5/ The Sex Pistols [ Back to excerpts ]

In spring 1976 we did a gig at Middlesborough Town Hall, as part of that UK tour. We got a call from Martin Hopewell asking if we would be prepared to let a band called The Sex Pistols support us for that one gig. They were a new so-called 'Punk' band who had attracted an inordinate amount of media coverage, thanks to the astute manipulation of staged 'outrages' by their self-proclaimed Situationist manager, Malcolm McLaren. As yet they hadn't yet played any shows outside London, and McLaren decided it was time for them to start. By this time we were drawing audiences of up to 1000 people a night. We were the only band around with any sort of sizeable following that were prepared to take the risk of having them on the bill with us. Most of the other bands around were too 'muso' and precious to share a bill with such an anarchic rabble. I liked what I had heard about their attitude and we agreed to give them the gig.

On arriving at the venue in Middlesborough, which actually turned out to be a large drab soviet-style functions-room underneath the Town Hall itself, we did the usual stuff a headline band does; sound checking and dicking around, drinking and chatting to the die-hard fans who arrive at a venue even before the band does, while the surly, pimply-faced quartet sat in the auditorium behaving suitably obnoxiously. The farted, burped, yawned extravagantly and giggled. We were surprised how weedy they looked, like schoolboys bunking off school, muttering asides to each other that were designed to aggravate and provoke. We didn't rise to the bait, but like an irritating wasp buzzing around a picnic, they were impossible to ignore. While they didn't dress as outrageously as we had been led to expect, their sole concessions to what became known as 'the punk look' being their spiked-up hair, a few badges, a torn T-shirt and the odd safety pin, Johnny Rotten, the front man, had an extraordinary presence and charisma, and his nasal whine seemed to have been rehearsed to perfection. Glen Matlock, the bass player, seemed ordinary and unremarkable, Steve Jones was yobbish and Paul Cook was just a typical drummer, who seemed temperamentally to be just like Peter di Lemma.

Eventually we let them have the stage, and when they realized that they didn't have all the equipment they needed, they sheepishly asked if they could borrow some of ours. Urban Blitz flatly refused to lend them his guitar amp, and I think the rest of us were none too keen to let them loose on our equipment. They had already attracted a certain reputation for trashing any equipment they borrowed. Somehow or other they did a sound check, and it really was a god-awful racket that they made. It was desultory, half-hearted, out of tune and rhythmically all over the place. The funny thing with the Pistols was that if you took away Rotten's petulant, snotty-nosed vocal delivery and lyrics, you were left with fairly conventional up-and-down pub rock. An hour or so later, however, when the punters were in and the Pistols were on stage, they were electric. They spent their entire 25-minute set goading and cajoling the audience, daring them to trash the joint, provoking the most extreme reaction I had ever seen at a gig, all the while the band seemed almost comatose with boredom. It was a great act. Bryan Morrison would have approved- when they had the audience by the balls, they squeezed 'em.

The audience watched, open-mouthed and wild-eyed. They gobbed and they pogoed, the vertical take-off, Tourette's Syndrome inspired dance of the time, and they were putty in the Sex Pistols' hands. Live, The Pistols mixed standards like Iggy Pop's Stooges song I Wanna be Your Dog and the Monkees' I'm not your Stepping Stone with their own nihilistic anthems that would soon make them famous, like Anarchy in the UK and No Feelings. It was a dreadful sensation, watching them from the side of the stage and knowing that we just couldn't compete. There is a passage in George Melly's excellent autobiography 'Owning Up', in which he describes how, witnessing the hysterical teenage audience reaction to 1950Õs British rock'n'roll hero Tommy Steele for the first time, a jazz colleague turns to George and says, 'You hear that? That's the Death of Jazz. We've had it. In six months we'll all be in the Bread-line'. I must confess that is exactly how I felt watching the Sex Pistols play that night. They were changing the rules, and the game was being snatched away from underneath our noses.

We followed them onto the stage after a suitably long interval, hoping that the temperature would cool sufficiently for us to get the audience going again. In truth the gig we did that night was pretty good, but we knew that we had not generated one quarter of the excitement that the Sex Pistols had. Our fans came backstage and were enthusiastic, as usual, and many of them told us that they thought that the punk thing would blow itself out in a couple of months, but I was neither comforted nor convinced. I was simply jealous. To compound what had been a very bad evening for us, while driving back to the hotel after the gig, we realized that we had all had some money stolen from our clothes in the dressing room while we had been on stage. It didn't require Sherlock Holmes to deduce that while we had been performing, the Pistols had gone through our pockets and scarpered. They didn't take a great deal, in truth there wasn't much to take, just a few quid from each of us at most, but we were livid. We weren't the final victims of that truculent, snotty-nosed bunch- the unholy trinity of record companies, EMI, A & M and Virgin, still hadn't yet had the pleasure of their company, nor checked their back pockets to find that they had had hundreds of thousands of pounds filched.

21 years later, I was working as an actor in Germany on a regular TV show, travelling to Munich every weekend. I had a driver, a jovial, garrulous bear of a man called Ossi, who always collected me at airport and drove me to the TV studio, and then did the reverse journey when I was travelling back to London. After our last show before the summer break, I asked him what he would be doing through the summer, and he replied that he would be driving bands around the different outdoor festivals in Germany. 'That sounds fun' I said, 'Who's coming over?' 'Oh, I shall just be driving The Sex Pistols for their reunion tour.'

I knew that the Pistols had reformed for this bank-snatch, sorry, reunion tour, and the rumour was that they would get a million pounds each for the summer. I took out a pen and scrawled a message for Johnny Rotten: Dear Johnny, I have just been going through the pockets of a pair of trousers I haven't worn since you supported me in Middlesborough in 1976. I am afraid to say that approximately twelve pounds seems to be missing. If you know anything about the matter, would you kindly settle with Ossi? Best wishes Richard 'Kid' Strange. I gave it to Ossi and asked him to give it to Johnny Rotten at an appropriate moment.

In September when I returned to Munich, Ossi was waiting for me at the airport, as usual. In the car I asked, 'How was summer?' and he replied, 'Oh, it was great. Lots of festivals and lots of fun. Oh, by the way, I have a letter for you.' He slipped a tatty envelope over his shoulder to me, in the back of the car, as he drove. Inside, in ragged handwriting, was short note: 'Dear Kid. Yeah. Sorry about that. I do remember something. Hope this will cover it. All the best John Lydon' Attached to the letter was a crisp new fifty-dollar bill and a receipt on which he had scribbled PAID IN FULL. It was quite a nice touch and rather endearing. When I told Malcolm McLaren about this he laughed and said, 'But I'm sure it was Steve (Jones) who nicked all the money that night'.

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