Watching the Watchers (Sex Pistols gig, 2008/9)

This one's labelled 'for Charli's book'. I don't know which Charli, or which book. 100% true tho.

BudizZegzBizlsman, geridzdownyerneg

Getting fucked-up always seemed appropriate under the circumstances. This wasn’t, after all, the 100 Club in 1976; it was Manchester in 2008. Not even Manchester Apollo, an old theatre ripe with the ghosts of hundreds of punks and pricks of the past. Nowhere near the Lesser Free Trade Hall, where Johnny Rotten and the boys had kicked off the northern punk scene with a gig attended by everyone from Buzzcocks and Tony Wilson to Mark E. Smith and Morrissey.

Nope, this was at the MEN Arena, one of those glitzy, airbrushed piece of crap sit-down venues more suited to ice hockey and Neil Diamond than green-toothed cultural destroyers. So drinking was always going to be the way to dull the pain of the realisation of the ultimate music-industry subsumation/subjugation of the punk spirit. And it also made them look, hopefully, a little less like the fat old bastards they’d turned into; a horrendous cabaret pastiche of themselves. I was tryna explain all of this to the guy standing next to me, who kept nodding his head sagely in a dislocated kinda manner. Maybe he needed a bit of power fuel to get on board the Pistols pissed bus.

Eere y’arhmate, I zmuggledidin

Then again, the geezer was a bit scrawny-looking so maybe the absinth-n-coal cocktail I’d skilfully blended on the train on the way over was a bit much. I smiled, he half-grinned a little warily

The Pistols had a bit to answer for, I told him, like that time in Bangor Cricket Club when we weren’t allowed a soundcheck for some reason and me and Trifle necked all them sleepy pills and vodka before our band launched into a set that went at about a hundred clicks a second and I broke two bass strings before stripping off all my clothes and trying to knock the PA stack down with my head a bit like Sid did in Texas really and finally running up and down a table full of S4C presenters who’d thought they were there to watch Gorkys Zygotic Mynci but instead had to look at my little winkie flopping around worryingly near their drinks. Talking of the latter…

Juzzabit man, you shure?

He shook his slightly simian head and crossed his weirdly floppy-long arms, moving back a little as the lights went down and a roar rippled from front to back of this cavernous paean to Americanised entertainment. For the next hour and a half Johnny and the gang hammered out all those songs that had got us all here, all in music, all not in real jobs, in the first place. Rotten/Lydon was nasty and acerbic but in the way that your old farting uncle is, not in the way that your fifteen year-old snotty cousin is; Steve Jones was tanned and dreadful-haired, half LA and half lager n lime.

I swigged the last of the bottle and as the last chords of the encore rang out turned to see Ian Brown scurrying from his seat next to mine and try and get his scrawny arse backstage.

I fucked off to the offy. It seemed the right thing to do.