It’s 40 years since Sex Pistols gig cancelled
IT was the Sex Pistols gig that never was. Forty years ago the notorious punk band were booked to play Champness Hall on Drake Street.
But unlike the previous year’s seminal Lesser Free Trade Hall concert in Manchester, said to have inspired the likes of Joy Division, Buzzcocks and The Smiths, the cancelled Rochdale gig would help signal the demise of the band.
Amid the hysteria surrounding the Pistols, threats of court action and a moral panic from Rochdale’s Methodist leaders, who said the gig was an ‘insult to decent folk’, councillors in the town banned Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Paul Cook and Steve Jones from performing.
The Champness Hall gig on December 22, 1977, was part of an eight date mini-tour scheduled by the Pistols for December 1977.
Laid low by the controversy which had dogged them for much of the previous 12 months, including the notorious ‘the filth and the fury’ appearance on Bill Grundy’s chat show and the BBC’s decision to ban God Save the Queen from the airwaves, the band were hoping the tour, which also included dates in Coventry, Birkenhead, Uxbridge, Wolverhampton, Keighley, Newport and Cromer, would help them regain their mojo.
And initially at least the Rochdale concert was hailed as a ‘big scoop’ for the town, with the council’s deputy entertainments officer Sam Shrouder, who helped organise the show, saying the Pistols were anxious to ‘improve their image and prove they were well-behaved’.
Tickets were £1.75 and about 250 were snapped up within minutes of going on sale.
But the mood was to change when trustees at the Methodist church owned hall threatened legal action if the show went ahead.
In a statement Rev John Jennings, minister at Champness Hall, said: “We were stunned to learn from the Rochdale Observer that the Sex Pistols were playing in our premises and we knew nothing about it.
“The lease through which the borough use our main hall clearly states that nothing will be presented by the borough which is ‘offensive, noisy or immoral’.
“We regard this booking as an insult to Methodism and an insult to decent folk in the borough.”
Spooked by the controversy on Tuesday, December 13, councillors voted to ban the group from Rochdale.
At what appears to have been a stormy meeting, councillors were split on the move.
Coun Arthur Cleasby was all for the ban, saying the council official who booked the gig should also be censured.
But Coun John Hatton told the committee ‘many young people enjoyed watching the Sex Pistols’ adding: “We cannot be judge and jury on this.”
Another dissenting voice came from Coun Edmund Aspinall, who said: “We are of a different generation and age group and look at these things from a different point of view.”
But their protests fell on deaf ears and the gig was cancelled.
The December ‘77 tour was to prove the band’s death knell.
Of the eight scheduled dates, four were called off due to illness or political pressure.
On Christmas Day 1977 the Pistols played two shows at Ivanhoe’s in Huddersfield.
They would turn out to be the band’s final UK performances until the original line-up reformed in 1996 for the Filthy Lucre Tour.
Just over three weeks later, after a disastrous tour of America, the band were no more, with Johnny Rotten uttering the immortal words ‘ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated’ on stage during the band’s final performance in San Francisco. »●To mark the 40th anniversary of the banned gig, tribute act the Sex Pistols Experience played a free concert at the Empire in the town centre last night (Friday)