One Night in Manchester: The Gig that Changed Music Forever

[Dirty Epic]

Stumbled across this on the BBC website about the 40th anniversary of the Sex Pistols gig at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07cyvmw

The gig itself isn't really anything controversial compared to the territory the Pistols went into a year or so later but what it is special for is pretty much everyone who attended it got inspired to be in or involved with bands in the punk/post punk scene which followed.

Another good link from the BBC site is this one too.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/1Kw2j5LJfwpwz9KB55Gvh1Z/the-10-gigs-that-launched-a-thousand-bands?intc_type=promo&intc_location=sport&intc_campaign=sexpistols&intc_linkname=radio2_fac_article1

[Windy Miller]

Yes. The Manchester Free Trade Hall is quite a place.

Almost 50 years ago to the day, give or take 17 days, Bob Dylan played there. Bob comes on stage and initially plays an acoustic repertoire of hits including ‘Just Like A Woman’ and ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. The gig is going down a storm, but the audience must have had their suspicions raised by all the electrical amps and things that were behind Dylan.

Second half of the show gets underway, Bob plugs in a Stratocaster, and all hell brakes loose.

One fan shouted 'Judas' as they watched him ‘betray’ his Woody Guthrie roots. Taken aback by the vitriolic response from the audience, Dylan snarled back ‘I don’t believe you, you’re a liar’ and then told his band to ‘Play it...loud’ as they delivered a thunderous version of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. “About a third of the audience liked it, a third were bewildered, and a third appalled. Scuffles were breaking out. It was mayhem.

The concert gained legendary status and illegal bootlegs of the concert appeared before it was issued officially. Dylan’s emergence for the second half of the Manchester concert and plugging in is hailed as one of the twenty most important moments in rock history, noted as the night the young American poet clashed head on with the traditionalist die-hards of the British folk scene.



Bob Dylan on stage at Manchester's Free Trade Hall, May 17th 1966.