Rare footage of the Sex Pistols’ iconic Manchester Free Trade Hall show just sold for £15,000

Rare film footage of the Sex Pistols performing at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976 has been sold at auction for a staggering £15,000.

Known today as the ‘gig that changed the world’, the Sex Pistols’ two June 4th performances at the Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall have long been regarded as one of the pinnacle and most influential moments in music history. 

Among the audience members were future Manc music icons, including Joy Division bandmates Peter Hook, Bernard Sumner and Ian Curtis, Buzzcocks‘ Pete Shelley, Howard Devoto and Steve Diggle, as well as Factory Records founder Tony Wilson.

Mikey / Flickr

According to NME, a seventeen-year-old Morrissey was also in the crowd and had written to the publication shortly afterwards to say he ‘hopes the Sex Pistols make it’.

But what makes the historic gigs truly renown today is the fact there were only forty people in attendance and, perhaps even more famously, very little footage was captured. 

While being loosely recreated in the film 24 Hour Party People, the details surrounding the gigs have remained down to word-of-mouth from those who claim to have been in attendance and, ultimately, to the imagination of music fans far and wide.

Omega Auctions

So as you can imagine, any footage that was captured will be of extreme value today – and, low and behold, rare footage that does exist of the gig has been auctioned off this week for a staggering £15,000. 

Auctioneer Paul Fairweather said the films were ‘as unique as you can get’, with him adding that the shows were ‘huge for bands that spawned off the back of them’ and said ‘it was the birth of punk’.

A spokesman for Omega Auctions told the BBC that the films were the ‘only known footage of the gigs’, so the ‘historic nature’ of them was ‘indisputable’.