In January 1976, the cover of the NME didn’t feature an artist, but a photo of a room damaged by an IRA bomb: there had been a string of terrorist attacks in London the previous year. The headline: “Is rock’n’roll ready for 1976 … Is 1976 ready for rock’n’roll?”
In the accompanying feature, writer Mick Farren was to be found complaining vociferously about the state of music. Audiences are “prepared to tolerate just about anything”. Rock has “lost its guts” and “is on an unalterable course to a neo-Las Vegas”, because artists are “totally insulated from the real world” and thus making music that “seems so damned irrelevant to real life”. Farren reiterated these points in June in a piece titled The Titanic Sails at Dawn, by which point it was obvious that some new artists completely agreed with him.
Fifty years ago this week, the Sex Pistols played their first Manchester gig at the city’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. Attended by future members of Joy Division, the Smiths and the Fall, it is more mythologised in retrospect than noted at the time – there were only a few dozen people actually there – but it nevertheless marked the beginning of a summer that changed British rock for ever.
The next three months saw the live debuts of the Clash, the Damned and Buzzcocks, the arrival of the fanzine Sniffin’ Glue, and the first British gig by the Ramones, whose debut album had arrived in Britain on import a few weeks before the Pistols’ Manchester show. By the end of September, the Sex Pistols had made their first TV appearance on Granada TV’s So It Goes, presented by Tony Wilson, another Free Trade Hall attendee; Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Subway Sect had played their first gigs; and London’s 100 Club had hosted its now-legendary punk festival.
You can argue all you like about how much impact punk really had, but one thing it did very successfully was obliterate everything that came immediately before it from the collective memory. If few periods in British pop history have been more regularly mythologised than punk, the details of the musical world it entered into have mostly been forgotten. But what was that world really like? What did punk actually spring out of? These are intriguing questions, which is why I’m sitting in a tiny room in the offices of archivists Rock’s Backpages, going through endless bound editions of the music press from 1976.
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It is a deeply odd experience. In 2026, we like to think that we know all there is to know about music’s past: it’s been examined in such detail thanks to the heritage rock press and umpteen books, and it’s all readily available thanks to the internet and streaming. But reading the weekly music papers from 1976 is a plunge into a past with which you feel weirdly unacquainted.
Here is a lost musical world where Bruce Springsteen’s name is a byword for desperate hype around underwhelming music – his label’s attempts to push him in the UK with the cocky slogan “Finally, London is ready for Bruce Springsteen” having clearly gone down every bit as badly as Springsteen himself thought they would – while future E Street Band guitarist Nils Lofgren is tipped to become one of the biggest stars in the world, the recipient of so many hyperventilating features on the back of his second solo album Cry Tough that ZigZag magazine feels impelled to publish another feature wondering whether he can cope with all the other features (“Can Nils Beat the Press?”).
The really big names might be very familiar indeed – Elton John, Paul McCartney, Queen, the Who, the Rolling Stones, ELO – but the terms in which they’re discussed are frequently not. “Is Your Fave Rave Rock Star Old Enough to Be Your Father?” screams an NME cover: inside there’s a spread of pictures featuring most of the above, beneath the damning headline “All the People On This Page Will Be 30 Or Over During The Next Year – How Will They Live With It?”, a line that’s hard to read without chuckling, given that today, no one bats an eyelid about the fact that they’re all still treading the boards in their late 70s and early 80s.
A rather more hollow chuckle is provoked by the ongoing hand-wringing about gig ticket prices. That too seems familiar, until you realise that the gig tickets causing the angst – for the Rolling Stones’ spring tour – cost £3, or 30 quid in today’s money. The last time the Stones played Hyde Park, in 2022, getting close to the stage would have set you back £186.
Turning the pages of NME, Melody Maker and Sounds, you’re assailed by a constant stream of forgotten names: who are the Jess Roden Band, Nasty Pop, the Cate Brothers or indeed Elephunt? What’s with the apparent vogue for bands who mix music and comedy, which is a big enough deal to encourage a press rivalry between its two chief practitioners, Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias and Supercharge, the latter apparently reducing audiences to stitches with their onstage impersonations of “Status Quo, Dr Feelgood and the Bay City Rollers”? And what, pray, is going on with the use of the word “punk”, which is common currency to describe music, just not any of the music you’d reasonably expect?
