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On June 4, 1976, the Sex Pistols played Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall to an audience of no more than 50 people. The night would colour the lives of everyone in attendance, and change the city's music scene forever.
The Pistols were invited to play the show by Bolton Technical College students Howard Trafford and Pete McNeish, better known to the world now as Buzzcocks founders Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley. The pair's initial motivation was somewhat selfish - they wanted their new band to support the London punk quartet - but Buzzcocks weren't yet ready to perform in public, meaning that the opening band slot was reluctantly passed over to local rockers Solstice, whose biggest claim to fame was that they could play Mountain's Nantucket Sleighride note-for-note.
19-year-old Salford lad Peter Hook learned of the Sex Pistols gig when he saw an ad for the show in the Manchester Evening News. He immediately phoned his friend Bernard Sumner to see if he fancied coming along, but Sumner had never heard of the band.
"They have fights at every gig and it's really funny," Hook recalls telling him. "Come on, it's only 50p."
In his 2013 memoir Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division, Hook would describe June 4, 1976 as "a night that turned out to be the most important of my life."
When they arrived at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, Hook and Sumner handed over their 50p admission fee to Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, who was doing the door.
"The Sex Pistols’ gear was set up and then, without further ceremony, they came on: Johnny Rotten, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones and Paul Cook," Hook recalls. "Steve Jones was wearing a boiler suit and and the rest of them looked like they’d just vandalized an Oxfam shop. Rotten had on this torn-open yellow sweater and he glared out into the audience like he wanted to kill each and every one of us, one at a time."
When the band started playing, the sound was so "loud and dirty and distorted" that Hook couldn't actually determine which song they were playing. But this minor detail was irrelevant, for he recalls his life being transformed instantly.
"I remember feeling as though I’d been sitting in a darkened room all of my life – comfortable and warm and safe and quiet – then all of a sudden someone had kicked the door in, and it had burst open to let in an intense bright light and this even more intense noise, showing me another world, another life, a way out. I was immediately no longer comfortable and safe, but that didn’t matter because it felt great. I felt alive."
Hook's immediate thought was "I could do that".
"The second thing I felt," he wrote, "was: I want to do that. No, I fucking need to do that."
"On the way home that night we decided to form a band."
The same thoughts doubtless struck other audience members, who included future Smiths frontman Morrissey, future Simply Red frontman Mick Hucknall, and Mark E. Smith, future frontman of The Fall, as well as Buzzcocks duo Shelley and Devoto. When the Pistols returned to the same venue that following month, future Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis and future Factory Records founder Tony Wilson were in attendance also.
Manchester's music scene would never be the same.
