NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS

PHIL GRIFFIN UNCOVERS THE TRUTH ABOUT THOSE SEMINAL SEX PISTOLS GIGS AND TALKS TO DAVID NOLAN, DIRECTOR OF THE NEW GRANADA DOCUMENTARY

I SWEAR I WAS THERE

Texan songwriter Guy Clark has a song called 'The Last Gunfighter Ballad' in which the protagonist 'calls himself a gunfighter, the last of the breed'. He bores people in bars with his tales of shoot-outs and vengeance. He has lived beyond his time. One day, his reverie is so vivid, he begins to relive the past. He puts down his drink and walks into the street, where he takes a stance, hand hovering at his side,'he's checkin' out the sun / and is killed by a truck as he goes for his gun'. The end. Was he or wasn't he the last gunfighter? Was he there at the OK Coral when the Earp brothers shot up the Clanton gang, or had he just grown old believing he was?

Granada TV producer, David Nolan, in his days as a trainee journalist in 1981, thought he had spotted a bullshitter when Peter Oldham, a press photographer he was working with, claimed to have been at both the legendary Sex Pistols gigs in the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976. "you don't believe me?... I'll bring in the photos" said Pete. He did. One of them - of the second gig - is on the cover of this magazine. David explains, "I told Peter back then that if I ever got the chance to make a TV documentary about those events I would, and if I ever did, I'd show his photos. Well, now I have."

Peter Oldham is interviewed in the programme. He tells about the time that he had to swerve to avoid the Pistols as they swaggered on to Oxford Street, not far from the sacramental gig, "I could have changed the course of music history," he claims, and the rest of this documentary goes a long way to justify his muse. Without the Lesser Free Trade Hall (which is neatly alluded to in the programme as sounding like 'a breed of small bird') there would have been no Joy Division, no New Order, Buzzcocks, Fall, Factory Records, HaÁienda, Smiths or Oasis. And without David Nolan there might never have been this amiable parade of double chins and faintly punkish hair arrangements, to back up this perhaps parochial view of world history. And there may not have been the authoritative dome and reassuring spectacles of one Howard Trafford to affirm every detail of the legend.

Howard and his friend Peter McNeish were mates at Bolton Institute of Technology. They went to London, found Kings Road and made it to the clothes shop called Sex, pencilled hi a Pistols gig in Bolton with Malcolm McLaren, watched the band a couple of times and headed home, to change their names to Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley. Bolton Institute refused the gig when the Pistols started hitting the newspapers, and history, and a large sector of the independent music industry in Britain, was made in Manchester instead. David Nolan becomes a sort of master of ceremonies during the telling of the story that follows, Off screen, he conducts the witnesses in their parts, and, because, for once, they have been asked to retell events that they actually had some part in, even the most worn-thin of TV pundits - I'm thinking here of Paul Morley - have comfortable weight and substance. Morley has never been better, Peter Hook puts you in the room, Peter Oldham quietly expresses the impact on his life, and the entire ensemble could be revisiting the first Lib-Dem conference in Harrogate, or the opening of Ikea, for all the residual anger and anarchy that flies around.

The summer of '76 was one of the hottest on record. Pleasant though this was, men in Manchester had yet to discover shorts and sandals. Sadly, we had chosen this moment to take to padded leather baseball boots. Sticky blokes wandered around looking more or less like Tony Wilson on So it Goes; too tight denim, ventilated by strategic rips, and too long hair, short on conditioner. David Nolan has a curator's feel for all this. "It was cheese cloth and clogs in there. The audience wore mutton chops and flares." He's been forensic about the Free Trade Hall. "If you're going to tell the story, you should get it right..." Jon Savage didn't get it right in England's Dreaming, his punk manual from a few years back. Savage brings all the intellectual power of a high Cambridge graduate to the job of sifting through the remains of Slaughter and the Dogs, Ed Banger and Buzzcocks. Nolan is a bit more night school about it. The good thing about his documentary is that he is comfortable with the Manchesterness of it all.

In the programme, Tony Wilson says that the Sex Pistols taught us, "just how bloody awful music at the time was." Maybe so. Styx, Wishbone Ash, Peter Frampton and Supertramp may not have turned on many lights but, to be honest, my all time high point of 1976, was seeing The Four Tops (sadly, not their high point) at the Golden Garter in Wythenshawe. Las Vegas came to the Civic Centre for Christ's sake, Leo Stubbs two yards beyond my beer and chicken-in-a-basket. This is not some callow youth (gifted or otherwise) in mutilated pink jacket and fucked-up hair, but the pitch perfect step by step magic of 'I Turn to Stone' and 'Reach Out. And I am breathless, and The Four Tops hang around and talk pleasantly to folk who find their way to the hotel bar after the show.

Back to punk. After Trafford and McNeish had changed to Devoto and Shelley, they cranked up The Buzzcocks, and put Bolton behind them: 'Spiral Scratch', 'Shot by Both Sides, 'Song From Under The Floorboards'. Houldsworth Hall, Electric Circus, Belle Vue. Some serious stuff and a lot of great pop music. For the most part punks did what kids are supposed to do, they got out from under their parents' feet. They changed into bondage in Chorlton phoneboxes, and revised for their 0-levels every other night. Peter Hook saw the Pistols and bought a bass guitar the next day. Good result.

According to the misprinted tickets (see contents page) for the first gig, and if you believe what you hear, life in Manchester and the world at large, changed forever on the night of June 4 '1076'. I could believe that. As it is, Mancunians have been blessed with Joy Division, New Order, Buzzcocks, and Tony Wilson. Granada TV were first to show The Beatles and The Sex Pistols. Incidentally, they were the last (and only) British TV company to show Billie Holiday, and they screened Ella Fitzgerald, Muddy Waters, Gene Vincent, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Sister Rosetta Tharp. Nowadays, they grab Russell Watson while hes hot. David Nolan knows the score. He got his programme commissioned because it's a bit of history in neat numbers, and it exploits a tiny bit of Granada's archive. The cast he has pulled together to help him to tell the story "straight", are as nice a bunch of people as you would ever wish to meet in the Electric Circus or the Oaks. Punk parents can gather their grandchildren round the telly and swear they were there. Anybody who winces at Eminem and pours scorn on other peoples' kids, or slams the behaviour of out-of-controt teenagers, might learn a salutory lesson.

I Swear I Was There, Granada, 11.30pm, Thursday 31 May.

©2004 CITYLIFE

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