause, in a way. Us kids just wanted to play. We were stuck in hotel rooms for a couple of days waiting to play, then we’d be told the gig was cancelled, so we’d wait another 3 days in the hotel room.

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`Fat, Forty And Back' -- Sex Pistols Reunite 20 Years After First Shooting To Fame

Concert preview The Sex Pistols, Gravity Kills and Goldfinger, 6 p.m. tomorrow, Bumbershoot Mainstage, Seattle Center; $10 Bumbershoot admission, 628-0888; Bumbershoot hotline: 281-8111.

It's been 20 years exactly since the Sex Pistols' heyday. But for a group with such an instant impact and - until now - short lifespan, they evolved remarkably slowly.

They came out of a group called The Strand, formed in 1972 by schoolmates Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Warwick Nightingale (historically, punk's Pete Best). Jones, who bought his stage clothes from Malcolm McLaren, got the would-be Svengali interested in his band. Eventually, McLaren would transform their prospects.

But it took four years and many changes, including McLaren's first stint as a manager. (This took place in Manhattan, with the New York Dolls.) In the interim, two sidemen were dismissed from the band and John Lydon, "Johnny Rotten," joined as the frontman. He replaced Steve Jones, the group's first lead singer. Then drummer John Ritchie, renamed "Sid Vicious," replaced Glen Matlock as the Pistols' bassist.

At first, the Pistols earned their notoriety slowly. (Their HQ was a brothel; they wore "dirty" T-shirts; they signed to, then left, two record labels.) But their great moment came on Dec. 1, 1976, on then-conservative UK television, when they let loose with a string of expletives. By next morning, newspapers hailed "The Filth - and the Fury," and, from then on, the Pistols' movements were a nonstop circus.

That summer, Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her silver jubilee. And the band released "God Save the Queen," which contained the famous line, "Those tourists are money!!!" Coming at the apex of national celebrations, it was quickly banned from play, and pop charts were published with a blank space for "No. 1."

Falling stars

From these happy heights, though, came rapid descent. After releasing one album and playing sporadically, the band set out for eight American dates. That was January 1978; by the tour's end, the band had split in an ugly welter of recriminations. On Feb. 2, 1979, Ritchie was found dead of a heroin overdose.

Now, says Lydon, "We're fat, forty and back. Filling in the final Sex Pistols' chapter: dot dot dot."

The Pistols play Bumbershoot tomorrow. Their reunion, The Filthy Lucre Tour, was original founder Jones' idea: "For 10 years, I tried to convince John. I knew things just shouldn't end the way they did. We were so naive, we knew so little. I knew we were capable of more."

Which was part of what won Lydon over. Once he published his autobiography ("No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish") to acclaim, "it cleared lots of cobwebs out of the closet." Lydon, claims Jones, "then finally said, `Let's do it.' " Of course, neither had spoken to Glen Matlock - by now, author of "I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol."

Jones, the real founder, now lives in Los Angeles. He has fought his own long battle with heroin, and, with Paul Cook, played in the band The Professionals. Jones also made two solo albums. And now, with members of Guns N' Roses and Duran Duran, he plays with the Neurotic Outsiders - a recent signing of Madonna's Maverick label.

So what's the audience like this time? Always the same, says Lydon: "Ten-year-olds and forty-year-olds. Exclusively. Only. But they totally love it." So, says Jones, does the band. "Lately, we have even thought of writing new stuff. Our chemistry is good and the sound is great. Of course, that don't mean we get on as people. We always pushed each other's buttons, still do. That's what makes the Sex Pistols what they are."

These days, the re-formed Pistols seem sincere: genuinely pleased with the crowds, the press, the adulation. Still, in a changed context, how does the music sound? Almost absurdly good, say most observers. Says Jones, "We've actually been surprised. You know, it's emotional. People have just gone berserk; it's great."

SEX PISTOLS: North American Tour Dates Announced

Punk rock legends SEX PISTOLS will embark on a two-week tour of North America in late August/early September.

The band's original line-up — John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten , vocals), Steve Jones (guitar), Paul Cook (drums) and Glen Matlock (bass) — will visit a mix of amphitheaters, clubs and concert halls, and will conclude the tour with a Sept. 7 set at the San Diego Street Scene festival.

SEX PISTOLS split in 1978 after a final performance at San Francisco Winterland Ballroom, by which time Sid Vicious had replaced Matlock on bass. Vicious died of a heroin overdose in 1979.

The original line-up reformed for the "Filthy Lucre" tour of the U.K. in 1996 and also reunited last summer to play a London show as a rebuttal to Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee celebrations.

