Next month, the Sex Pistols will release the first of three live albums recorded on their first -and last - US tour. But from the off, things went wrong. Due to members of the group having criminal records, ranging from drug arrests to assaults on a police officer.
A Warners lawyer told The New York Times , "This is a group of youngsters who came up from slum areas and it sounds to me like a lot of small things involved with street kids growing up. Now that they're on the threshold of being somebody, we shouldn't deny them the right to really make it. The delay in securing the visas meant that the first scheduled show on the tour, booked at the Leona Theatre in Pittsburgh on December 28, , had to be cancelled, as did a proposed appearance on Saturday Night Live.
And when the band rolled into Atlanta, Georgia for their opening gig at the Great South East Music Hall, their case was hardly helped by a local TV station gravely informing viewers that the English group would vomit and commit 'sex acts' with one another as part of their show.
Perhaps understandably, the group would face hostile, and in some cases properly violent, audiences in every city they visited, on a tour Steve Jones recalls as "a fucking circus", and "no fun". Bassist Sid Vicious in particular was subjected to more than one assault during the run, not helped by his baiting the audience every night, and begging for heroin onstage. So a lot of people come with their backs up and was fucking throwing so much crap at us, it was kind of scary.
It was such a mess. It ended, famously, with Johnny Rotten telling the audience "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated? Looking at it from the audience's point of view, maybe they thought, 'Wow, this is wild, this is crazy', but from my point of view we were just utterly fucked. In hindsight, we were young. I basically just wanted to run and get away from it.
