The Ians in the Audience: Punk Attitude and the Influence of the Avant-Garde

Abstract

In the summer of 1976, the London rock band The Sex Pistols played two gigs, one on June 4, the other July 20, at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in the Northern English city of Manchester, concerts which catalyzed a musical movement in the UK – punk rock and its offspring, postpunk – that has since grown in influence and significance to become a phenomenon memorialized, anthologized, and critically mulled over in vast numbers of recordings, books, articles, and films. In the words of the music journalist Paul Morley, who was present at the first of these gigs, an “emotional revolution” began in these encounters between performers and audience.¹ In particular, one young man who saw The Sex Pistols that summer and who found in their music an aesthetic form through which to channel his own sense of alienation has attained iconic status in the thirty-plus years since. His reputation and the impact of his musical and lyrical concerns has been steadily growing since he found a form of martyrdom in an early death, and the significance of the emotive epiphany the gig seemed to embody for him has run on through a cultic set of myths enshrined on various internet sites and in movements dedicated to pursuing his musical legacy. He has become a figurehead for a generation of alienated young men, the hero of an international movement.