SEX PISTOLS tour dates (subject to change):

Aug. 20 - Boston, MA - FleetBoston Pavilion Aug. 21 - Wantagh, NY - Jones Beach Theatre Aug. 23 - Atlantic City, NJ - Trump Marina Aug. 24 - Washington, DC - 9:30 Club Aug. 25 - Toronto, Ontario - Molson Amphitheatre Aug. 27 - Cleveland, OH - Scene Pavilion Aug. 28 - Detroit, MI - Cobo Arena Aug. 29 - Chicago, IL - Aragon Ballroom Aug. 31 - Englewood, CO - Fiddler's Green Amphitheater Sep. 03 - San Francisco, CA - The Warfield Sep. 05 - Las Vegas, NV - The Joint, Hard Rock Hotel Sep. 06 - Los Angeles, CA - Greek Theatre Sep. 07 - San Diego, CA - San Diego Street Scene

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Rhino Factoids: S.P.O.T.S. (Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly)

37 years ago today, the Sex Pistols embarked on a brief set of dates around the UK, but because of the amount of infamy they’d already accumulated during the course of their career, the band decided it’d be in their best interest to be booked at venues under fake names, resulting in what has come to be known as the S.P.O.T.S. tour, an acronym which stands for Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly.

In an interview included within Sex Pistols: The Inside Story, by Fred & Judy Vermorel, Paul Cook was asked to explain the thinking behind doing the secret gigs.

“Well, we decided to do these gigs, like, just for one, ‘cause we want to play anyway, and we hadn’t played in England for such a long time,” said Cook. “And we couldn’t publicize them, ‘cause if we did, some councilor might just come and say, ‘Right, you’re not playing here,’ we they have done and they can do, for any stupid reason. So we decided to go to each individual promoter ourselves, who owned their private clubs and who could put us on without having to ask someone else, and told them to keep it secret. But we knew enough word would get out that people would know we were playing – which they did. So it weren’t totally unfair on the fans anyway, ‘cause most of them who wanted to see us come to see us. And all the places were packed out, so enough word got ‘round for people to know we were playing.”

There was a minor freak-out when the plans for the secret gigs somehow made their way onto the front page of Melody Maker, but it turned out to be a tempest in a teacup, thankfully, as the magazine hadn’t actually managed to get any of the dates or venues right. The Sex Pistols ultimately did six dates on the so-called S.P.O.T.S. tour, being billed differently in each of the half-dozen locations: Lafayette Club, Wolverhampton (S.P.O.T.S.); Outlook Club, Doncaster (Tax Exiles); Penthouse, Scarborough (Special Guest); Rock Garden, Middlesborough (Acne Rabble); Woods Centre, Plymouth (The Hamsters), and Winter Gardens, Penzance (A Mystery Band of International Repute). If nothing else, the brief jaunt helped get Sid Vicious out and about as the band’s bassist, even if his limited playing ability proved evident.

Over at Vintagerock’s Weblog , you can at least get a feel for what the Scarborough show was like. Here’s an excerpt:

“The atmosphere was electric and the Pistols were incredible. Sid was new to the band, and was just learning to play bass, but he looked great; just the part. John was amazing, sneering and snarling, hanging off his mike stand and at times covered in spit from the crowd. Steve Jones was the ultimate rock guitar hero, all swagger in his leather jeans, and Paul Cook was smashing away at his drums. And they were loud, and fast. We braved it in the scrum down the front for some of the set, but I eventually bottled it and took up a vantage point at the back, standing on a chair. Too much spitting and pogoing down the front for my liking.”

Amazingly, at this point the band’s lone full-length studio offering, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, had yet to be released, but if you go over to read the rest of the write-up on the performance, it sounds like they played virtually all of it…and if you’re anything like us, then you’re suddenly finding yourself with a hankering to go listen to that album yourself, so allow us to provide you with the opportunity to do so.

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NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT

The most valuable vinyls ever revealed – could your collection be worth £10,000?

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We’ve all heard about innocent-looking Harry Potter books paying off mortgages – but have you ever considered the treasures that could be hiding in your record collection ?

If your wedge of vinyls has been handed down and spans back to the 60s and 70s, you may just own a £10,000 cultural relic. Or perhaps there’s one sitting in your local charity shop with a £5 price tag.

If you are lucky enough to own the UK’s most valuable vinyls then call your mother – you just won £67,000.

As today is April 20 – Record Store Day, don’t you know? – why not have a flick through those old boxes and find out if you’ve got one of the following treasures.

From the likes of The Beatles to Led Zeppelin , the company A2D2 – which connects analogue music devices to smart speaker sound systems – has researched the UK’s most valuable records, and here are the results.

