News, views and top stories in your inbox. Don't miss our must-read newsletter Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

What was the most important gig of all time? Woodstock? Live Aid? The Beatles’ first night at The Cavern?

Some say it was a show watched by about 40 surly Mancunians at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976.

That early Sex Pistols gig may not sound like the stuff of revolution but it changed the music scene forever.

It went on to become the stuff of legend, with everyone who’s anyone claiming they were there.

But who were the handful of lucky gig- goers who really witnessed – and went on to change – musical history?

Author David Nolan tells the Sunday People how he made it his mission to find out...

The bunch of young Londoners who ventured north to play a gig in Manchester in the hot summer of 1976 must have been a bit ­disappointed by the ­turnout.

Just a few dozen people were in a hall that could take several hundred on June 4, 1976, when the Sex Pistols played Manchester for the first time.

Yet this was the unlikely scene for the most important gig ever. But what made the night so special wasn’t the Pistols – it was the audience.

Without that gig, and the Pistols’ return visit six weeks later, there would have been no Buzzcocks, Magazine, Joy Division, New Order, Factory Records, indie scene, The Fall, The Smiths, The Hacienda, Madchester, Happy Mondays or Oasis.

The scattering of people who paid 50p to see the Johnny Rotten and co came away inspired, in a very bolshie and Mancunian way, to change the music forever.

They didn’t think: “I want to do that.” Instead they thought: “Nah! I could do way better than that.”

The message to the audience was clear. You don’t have to be a virtuoso or a musical genius to be in a band, anyone can do it.

(Image: Mirrorpix)

Standing at the back of the faintly musty upstairs hall was a young, unknown Morrissey scribbling notes to fire off a letter to the New Musical Express about the gig. Inspired by what he saw, he’d soon be ­forming a band of his own: The Smiths.

Over at the bar was a rowdy bunch of Salford lads necking pints and heckling. They decided to form a band that very night – Joy Division.

The band’s bassist Peter Hook says today: “It was the most shocking thing I’ve ever seen in my life. We just looked at each other and thought, My God!

"It was so alien to ­everything. You just thought we could do that. To this day I can’t imagine why on earth we thought we could do that, I’d never played a musical instrument.”

(Image: Redferns)

The polite young students who organised the gig and who took the tickets on the way in later became Buzzcocks. Steve Diggle in the audience joined the band on the spot.

He said: “That was the day the punk rock atom was split, no doubt about it. The Pistols were glamorous and they didn’t give a f**k!

“You got that vibe and the music was twice as fast as anything else. It was amazing to see. That’s where it exploded from, it changed Manchester and it changed the world.”

And it was no exaggeration.

Without that wave of inspiration there may have been no Nirvana, Arctic Monkeys, Blur, Radiohead or Prodigy. They all owe a debt to bands formed in the sticky-carpeted aisles of the Lesser Free Trade Hall.

Ex-NME journalist and audience member Paul Morley said: “Everything that happens is still a fallout of the Sex Pistols coming to the Lesser Free Trade Hall.”

The gig was organised by Bolton Technical College students Howard Trafford and Pete McNeish who, inspired by a NME article about the Pistols, borrowed a car and drove to London in February 76 to track down the band and their manager, Malcolm McLaren .

They saw the band twice and invited them to play in Manchester. They wanted their own band, christened Buzzcocks during the London trip, to support them.

Influenced by the Pistols own stage names, Trafford and McNeish changed their names that weekend – to Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley.

Devoto said: “I know it changed my life, beyond a whole roomful of shadows of doubt. Forever.”

The lads wanted the Pistols to play at Bolton College, but the authorities said no.

Buzzcocks weren’t ready to play with the Pistols on June 4 – local heavy rock band Solstice performed instead. But Devoto and Shelley – along with Steve Diggle and a 16-year-old John Maher – were ready for the Pistols’ second Manchester gig six weeks later.

In Devoto’s words, they “just about got away with it.”

But just six months after their Lesser Free Trade Hall ­debut, Buzzcocks released the first independent punk record, Spiral Scratch, essentially creating what we now call “indie music”.

Salford council clerk Peter Hook was so inspired by the June 4 gig he bought a bass from a local music and electronics shop the next day.

He immediately started a band called Joy Division with his mate Bernard Sumner.

Morrissey was sniffy about the Pistols but wrote to the NME: “Despite their discordant music and barely audible audacious lyrics, they were called back for two encores.” He was sure he could do better...

The myth surrounding the gig has meant thousands have people have since claimed they were there but many only made it to the encore six weeks later.

Factory Records’ Tony Wilson, Mark E. Smith of The Fall, Joy Division singer Ian Curtis all heard the hype over the first gig and knew the second one wasn’t to be missed.

(Image: Joel Goodman)

In 2006, Wilson said there Factory Records would not have been what it was without Joy Division.

He said: “Joy Division got up on stage because they saw these buggers (Sex Pistols). ‘Well, if they can do it, we can do it.’ That was the message.”

Imagine no Peter Hook bass lines, Pete Shelley’s winsome punk heartaches, Morrissey’s uplifting misery or Factory Records’ self-destructive, creative madness.

That’s why it was the most important gig of all time – the gig that changed the world.