No, sorry to disappoint, I am not offering a recording of this gig, I wish I could. Sifting again chronologically through some old music press, specifically from 1976, it is interesting to see how week on week London's new music gained in prominence. Scan the music listings pages and it is clear that The Stranglers were thrashing the hell out of the ice cream van, all across the capital and beyond, from the beginning of the year. The likes of Eddie & The Hot Rods, The Jam and Squeeze were also out there. Come the summer more of the bands we know and love started to crop up in the listings. But this was before The Roxy and some of those now legendary gigs... The 100 Club Punk Festival, The Screen On The Green, Notre Dam Hall...
In the 5th June issue of New Musical Express a gig was advertised that was to take place in the grand Walthamstow Assembly Hall out on the north eastern extremity of the Victoria Line.
The line up was initially to be Ian Dury's 'Kilburn & The High Roads', a band who brought a piece of music hall tradition to the early to mid-'70s pub rock scene and in doing so inspired the next generation of bands such as the Pistols and Madness in particular, with support from Joe Strummer's pre-Clash band the 101'ers and The Stranglers.
The same gig was advertised in the NME two weeks later (19th June 1976), only 101'ers had dropped off the bill, being replaced by Sex Pistols.
The following account of the gig appeared in the pages of Record Collector online.
THE PISTOLS VS THE SUBURBS
NOT EVERY PISTOLS’ GIG SEEMED LIKE A LANDMARK AT THE TIME, RECALLS IAN McCANN
In a few months’ time, local authorities would be banning Sex Pistols from their boroughs, fearful of the teenage rampage. But on 17 June 1976, the band were welcomed to the Walthamstow Assembly Halls, part of Waltham Forest’s magnificent – if utterly pompous – municipal centre: all pillars, civic pride, magistrates’ court and huge circular fountain (in which I once micturated in a pathetic act of juvenile rebellion).
I was on an ill-tempered caravan holiday with my pal Mick in Walton-on-the-Naze when the Pistols were due to play, but with Ian Dury & The Kilburns playing their final gig, The Stranglers, and this new punk rock whatsit all on the bill, I wasn’t going to miss it for the world and caught the train back for the night.
I met my mate Steve outside on the steps, just as Ian Dury was staggering in on calipers, bless his heart. (My mum knew him by sight when he lived in Diana Road, half a mile away – “I was sure he was someone,” she told me when he was a star, though he wasn’t when he lived there.) There was the air of an event, but not one where we knew what it would be like, though Steve and I had previously seen Kilburn & The High Roads next door at the Polytechnic, and walked out.
Nothing wrong with Dury, but they were a shambles.
So, the Pistols, then. It’s your turn. Go on lads, impress us.
The place was not empty, but we were rattling around a bit in there. You could probably name many members of the audience if you were local. It seems to have become Walthamstow’s answer to the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall gigs in legend, but not in reality. Pete Stennett from Small Wonder was said to have been present, experiencing his Damascene conversion from Silver Apples to punk. But I didn’t see him. What we did see was a bunch of people who looked like they didn’t belong round here. Actually, they didn’t look like they belonged anywhere, dressed in tartan, ripped clothing, with bits hanging out but in a non-sexualised way. It was probably the Bromley contingent, and doubtless McLaren and Westwood; maybe Siouxsie. A phenomenon in the making.
I remember smirking to Steve, “What a bunch of fucking poseurs.”
Never let anyone kid you that punk came from the working class. Ordinary kids adopted it, played it, loved it, but its look and intellectual conceits (and yes, anarchy was an intellectual conceit then – we knew about socialism, we had dads who worked in factories and belonged to unions and history teachers who urged us to join the SWP, but anarchy was no more than a word for making a mess to us common kids) grew out of the art schools and fashion salons. To us, poseurs, more interested in looks and swanking than anything else. People who could afford to mess up because there was something to fall back on, whether it was family money, a nice house in the suburbs, a university education, or a boutique. In fact, just the same as almost everything else that becomes a media craze.
Rotten and co came on early, I am guessing at about 8:15, to a bit of half-hearted noise from the crowd and some shrill squawking from the art school crew. The Pistols were… pretty rubbish. Metallish guitar. Clattering drums. They could play but it didn’t hang together. (It came as a shock when Anarchy was released five months later: so you could fix anything in a studio after all.) Was this the new revolution? It stumbled, rattled, flopped. Lydon, however, was amusing, though he didn’t seem particularly confident and – unlike his later Paddington Bear really hard stare – he seemed to avoid your eye. In No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, he recalls that he wore a rubber shirt and collapsed in the heat after three songs. That didn’t happen. Not in Walthamstow, anyway. There wasn’t much heat in the Assembly Hall, all cold stone and few windows, despite it being the “scorching summer of ’76” (© every lazy cultural commentator). The big event of their set was Glen Matlock busting a bass string. With aeons to fill in front of a mostly only vaguely curious audience, Lydon lolled on the mic stand, and invited comments from the requests. Perhaps he thought it was Two-Way Family Favourites. There was a vacuum, so, abhoring it like nature, I filled it by shouting “Substitute!”, knowing they played it. Lydon said: “We might – if we feel like it.” A further yell elicited the response: “Later.”
Bass string restored, they carried on. They played Stepping Stone, Submission, No Fun, among others. After they played Substitute, I yelled for it again as if it was unrecognisable, thinking I was hilarious. After a while, they went off. The world was not changed. Yet.
The Stranglers weren’t bad, but sounded a bit prog with all that noodly keyboard. Ian Dury & The Kilburns were less shambolic than Kilburn & The High Roads, but lacked warmth, and we left early again. In a short time, all three acts would be massive. But to us, it was a letdown. Was this the future?
In a curious postscript, the next spring I bought a Pistols bootleg from a badge stall in Petticoat Lane market. (They were concealed behind a curtain beneath the stall, so you had to know they were there to browse, which made shopping tricky.) I took it home – it was Indecent Exposure, taped live in Burton-on-Trent. But when I played it, quite clearly audible, there was Glen Matlock tuning up, and a dullard youth yelling for Substitute. Either there was two of me, or the credits, like Lydon’s tale of fainting after three songs, were about 135 miles north of reality. Maybe it was taken from a few gigs. Oh, and the band sounded great on the record…
This for me has to be one of the unsung gigs of the early days of the British punk scene. A handing over of the baton of sorts from the 34 year old Dury to the young Pistols (if not The Stranglers). It was to be the last gig that the Kilburns played for in NME of 17th July, the split of the band was announced on the grounds of Ian's health issues. In the event Dury's absence from the stage was a short-lived thing as with new outfit, The Blockheads, he went on to far greater success than he had enjoyed with Kilburn and the High Roads.
The other two bands performing in Walthamstow on that summer evening also went on to great success along with a certain amount of notoriety in both cases.
Ian McCann's account above seems to suggest that some of the gig (Pistols set at least) was recorded. Is much of it out there I wonder?