The UK’s most valuable vinyl records revealed

The beatles – the white album.

The White Album is the colloquial name for the band’s ninth studio album, officially called The Beatles.

But because of its blank white exterior, the album – which simply has The Beatles written on its cover – is now known better by its pretty self-explanatory nickname.

The 1968 album contains some of The Beatles’ biggest hits including A Hard Day’s Night, Eight Days A Week, Girl, And I Love Her and All My Loving. It’s also the only double Beatles album from legends George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and John Lennon.

Original copies – especially those with low serial numbers, in pristine condition and with the original Apple logo – can be worth a fortune, potentially fetching up to £10,000.

Complex – Complex

Complex’s self-titled rock album – with an iconic skeletal tree on a burnt orange background – was only pressed 99 times, and is one of the most sought-after psychedelic albums of all time.

Recorded in 1970, Complex’s album includes songs Funny Feeling, Green Eyed Lucy, Witch’s Spell, and Norwegian Butterfly.

An immaculate copy was picked up for £1 and later sold for a whopping £10,000. So it’s worth checking…

Dark – Round the Edges

With only 40 copies ever pressed, Dark’s Round The Edges – their debut album – is a real prize.

With tracks including Darkside, Maypole, The Cat, and Zero Time, this psychedelic 1972 rock album in its original form is considered to be the holy grail of record collections.

One of these rare copies could be worth up to £8,350.

Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin

Of vocalist Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page, bassist and keyboardist John Paul Jones, and drummer John Bonham’s many brilliant creations, among record collectors their self-titled debut studio album is of biggest value.

The 1969 album – which includes Dazed and Confused, I Can’t Quit You Baby, Good Times Bad Times, and Black Mountain Side – was recorded at Olympic Studios in London shortly after the band formed.

With its turquoise typography and a unique Superhype credit, one of the first pressings of Led Zeppelin’s debut album was sold for £7,100 in 2013.

A Fleeting Glance – A Fleeting Glance

Another psychedelic rock album on the list is A Fleeting Glance – a record put together by a variety of mysterious musicians at a social club. It allegedly includes an uncredited appearance by Billy Fury.

Only five copies of this curious album are known to exist, and so if another is found it could be worth up to £6,400.

The Beatles – Please Please Me

The Beatles’ debut album, Please Please Me, was first released on March 22 1963 with bangers including Love Me Do, Twist and Shout, and Please Please Me, and – naturally – it’s worth a lot of money.

The early UK Parlophone pressings with the black and gold label are highly sought after, worth up to £6,000.

John Lennon once revealed the band recorded their first album in one long twelve hour session.

‘The last song to be done was a song called Twist and Shout, which nearly killed me,’ he said.

Sir Paul McCartney also recalled how Lennon had to save Twist and Shout until last to preserve his throat.

‘John was sucking zoobs all day – those little throat tablets. And he finally had to do Twist and Shout knowing he had to do it last because it would just rip his throat apart to do it,’ he said.

‘It was great. You can still hear that on the record.’

Sex Pistols – God Save the Queen

The Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen boasts one of the most recognisable record covers in British history, as the band name and record title over Queen Elizabeth II’s eyes and mouth proved wildly controversial at the time.

Released in May 1997 in the midst of Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee – the band denied this timing was intentional – the song went on to cause uproar.

Written in Johnny Rotten’s London squat, the record was banned by the BBC who described it as an example of ‘gross bad taste’. It was also banned by the Independent Broadcasting Authority, which regulated Independent Local Radio.

Amid the furore, band members Paul Cook and Johnny Rotten were also physically assaulted by offended monarchists with razors and iron bars.

Nowadays, a first pressing on the A&M label, which was quickly withdrawn, can command a price of up to £6,000.

Joy Division – An Ideal For Living

An Ideal for Living is the first EP by post-punk band Joy Division, released on June 23, 1978, not long after they changed their name from Warsaw.

They released the EP under their own label, Enigma, before later signing to Tony Wilson and Martin Hannett’s Factory Records.

The EP was recorded at Pennine Sound Studios in Oldham and includes four tracks: Warsaw, No Love Lost, Leaders of Men and Failures.

The record was largely self-financed on a budget of just £400, and only 1,000 copies were pressed. Every record is said to have been individually folded by the bandmates.

An Ideal For Living also caused controversy with its cover, showing a member of the Hitler Youth.

Later that year, the EP was re-pressed as a 12″. Only genuine original pressings have an anti-slip ring on the centre label of the 7″ – and they are all black vinyl.

If you’ve got one of these in good condition, you could be £4,700 richer.

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