It was a day that went down in music folklore.
Christmas Day, 1977, and a nightclub in Huddersfield was about to make history.
Ivanhoes, on Manchester Road, played host to a gig by The Sex Pistols. Just two years after the start of their controversial career, the Pistols thrashed out their final UK gig on that day.
It was an event that placed the town on the punk rock map and it is a slice of anti-establishment heritage now being explored by two students at its University. They are keen to record interviews with local survivors of the scene.
Many bands including The Damned played what was Huddersfield Polytechnic.
The research pair have started work on audio guides to Huddersfield’s punk past, and their research has earned them a slot at an important academic conference.
The students are Martyn Richardson, 30, who is completing the second year of his history degree, and 50-year-old Jon Crook, who is in the third and final year of his degree course in music technology.
The two came together via an innovative University of Huddersfield scheme named CollabHub, pioneered by music technology lecturer Dr Liz Dobson as a way of forging productive links between students from differing subject areas. This inter-disciplinary dimension and its advantages will form part of the presentation to be given by Martyn and Jon at a conference taking place at Salford’s Lowry Centre this week.
Organised by the Higher Education Academy, the event is titled Heroes and Monsters; extraordinary tales of learning and teaching in the arts and humanities. Martyn and Jon have entitled their paper Wild West – Punk in Huddersfield.
Jon, whose varied career included social work, farm work, teaching and computers before embarking on his music technology degree, has first-hand recollections of the punk movement that erupted in 70s Britain, plus its 1980s aftermath.
He wasn’t present on December 25, 1977 when the Sex Pistols played a Ivanhoe’s but was at another defunct local club, Cleopatra’s, when a new group named Adam and the Ants played an early gig, scarred by a skinhead invasion.
The performances are the starting point for a “sound walk” project that Jon and Martyn have begun to assemble, as part of a module named Hands on History, taught by Dr Janette Martin.
Jon and Martyn have managed to obtain ambient recordings of both the Ivanhoe’s and the Cleopatra’s performances and these will be edited with overdubbed commentary. Jon said: “Huddersfield became a hot bed for punk rock. It was exactly the sort of town, well away from the fashion-conscious metropolis, where this music was most likely to capture and retain a loyal following.
“The theme of our project is the fact that punk made a big impact in a lot of provincial and rural places in the UK, where it had quite a long-lasting effect”.
The political dimension to this angrily anti-establishment music – with its critique of the distribution of wealth and power – was one reason for this, he added. And this is where history student Martyn comes in.
He is too young to recall the music at first hand, but he is fascinated by working-class history and the long tradition of radicalism and protest in Huddersfield and the West Riding. The 1970s punk scene fits into that pattern, argues Martyn, whose research interests, revolving around “history from below”, include the 1980s miners’ strike.
Jon and Martyn now intend to map other locations in Huddersfield that were linked to punk and to interview local people who have recollections of the scene from 1976 onwards, with the goal of producing an audio-visual documentary.
If you have memories of Huddersfield’s punk rock scene, contact U1263027@unimail.hud.ac.uk or U9952744@unimail.hud.ac.uk
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