Shadowplayers

'In late 1975 nothing, absolutely nothing, was happening,' insisted an emphatic Tony Wilson, glancing back over three tumultuous decades. 'We were in that great dead period one gets at the end of a culture. First of all, you watched all your heroes from the sixties grow fat, limp and pointless. How many bad Van Morrison albums did you buy before you finally stopped? And the people who were happening were this pompous, sententious crap. People forget how bad it all was. Two words: Rick Wakeman.'

All this would change in June 1976, when a landmark performance by the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall inspired Manchester to become Britain's second city of punk after London. Yet Tony Wilson was not among the earliest pioneers. True, the foundation of Factory Records two years later owed much to the cultural renaissance sparked by the Pistols, just as Factory itself would in turn perpetuate a unique creative continuum that ranged from Anthony Burgess to The Bee Gees, the Hallé Orchestra to The Hollies, and Alan Turing to 10cc. Far more than any rising media stars at Granada Television, however, the protagonists who would transform the cultural landscape of the city in 1976 were two students from the mundane hinterland of Bolton Institute of Technology: Howard Trafford and Peter McNeish.

In February 1976 Trafford and McNeish were studying for their respective degrees in humanities and electronics. Devotees of The Stooges, Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Brian Eno and Krautrock, the pair had been struggling to form a band for several months, but lacked an imperative, and an outlet. Despite being younger than Trafford by three years, affable guitarist McNeish was the more experienced musician, having hired halls for his grammar-school band, Jets of Air, and on occasion even managing to turn a profit. 'We had in our mind what music we wanted to do,' he maintains. 'It was The Stooges, wasn't it? We wanted people to say it was rubbish and walk away.'

Cerebral and inquisitive, Howard Trafford found himself intrigued by a New Musical Express review of a novel young band from London called the Sex Pistols, whose live set included a Stooges cover, and who claimed to be more into chaos than music. By happy coincidence Trafford had use of a car over the weekend of 20-21 February, and decided to drive south with McNeish to investigate. A call to the NME office established that Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren owned an outré boutique called Sex on the King's Road in Chelsea. Arriving just as McLaren and his assistant, Jordan, closed up, the visiting pair learned the Pistols were due to perform twice over the weekend, opening for Screaming Lord Sutch at High Wycombe on Saturday, then playing in Welwyn Garden City the following night.

Trafford and McNeish attended both shows with Richard Boon, a schoolfriend of Trafford's now in the final year of a Fine Art degree at Reading University. 'We didn't know what the Sex Pistols would be like,' recalls Trafford. 'It was probably halfway through that we found a plot. I wouldn't say they felt quite dangerous but there was something about them, particularly John Lydon. I'd not seen anyone like him in a band before and the fragments of words that came through sounded intriguing. The aggro of it was interesting. At that first gig, John got into a bit of a tussle with somebody in the audience and kept singing under a small pile of people. That was sort of what one had been looking for for quite a while. Suddenly there was a direction, something I passionately wanted to be involved in. We immediately changed our look. I started hennaing my hair, ordered some blue striped jeans and had them taken in.'

'The Sex Pistols stood out like a sore thumb,' agrees McNeish. 'That was what made them exciting. They were also funny as well. It was the opposite of what you expected from a gig. It wasn't about how good they could play, but how good they were. We saw them doing it and we thought, well, if they can do it, we can do it. Howard and I decided we would make it happen, rather than just writing songs and not do anything.'

A critique of television series Rock Follies ('It's the buzz, cock!') printed in listings magazine Time Out gifted the still theoretical band an arresting name, Buzzcocks, in which Trafford would become charismatic singer Howard Devoto, while McNeish waxed poetic as Pete Shelley. Impressed by their enthusiasm, McLaren asked the pair if they could arrange a gig for the Pistols in Manchester, a key proviso being that the venue was not a pub, permitting free entry to all and sundry. Bolton Institute of Technology passed on the idea, as did the Commercial Hotel in outlying Stalybridge. Fortunately Devoto and Shelley discovered that they could book the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester for just £32. Situated upstairs from the much larger Free Trade Hall, the venue was small, seated and salubrious, yet sufficiently unorthodox, and city central. The Sex Pistols date was set for 4 June 1976. McLaren posted a cheque to cover the cost of the booking, and Devoto and Shelley typed up tickets by hand, as well as producing A3 posters and leaflets, and running a preview in the highbrow New Manchester Review, for which Devoto compiled gig listings. These advertised Buzzcocks as support, although on the night the new group were not yet ready to play.

Devoto also posted a Sex Pistols demo cassette to an urbane, modish journalist at Granada Television named Tony Wilson. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in Salford on 20 February 1950, Anthony Howard Wilson was the son of an unemployed actor turned shopkeeper, Sydney, who was also keen on amateur dramatics, and discreetly gay. After attending De la Salle Grammar School, Tony Wilson spent three years at Jesus College, Cambridge, editing the university's Shilling Paper and discovering both drugs and Situationism, but earning only a modest 2:2 grading for his English degree, a result that 'distressed him until the end of time'. Cambridge contemporary Paul Sieveking would recall Wilson as being 'very enthusiastic for causes, but a bit naïve'. Although he nursed ambitions to become an actor, while at Cambridge Wilson realized his thespian abilities were limited, and unwilling to become a teacher, settled on a career in broadcast journalism instead. 'As a television presenter,' he later acknowledged, 'I am still a performer.'

Wilson trained as a scriptwriter and junior news reporter with ITN in London, before returning to Manchester in 1973 to join Granada as a reporter and presenter. 'I thought that to short-circuit the process I would go to a regional ITV company on a local magazine show for two years, learn my trade on the road, and come back as a fully trained reporter. And I got stuck.' He duly appeared on several programmes, notably Granada Reports and What's On, both early-evening news and magazine strands, on which he stood out as smart, witty and flamboyant, becoming a minor household name across the north-west and allegedly receiving 200 fan letters a week. This led to talk of joining Nationwide and the BBC, although ultimately this ambition went unrealized, and Tony Wilson remained in Manchester, a large fish in a small pool.

In June 1976 Wilson was gearing up to anchor the first series of a new late-night music and arts show, So It Goes. His own tastes were unexceptional, ranging from 'Austin, Texas, country music' to Bruce Springsteen. 'The years 1973 to 1975 were unbelievably awful,' he claimed later. 'So It Goes was regarded as a comedy show at first, because there was nothing else to do but have a few laughs.' At the same time, Wilson cheerfully admitted to 'no knowledge of the Ramones, no backward knowledge of the New York Dolls. I wasn't even really aware of Iggy. My own particular introduction to the fact that the world might be changing was when a friend gave me a copy of Horses by Patti Smith.' Despite having no interest at all in British music, Wilson was intrigued by the music on the three-song Sex Pistols demo posted by Howard Devoto, and duly marked 4 June in his diary. 'I used to wonder what made one choose bands,' he mused later. 'Doing English at Cambridge, I'd been brought up as a literary critic, and when you go and see a band it's like doing the practical criticism exam when you're given sixteen pieces of prose or poetry, and you have to choose four and say when they date from and whether you think they're good or bad.'

Lacking a regular bassist and a drummer, Buzzcocks were unable to perform at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on 4 June, and instead drafted in a local heavy rock group called Solstice to open for the visiting Pistols. Most of those present number the audience at around forty, though Devoto pegs the figure at closer to 100. As for Devoto and Shelley at High Wycombe in February, the effect of seeing the Sex Pistols onstage proved to be a Damascene moment for many of...