It was on the fifth floor in an open common room with no stage There were no lifts and it was stairs all the way up It was empty - no tables or anything - pretty dark There were no more than 40 people there They were selling cheap white wine at 20p a cup. I had seen the Pistols rehearsing before the gig quite a few times before John had joined when they still had Wally Nightingale on guitar. At that stage it was very rudimentary - how shall I put it - they weren't the best musicians in the world They were feeling their way. John gave them another dimension when he joined.John Ellis (guitar/vocals Bazooka Joe, later played with The Vibrators and The Stranglers)I was the founder member of Bazooka Joe with Daniel Kleinman We started as a rock'n'roll covers band like Sha Na Na. Here we relive that fateful night with the people who were there.Glen Matlock (Sex Pistols bassist.
Now touring with Glen Matlock and The Philistines) I set the gig up I was at St Martins doing a foundation course. In the second year, I was going to be the social sec but over the summer holidays I decided to take the band seriously after John had joined that August, so I gave my place to someone else and, as I left, I blagged the gig with Bazooka Joe.Mark Helford (key early face on the punk scene who ran The Clash fan club)I was mates with Glen. Within a year, they had released their first single and were about to go on Bill Grundy The British music scene would never ever be the same again. and the sheer energy and wealth of ideas thrown up by punk rock remains a musical staple to this day. The band's mod roots were apparent but they had been dredged through a New York Dolls and Stooges blender and dragged bang up to date to a dirtier and meaner time.Within months, the Sex Pistols had created provocation as an art form and turned themselves into the best live band in the country.
The group - Glen Matlock, John Lydon, Steve Jones and Paul Cook - dragged their gear across the Charing Cross Road from a rehearsal room in nearby Tin Pan Alley to St Martins College, got on stage and plugged in. It was just another night on the mid-Seventies circuit; yet one more under-rehearsed new band attempting to break through in a music scene that had long gone stale from the fallout from the 1960s, the death of glam rock and the tail-end of the pub rock scene. What the 40-odd people in the room - most of whom were there to see the main event, Bazooka Joe, fronted by Stuart Goddard, who later became Adam Ant - didn't know at the time was that they were witnessing the beginning of the punk revolution and the first generation gap in rock'n'roll.Their set was made up of mangled versions of Small Faces and Who songs sung with a sneer that had never been heard before. On 6 November, 1975, a scruffy bunch of kids blagged a support gig at an art college in London. John, who lives in Manchester and works as a printer, says: "I play the drums in a band and, from time to time, I practise at home. I had a letter from the council saying that the woman who lives in the house which backs onto mine was distressed about the level of noise."John says he apologised immediately and the problem went away for about 12 months.