It isn’t used to label the scene that’s burgeoning around New York club CBGBs, nor said movement’s spiritual forefathers the Stooges and MC5, nor the 60s garage rock collected a few years previously on celebrated compilation album Nuggets. Instead, it’s applied by the NME to harmless pop-rock bands City Boy (who “make the future of British punk fractionally more rosy”) and Mr Big (“one of this country’s prime punk outfits”). More baffling still, Melody Maker claims that “a golden age of punk” is heralded by the arrival of Midge Ure-fronted Slik, briefly successful pretenders to the Bay City Rollers’ teenybop crown. Sounds, meanwhile, claims to have found “a genuine article punk”. It’s Nils Lofgren. Him again.
Perhaps the most pressing question is why there’s a constant bubbling stream of discontent at the state of music – you’re never far away from an aside about how things are in “a boring lull”. From the perspective of 2026, a year that involves the releases of David Bowie’s Station to Station, Bob Dylan’s Desire, Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby, Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, Roy Ayers’ Everybody Loves the Sunshine, Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam, AC/DC’s High Voltage and Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life doesn’t seem particularly moribund; if your tastes run to the music covered by magazines Blues and Soul and Black Music, the sheer profusion of incredible new singles is head-spinning – the joy-bringing strains of early disco, Diana Ross’s Love Hangover and Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’ Wake Up Everybody, and so much fantastic reggae you wonder how anyone kept up. Maybe it’s a matter of context: as former Sniffin’ Glue and NME journalist Danny Baker has pointed out, audiences in the early 70s were subject to constant bombardment of new scenes, styles and innovations, including heavy metal, glam rock, dub reggae, Krautrock, P-Funk, pub rock, disco and jazz fusion.
But whatever one makes of the crop of British bands being hotly tipped for big things in 1976, they aren’t particularly innovative, nor do they come as part of a scene: the vaguely glam-adjacent Sailor, the soul and jazz-infused Cado Belle, and “raunchy” hard rockers Strapps, whose notion of raunch, alas, involves writing songs about schoolgirls and being photographed mauling topless women.
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Moreover, the extant scenes are in trouble. The twin poles of British rock in the early 70s, glam and prog, are, respectively, over and in a state of terrible decline. There’s a half-hearted attempt to generate some excitement around a Yes-indebted British band called Druid and Italy’s Emerson Lake and Palmer-endorsed Premiata Forneria Marconi, who’ve just begun recording in English and whose sound has been gifted the unwanted soubriquet “spaghetti rock” (“our cross to bear,” sighs drummer Franz di Cioccio). But it’s a hopeless task.
Most of prog’s chief practitioners are long past their peak, which does rather make a mockery of the idea that punk was a reaction to prog: why would you bother reacting to a genre that’s already long past its sell-by date? Druid will split up in 1977 – although their keyboard player will later find chart-topping success, albeit as the writer of Teletubbies Say “Eh-Oh!” – and PFM will give up singing in English a year later. Pub rock is evidently in decline, too. Dr Feelgood may have hit the big time, but there’s no one to follow in their footsteps: a round-up of hot new talent features Dog Watch, Bearded Lady, Giggles and the Wharf Rats, none of whom will be heard of again.
In the absence of anything else, there’s a noticeable retreat into the past. There is a peculiar revival of interest in the music of the 40s that began as a kind of joke in the soul clubs of Essex – DJs responding to clubbers dressing in the GI style popularised by Bryan Ferry – but appears to have spiralled: “Louis Jordan is currently rivalling the Springsteens and Sliks of this world as the hottest thing since the burning bush,” reports the NME; big band revivalists the Pasadena Roof Orchestra get a lot more coverage than you might expect. Sounds reports on 17-year-old Jay Strongman, who’s singlehandedly trying to a start a mod revival three years too early in his home town of Crowthorne, Berkshire: “There are 50 mods living in the area,” he claims.
But the really big noise in revivalism is rock’n’roll: 5,000 teddy boys march through London to the BBC to demand that Radio One play more rockabilly, part of a countrywide scene in which records by “plastic teds” Showaddywaddy are ritually burned and crowds thrill to British rock’n’roll bands Matchbox, Remember This, the Hellraisers, Rockin’ Pneumonia, Rocky Sharpe and the Razors and Crazy Cavan and the Rhythm Rockers. The weird thing, given that they’re about to become mortal enemies, is how much the teds speak like punks. In an NME feature, one suggests “the spread has happened because of, can I say, the sheer boredom in music”. Another thinks the 1950s appeal because “politically, the country was in a bad state after the war – no money, nowhere to go for the kids, everyone was depressed, not unlike now”.
