The Sex Pistols’ Manchester debut at the Lesser Free Trade Hall is one of the most mythologized gigs in rock history, the concert’s meaning dissected in countless books, documentaries and magazine articles. Widely regarded as the genesis of the Manchester punk scene, the actual event—at which the Pistols hammered through a set that included covers of the Monkees’ “Stepping Stone” and the Stooges’ “No Fun”—was a relatively low-key affair, certainly not the world-shattering event it was subsequently portrayed as, especially compared to previous raucous shows by the punk rock pioneers who had a reputation for getting into fights with the audience.

Buzzcocks bass player Steve Diggle being carried out of the Ranch | photo by Kevin Cummins

The concert’s mythic status rests less on the Pistols’ performance that night and more on the fifty people who ponied up the equivalent of a dollar admission price: the writers, entrepreneurs and musicians who subsequently become famous. Among them were Buzzcocks’ founders Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, who organized the event and met their bass player Steve Diggle there after Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren introduced them. Two boozy buddies, Peter Hook and Bernard Sumner, were also on hand to witness the performance. Duly impressed, Hook went out the next day to buy a bass guitar and set about forming a band with Sumner that would become Joy Division.

Also present was a local teenage wallflower named Steven Patrick Morrissey, the future Pope of Mope, who thought that the Pistols were a poor imitation of his beloved New York Dolls and wrote a letter to the British music weekly New Musical Express after the gig. “I’d love to see the Pistols make it,” he wrote. “Maybe then they can afford some clothes that don’t look like they’ve been slept in.”

An encore performance by the Sex Pistols at the same venue six weeks later attracted local newscaster Tony Wilson, who would go on to co-found Factory Records; Mark E. Smith, soon-to-be uberfuhrer of Mancunian musical mainstays, the Fall; and a shy young man named Ian Curtis who was accompanied by his wife Deborah. Curtis had yet to meet Sumner and Hook but Deborah Curtis later described the effect the gig had on her husband: “It re-affirmed Ian’s belief that anybody could become a rock star.”

Despite the meager turnout, the two Lesser Free Trade Hall gigs created a buzz in the city which only intensified after Tony Wilson booked them to make their television debut on his early evening experimental pop show, So It Goes, where the group performed “Anarchy in The U.K.” four months before the song was released as a single. Now there was maybe ten, twenty times as many people who attended the Lesser Free Trade Hall shows talking about this revolutionary rock band who were more into chaos than music.

Bowie clone in his bedroom | photo by Kevin Cummins

The look of the Sex Pistols—what Vivienne Westwood, who designed the band’s clothes, called “confrontation fashion”—particularly fascinated Manchester’s large contingent of David Bowie and Roxy Music fans. The boys who dressed like Thin White Duke-era Bowie or, like myself, Bryan Ferry during his GI Joe phase, and the girls who modeled themselves on the pencil-skirted vamp from the cover of Roxy Music’s second album For Your Pleasure, would soon be spiking up their hair and ripping up their clothes, spray painting “Hate and War” on the back of their jackets. Bowie’s message to his fans that they were their own self-creation found a natural fit with punk’s DIY spirit.

By December, when the Sex Pistols played a third gig at a dilapidated and foul-smelling former bingo hall known as the Electric Circus, on a bill that also included Buzzcocks, the Clash and the Heartbreakers, the pocket-sized community that had formed after the Lesser Free Trade Hall concerts had morphed into a fledgling scene.

“Punk had started to hit the press hard,” says Denise Shaw, one of the original Manchester punks, referencing the profanity-laced interview that British TV host Bill Grundy conducted with the Sex Pistols that catapulted them to tabloid infamy. “The place was packed due to massive amount of publicity the Pistols had been getting.”

My most vivid memory of seeing the Sex Pistols at the Electric Circus is what happened after the show when I got jumped from behind by a bunch of neighborhood kids and received a serious kicking that left me cut and bruised for weeks. That was my introduction to the Perry Boys, an ultra-violent subculture of soul boys who sported wedge haircuts and Fred Perry t-shirts, and who would be later immortalized by the Fall on the song “City Hobgoblins.”

Still, that didn’t stop me the next week from chopping off my Bryan Ferry-style hairdo, buying a dog collar and black garbage bag on which I stenciled “I Hate Pink Floyd,” much to the amusement of my poor Irish mom. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, just look at yourself,” she said between gales of laughter. “You’re wearing a dustbin liner.”

Author Frank Owen wearing two-tone Teddy Boy drape jacket | photo by Kevin Cummins

Manchester during this period was a dangerous place to stand out from the crowd. If the Perry Boys didn’t get you, then the Teddy Boys (the U.K. equivalent of rockabilly fans) and the soccer hooligans were waiting around the corner. Manchester punks had little choice but to take refuge in gay clubs, one of the few venues where punks could hang out without the risk of getting a broken beer glass shoved in their faces. That’s how a small downstairs gay nightclub called the Ranch Bar on a desolate street surrounded by empty warehouses became the Manchester punk scene’s headquarters.

Owned by local drag performer Foo Foo Lamar, the space was hidden in the basement of Foo Foo’s Palace and was connected to the main establishment by a door behind the bar. The Ranch had a strict admittance policy. After knocking on the door, a sliding letter box would open up like an old time speakeasy and Jerry the doorman would inspect you through the slot and decide whether to let you inside.

“He could turn you away on a whim and often did,” remembers Francis Taylor, a well-known local face on the scene. “A friend told me years later his mood depended on whether he had been able to get tugged off in the public toilets in Stephenson Square earlier in the evening.”

Then it was down a flight of rickety stairs and into a dingy basement which was decorated like a country and western honky-tonk, complete with cow horns, oil lamps and saddles for bar seats. Probably the most incongruous aspect of the decor was an illuminated sign perched on the bar saying “Hot Pies.”

“It was a peculiarity of late license laws in Manchester at the time that food had to be available until the premises closed,” says Taylor. “When the police raided, one of the first things they would check was that there was food available, because if you didn’t have it they would shut down the club and kick everyone into the street immediately.”

The music played at the Ranch was a strange mixture. Because only a few punk records had been released at the time, most of the tunes the DJ played were standard fare from Bowie, Roxy and Lou Reed, interspersed with oddities such as the Andrew Sisters’ 1945 calypso hit “Rum and Coca-Cola” which usually packed the tiny dance floor. The night always ended with “What A Way To End It All” by the whimsical art-school band Deaf School who were from nearby Liverpool.

At first, the place catered mainly to Bowie and Roxy fans. As more and more of them grew bored with the glam look and started to sport leather jackets adorned with safety pins and razor blades, it turned into an exclusive social club for the Manchester punk set. On a typical night, you’d find scattered about the room musicians from all the major bands that formed in the wake of the Sex Pistols’ Lesser Free Trade Hall gigs, preeminent among them Buzzcocks, the Fall and Joy Division prototype, Warsaw.