Supporting The Sex Pistols

Updated Feb 2024 added Torquay contract

Remember when the Sex Pistols played in Torquay? If you do, you weren't there

In hindsight I looked ridiculous, at the time I thought I looked mad, bad and dangerous to know

Devon Live

By Guy Henderson
14 SEP 2017

Online or PDF version

In case your memory plays tricks on you, as it does to all of us old punks now we have reached a certain age, you weren't there the night the Pistols played the 400 club, the night Johnny Rotten snarled his way through Anarchy, the night Sid punched someone in the front row.

That's because it never happened, despite the lurid stories you may have heard. If you have a mate who says he saw the Pistols at the 400 Club in October 1977, sit him down with a stiff mug of Ovaltine and break the news gently. He didn't.

Torquay United fans found flyers for the gig inside their match programmes that September. The gig promoters clearly thought the Ministand kids were Pistols fans. But the council got wind of the gig by the Pistols, who the previous year had cemented their place among Middle England's most hated by employing weapons-grade swear words on a TV chat show.

The plug was pulled on the 400 gig, and it never happened.
Glen Matlock, who had been in the Pistols before Sid arrived, did play at the Town Hall with his next band The Rich Kids. Stir the Ovaltine, give your mate a pat on the shoulder and tell that's what might be confusing him.

The ballroom itself, however, had played a leading role in the Bay's music scene for some time before and would continue to do so for many sweaty, beery nights after that. Regular readers will have stomped this dancefloor with me before, but we saw The Vibrators there, The Damned and The Rezillos.

It was a great venue, the 400. Down at the bottom of the stairs the door staff would take a cursory look at your provisional driving licence to make sure you were of a roughly appropriate age to go inside, then you would make your way up past the cloakroom and into the venue itself.

I don't think I ever checked a coat in. My school blazer, complete with its phalanx of pin badges and bits of wire sticking out, was part of the uniform, along with a pair of straight jeans and some Frisby's baseball boots. I had garish yellow plastic sunglasses, of course I did. Sometimes I wore one fingerless glove. In hindsight I looked ridiculous, at the time I thought I looked mad, bad and dangerous to know, a fully paid-up member of the Last Gang In Town.

It was a fun time, though, and the 400 was at the centre of the whole thing. Once inside, there were bars at either side of the dancefloor, and the stage in the centre. There was probably food available, but I don't ever remember buying any. We were fuelled by pork scratchings, Picadilly filter-tips and Worthington E. Oddly, one of our number was called Worthington and his initial was E.

There was a balcony upstairs in the 400, and if memory serves me correctly, another bar up there too. Readers may have to help me here. Your memories will undoubtedly be better than mine.

We loved the 400. We went there a lot. I don't remember if we moved on to other things and shifted our allegiances before the club changed its name and its style or after, but the punk bands became new wave acts, then New Romantics and jazz/funk outfits as musical tastes changed and I had to hand in my plastic sunglasses in favour of something marginally more mature and sensible.

Ian Gillan's band played there, and Paul Young's, and UB40, and a reggae band from Bristol called Talisman, who played the 400 one memorable New Year's Eve, but then things moved on and so did we.

Poster from the Anarchy gig at the Torquay

Torquay Contract

Book: Images of England Through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock 'n' Roll ...

By K. Gildart / Link

Torquay 400 Ballroom

If you know of any recording, please email blackmarketclash