32 YEARS ON - SEX PISTOLS PLAY BRUM

27-03-2008

The Sex Pistols - Johnny Rotten and all - will play their first Birmingham gig for 32 years this June when they come to the Carling Academy. Tickets go on sale at 9am on Friday.

By our reckoning, the band’s last show in the city was in October 1976 at Bogarts, a rockers hangout in New Street; two months earlier they’d played the legendary Barbarellas.

They also turned up twice in the space of four months at the Lafayette in Wolverhampton at the back end of 1976, and returned there in December ’77 as part of the Never Mind The Bans Tour – this after a performance at Brum Town Hall as part of the Anarchy in The UK Tour was cancelled.

Now the group is back in harness again with three of the original members (Rotten, Cook and Jones) and though it will no doubt be a crowd-mocking anti climax, they have one of the greatest songbooks in rock history.

“Anarchy In the UK”, “God Save The Queen”, “Pretty Vacant”… go on, you know you want to.

The show is a warm-up for their headlining turn at the Isle of Wight festival, and though there’s something undeniably WRONG about seeing punks turn wrinkly - especially this lot - they are living legends who should not, on any account, be missed.