SHOOTING THE PISTOLS

Punk’s DIY ethos inspired great art, records and fashion. It also inspired one pioneering fan, Cindy Stern, to go to gigs with an ordinary camera and start shooting. The results are here: the Sex Pistols, Clash, Heartbreakers, Damned and Buzzcocks, at the start of the whole mad era. These amazing edgy photos shot at events such as the Screen On The Green and the Pistols’ forgotten northern debut (to an crowd of 10) in Northallerton, have never been published. This is an Instamatic history in the true spirit of the age. Tim Naylor reports

 Record Collector has been given exclusive access to a unique collection of photographs chronicling the very earliest days of punk, including the Sex Pistols’ first northern gig in the spring of 1976, and pictures from the legendary Screen On The Green event when The Clash had Keith Levene in their ranks.

The photographs were taken by cross-dressing music obsessive Cindy Stern, who attended these gigs with his then-girlfriend Pauline Murray (later to be lead singer of Penetration) and his trusty Instamatic camera, capturing some truly fascinating and utterly unrepeatable images of the nascent Pistols and other punk luminaries.

In the spring of ’76, Stern had hung out at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Sex shop on the Kings Road, meeting Jordan and – later on – the Bromley crew. He says: “McLaren was impressed that Pauline and I had travelled all the way from Newcastle just to visit the shop and asked us if we could promote a Sex Pistols gig in the north of England? We didn’t have any contacts but McLaren later let us know that the Pistols were playing a short Northern tour, so we of course turned up and I took some snaps while they were playing.”

These are the only pictures to surface from the Pistols’ first Northern jaunt, which took them to Northallerton, Yorkshire, in May 1976 …

by Tim Naylor
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