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crowd from which were born bands that would be amongst the most important in Manchester’s musical heritage and would enliven immediate rock history. Mick Hucknall, Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner, Tony Wilson and Mike Pickering were all allegedly present to see the Sex Pistols at that feted Lesser Free Trade Hall show. New Order and Joy Division, Factory Records, Simply Red, The Hacienda club, M People – all were born in some sense out of these cathartic musical events. Pickering, one of the brains behind M People and Quando Quango, was the man to book The Smiths into their first public gig, and would later work with Johnny on at least two occasions.
    But at the Sex Pistols gig was another kid looking for a reason to believe. A young man by the name of Steven.
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    Punk was an immediate call to arms for teenagers everywhere. Not since an army of Bowie clones had peopled a hundred high streets in the early Seventies was there such an immediate rush among across the nation’s youth to join the movement. Punk was the excuse everyone had needed to dress up, get out and get into trouble. Have fun and cause offence. Of course, the movement was about much more than just music. The music attracted a crowd with a certain fashion sense, it didn’t create it. A link between fashion and music features in the punk story and in Johnny Maher’s. The Pistols were born of Malcolm McClaren’s King’s Road boutique, Sex. In London in particular, punk was a fashion statement as much as a musical force, but by the time it had hit the provinces the two had become almost inextricably linked.
    The most tangible evidence that punk had hit town was that kids went out and formed bands of their own. The Sex Pistols were at one and the same time both so good and so bad, that everyone recognised in them something that they could get off their backsides for and do themselves, at a time when nobody else in society seemed interested in them. Punk was the first truly DIY ethic in pop music since skiffle, when a guitar and a washboard were all a band needed to get started. In its earliest days, pop songs were written by professional song-writers, who would present finished songs to artists to perform under studio direction. Via Buddy and The Beatles, artists soon performed their own material. By the end of the Sixties, artists were not onlywriting and performing their own material, but the biggest owned their own labels too, like Apple and Beggars Banquet. But in order to be successful, even the most self-managing bands still had to be accomplished as musicians or singers. Punk demonstrated to everyone that if they had something to say they could simply go out and say it, and do all of the above, regardless of how well they could do so. And they could have it done by tomorrow. And in Manchester – as everywhere else – they said it loudly and proudly.
    For Johnny Maher punk was a sword with two edges. The Smiths were never a punk group, but they had its influence scrawled all over their attitude to the record industry, their love of the three-minute single, their rhythm section, and their uncompromising belief in their own selves. At the time, Johnny watched the movement from a slight distance. He kicked against it largely because of his current interest in English folk music, derided by the hard-line punk movement. At the same time, he was too young to get in on punk’s earliest flourish, those first, influential Manchester gigs. Only twelve years old when the Pistols first came to the city, the first gig that Johnny attended was The Faces. But punk was more than just suburban thrash from south London, if you had the ears to hear it. The American bands embraced by the movement appealed to Johnny much more. Early on, he managed to see Iggy Pop, and it was the related bands such as Television, Patti Smith and The Stooges who joined Bolan and Sparks in Johnny’s pantheon of rock gods. Johnny also recalls seeing Rory Gallagher live at around