McGee drops hint on new date for TRNSMT festival
New TV drama directed by Danny Boyle charts rise of punk pioneers who hit top by channelling fury of a generation and putting them centre stage
MUSIC mogul Alan McGee has hinted this year’s TRNSMT festival could be moved back to August.
The three-day event at Glasgow Green is scheduled to run from Friday, July 9, to Sunday, July 11, with headliners including Lewis Capaldi, Liam Gallagher and Courteeners.
While other festivals such as Glastonbury and
Download have been cancelled for the second year in a row, bosses of Scotland’s biggest music event hope the vaccine against Covid-19 will allow it to go ahead.
Speaking on Chris Moyles’s Radio X show yesterday, McGee suggested TRNSMT will still take place. He said: “One of the bands I’m involved with, Shambolics, are playing TRNSMT in July, August or something like that.”
When pressed on the issue, he added: “It might be moving back. It’s supposed to be happening.”
A TRNSMT spokesman said: “We expect announcements from the Scottish Government in the next couple of weeks about the Scottish road map.”
THEY snarled through Anarchy in the UK and Pretty Vacant. Now, more than 50 years after their short career crashed and burned, Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle is turning the story of the Sex Pistols into a TV series.
Called Pistol, it’s based on the biography of guitarist Steve Jones. It will look at the early days of the band, formed by Malcolm McLaren from a bunch of misfits who had a look and an attitude rather than noticeable musical ability.
Boyle, who directed Trainspotting, said the show would capture a key moment in the 20th century.
He said: “Imagine breaking into the world of The Crown and Downton Abbey with your mates and screaming your songs and your fury at all they represent.
“It is the detonation point for British street culture, where ordinary young people had the stage and vented their fury and their fashion and everyone had to watch and listen. Everyone feared them – or followed them.”
Boyle’s series, which starts shooting this month, will focus on the early days of the band. McLaren pulled the Sex Pistols together in 1975 by recruiting a green haired 19-year-old, John Lydon, to front Steve Jones’s pub rock group.
McLaren’s girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood, dressed them in the bondage trousers and offensive T-shirts that would become the basis of punk style.
Their first TV performance was on the Manchester-based show So It Goes, performing Anarchy In the UK. By October of 1976, they had signed to EMI.
Soon after Anarchy in the UK was released as a single, they appeared on Thames Television’s Today show, hosted by Bill Grundy – who they wound up by swearing and calling him a “dirty old man”.
The lurid headlines in the next day’s papers ensured that millions of people now knew who the Sex Pistols were.
Their next single, God Save The Queen, was banned by the BBC and most independent radio stations.
Their first album, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols was banned by Boots, WH Smith and Woolworths. The tour to support the album was reduced to four dates.
The band disintegrated on tour in the US – Sid Vicious was addicted to heroin, Lydon was ill and fell out with the other two members of the band.
In 1978, Vicious’s girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, was found dead in their New York hotel room in her underwear. He was charged with her murder, imprisoned then released.
At a party to celebrate his freedom, he died of an overdose.
There have been other attempts to tell the band’s story on screen. McLaren hired student Julian Temple to film them – his footage became the 1979 flick The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.
Sid and Nancy, a biopic of the illfated couple, was released in 1996.
In 2000, Temple revisited his archive to make The Filth And The Fury. Now it’s Danny Boyle’s turn. Good luck with that.
THE cap on contactless card payments will more than double to £100, the Treasury confirmed yesterday.
The move comes less than a year after the limit was upped from £30 to £45.
The increase has only been allowed as, post-Brexit, the UK is no longer bound by the £45 equivalent limit for EU member states.
Announcing the rise, Chancellor Rishi Sunak said: “The contactless limit increase will make it easier than ever for people to pay for their shopping, providing a welcome boost to retail that will protect jobs and drive growth across the UK.”
Eight out of 10 adults used contactless payments in 2019, with cash use falling during the pandemic.
The Treasury insisted the new £100 limit would not lead to more fraud.
But Ray Walsh, digital privacy expert at security consultancy ProPrivacy, said: “More than doubling the limit on cashless payments introduces risks for consumers who will inevitably face a higher threat of card theft.”