Back in early 2001, David Nolan was enjoying a decent career as a documentary producer for Granada Television when he received the green light for a pet project.

“It was the kind of programme that I joined Granada to make, really,” says Nolan. “I’d worked my way up the hard way, as a reporter and news producer. At that time, it was open house at Granada. You could put your ideas in, and I sold them this idea to do something on the 25th anniversary of the Pistols.”

The Sex Pistols’ gig is enshrined in Manchester music history. On June 4, 1976, relatively early in their brief career, the Sex Pistols played at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester city centre. Tickets cost a princely 50p. Officially only 28 tickets were sold, and it’s thought that no more than around 50 people were present in total, with the band’s headline set done in under 45 minutes. But it proved to be a seminal event. It inspired several audience members (among them Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Morrissey) to head off and form bands of their own.

Exactly who was in the audience that night, though? Well, that’s a whole can of worms right there – partly because a second Pistols gig at the same venue followed on July 20 and memories get foggy, but also because the world and his wife have insisted subsequently that, yes, they were there for that historic first gig. Nolan’s 25^th anniversary Granada documentary, I Swear I Was There, sought to speak to attendees and nail down the actual facts.

The documentary had two immediate consequences. For one, while making it, Nolan crossed paths at Granada with a publisher looking for potential new titles.

“I got dragged into an office and was instructed to tell these people the story about this programme I was doing,” he recalls. “They said, ‘can you do a book to go with this?’ They used to do that a lot in the olden times – you’d watch something on telly and at the end it would say ‘and there’s a book to accompany this programme’. So I made the programme during the day and I wrote the book during the night. I nearly went mad, but I managed to pull this book together in a matter of weeks. And you know, what a thrill to walk into Waterstones on Deansgate and see a book with your name on it. Just legs-go-to-jelly stuff, that was.”

In fact, this changed the course of Nolan’s whole career. In time, he’d leave Granada and become a full-time writer. But there was another striking consequence of the documentary. After it aired, Nolan was contacted by a complete stranger called Paul Welsh. He’d been at the Pistols’ gig. What’s more, he had the evidence to prove it.

A front-row seat

In July 1976, 23-year-old Paul Welsh from Heaton Chapel was a window cleaner. Fascinated with music from an early age, in 1973 he’d launched his own fanzine, Penetration Rock Magazine, named after a track by Iggy and the Stooges.

“From the first issue, I always had a punk band in,” Welsh says. “The Stooges and Suicide were in the first one. The Velvet Underground, Flamin’ Groovies… so when I read a review in the NME saying ‘the Sex Pistols are coming’, I thought ‘I’ve got to see them’.”

On May 21, 1976, Welsh went to see beloved Manchester act Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias play at the Palace Theatre. On the way out, he was handed a flyer for the Sex Pistols’ upcoming gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall. He wasted no time in getting a ticket, and turned up on the night with a few friends, plus a camera.

“I’d decided I was going to write something in the magazine about it and take a couple of photographs,” he remembers. “It was quite expensive to take photographs. When I was doing the magazine, I’d normally buy a 36-shot film. Then I could sort of fit six bands on it.” However, when the main attraction took to the stage that night, Welsh was swept up by the occasion.

“It was so different to what we were used to seeing. It was like something completely new, really. It was so basic, no stage set, and they looked like a bunch of mechanics from a local garage or something. I just got carried away and took 21 shots.”

Afterwards, Welsh wrote a review of the gig for the next issue of Penetration – the only published review, in fact – and included a few of those black and white photos, taken from the right-hand side of the stage on the night, before storing the negatives away in his loft. Over the next few years, life took Welsh in different directions. For a time he wrote TV comedy sketches for the likes of Russ Abbot and The Real McCoy, and he quite forgot that those photos even existed. That is, right up until 2001, when his memory was jogged by reading an interview with Nolan in Manchester listings magazine City Life, in which Nolan discussed his Sex Pistols anniversary documentary and book, and lamented that no one seemed to have taken any photos of that landmark June 1976 gig.

A few days later, Nolan was in the bar at Granada (“not an unusual occurrence, it has to be said,” he confesses). With mounting astonishment, he looked through the contents of an envelope that had been left for him.

“It was a full set of photographs from the first gig. I thought ‘this is amazing’. Nobody knew that these things existed. Actually, my first thought was ‘no, this can’t be right, there’s no way that no one has seen these photographs since 1976, it’s just too good to be true’. Being an old cynic, I remember sitting there looking at them, thinking, ‘can’t be, can’t be’. But yeah, it could be. It was, and it was a great thing. They’re cracking photos. It would still be a fascinating story if they were rubbish, but they’re not, they’re fantastic pictures.”

One of the photos, showing the audience watching the band on stage, has since become – to use a much overused term – iconic. Nevertheless, Welsh admits that “if I’d have taken that with a digital camera and looked at it, I’d have deleted it straight away, because I’d have thought ‘why did I take that with all the audience?’”

When Welsh sent his photos to Nolan, a second screening of the TV documentary was on the horizon.

“I was like, ‘okay, let’s include these pictures into the new version of the programme’,” Nolan says. “Granada weren’t terribly happy about it, because they thought this was going to cost them money. I said ‘I’ll do it at night. I don’t care, we’ve got to show these pictures, and give Paul the credit that is long, long overdue’.” Sure enough, Welsh’s photos appeared in the revised repeat, and in all subsequent editions of Nolan’s I Swear I Was There book. 

I Swear I Was There

As the 50th anniversary of the gig looms, the Sex Pistols themselves, fronted by Frank Carter, will be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the historic Lesser Free Trade Hall gigs with a show at Manchester’s Castlefield Bowl on July 12 (with ticket prices significantly higher than 50p). As for Nolan, he’ll be marking the occasion with a number of talks. The book incarnation of I Swear I Was There is into its fourth edition.

“Every time, things have been added including new photographs and new interviews,” says Nolan. “Every single time it’s got bigger and bigger and bigger.” Since it was last updated, Nolan has continued to unearth new details.

“It’s part rock ‘n’ roll history lesson, part mythical quest, and it carries on. There’s always another little nugget around the corner. There’s always another little ‘well, I didn’t know that’, so the work is never done. I’ve never blocked off this story. I’ve never gone off-shift. I’ve always, always kept on doing interviews, following new leads and finding out new things. I had a reasonable pile of them, so I thought ‘I’ll put them into the talks’.”

Nolan teases a major new revelation to be unveiled at these talks (a fact relating to someone who was, it turns out, there), part of the fruits of his ongoing painstaking researches, drawing on his journalistic background. “That’s been my job,” he says. “And I have approached it in the same way as I’ve approached a prison riot or a robbery or whatever. I’ve gone to the scene, I’ve interviewed the key players, and I’ve presented their version of the facts for people to make their minds up.”

However, Nolan’s book does provides a definitive answer to one particular question, namely: who shot the Pistols? For that, it turns out we have Paul Welsh to thank.

By Andy Murray, Music Editor

Main image: Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, June 4, 1976. Copyright Paul Welsh.

 

David Nolan will be speaking at Never Mind the Books, Here’s Punk Day at Central Library in Manchester on July 11, 2026 (tickets are pay-what-you-can). For more information, click here.

I Swear I Was There by David Nolan (featuring Paul Welsh’s photographs) is available from John Blake Publishing