There is admittedly some brand new music that allows you to vent the frustrations of 1976, a year of rampant inflation, political crisis, rioting and terrorism. Some writers pin their hopes on pub rock refugees Eddie and the Hot Rods, hailed in Sounds as “strictly wham-bam merchants”. Others plump for the “lewd, exciting, loud” Heavy Metal Kids, who certainly talk a good, outrageous game – one live review approvingly notes frontman Gary Holton leading the audience in a chant of “spew up!” – but whose street-rock bona fides are in question thanks to Holton’s background as an actor (he would later find fame starring in 80s comedy-drama Auf Wiedersehen Pet, before dying of an overdose midway through the second series).
But by common consent, the best bet of all seems to be the Doctors of Madness, a largely forgotten bridge between the arty end of glam and punk. Their frontman Kid Strange has blue hair; they boast a violin player called Urban Blitz; they talk about the Velvet Underground and William Burroughs in interviews. They have secured a “record advance” from a major label, and their debut album Late Night Movies, All Night Brainstorms has been excitedly received: listening to its frantic opening track, Waiting, you can see why. “No other band,” readers are assured, “is moving so quickly.” Except, it turns out, for one other band, fronted by Johnny Rotten.
Under the circumstances, you might expect the music press to alight on punk’s arrival with untrammelled delight, but no. The appearance of the Ramones at London’s Roundhouse has Sounds’ reviewer wondering if they’re a comedy act and protesting that all their songs sound the same. Even early Sex Pistols reviews, including the famous February 1976 piece in NME that concludes with guitarist Steve Jones announcing that they’re “not into music – we’re into chaos”, are strikingly equivocal or flatly dismissive. “It will take a far better band than them to create a raw music for their generation,” one NME writer confidently predicts.
“Real lovers of attitude may find the stance of singer Johnny Rotten rather contrived,” complains the NME reviewer who sees them at the Nashville, directing readers’ attention instead towards headlining act the 101ers, who “rock like hell and deservedly get two encores”, blissfully unaware that after seeing the Sex Pistols, 101ers frontman Joe Strummer will decide his band are “yesterday’s papers”.
He wasn’t the only one. The striking thing about the rise of punk is how little impact it had on the rock aristocrats some observers thought it would dethrone: the Rolling Stones’ career continued unimpeded, as did those of Elton John, Queen, ELO, Pink Floyd et al. Instead, it affected almost every artist the music press suggested might be big at the start of 1976. Strapps, Cado Belle and Alberto y Lost Trios Paranoias would never be more famous than they were in the spring of that year. Nor would the Heavy Metal Kids, whose career reached a kind of peak with an appearance on Top of the Pops’ new artist slot in May. No one would call City Boy or Mr Big “punk” again.
Eddie and the Hot Rods would make one utterly incredible single – Do Anything You Wanna Do, a huge hit in 1977 – before diminishing returns set in. At least some of the rock’n’roll revivalists would cross over to mainstream success – most notably Matchbox and Rocky Sharpe and the Razors, who split into two bands, Darts, and Rocky Sharpe and the Replays – but most would remain stars only within their underground scene. In Crowthorne, Berkshire, Jay Strongman’s plans for a Berkshire-based mod revival would be put on hold. “My life changed when I saw the Sex Pistols,” he later reflected: he subsequently became a celebrated DJ.
And it’s hard not to feel for poor old Kid Strange, who invited the Sex Pistols to support the Doctors of Madness in May, then found himself looking on aghast. “I knew it was over for us, I knew someone had just moved the fucking goalposts,” he recalled, summing up the lot of the hot new artists of the pre-punk world, lost to history thanks to punk’s arrival. To add insult to injury, it turned out the Doctors of Madness’s thunder wasn’t the only thing the Pistols stole.
“By the time we got into the dressing room, the Pistols had left, and so had the cash from my back pocket. So that was a really bad day: my career had gone and so had 12 quid.”
