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Wednesday, December 18th, 2024
| Time | Event |
| 7:17a | Watch the Sex Pistols’ Christmas Party for Kids–Which Happened to Be Their Final Gig in the UK (1977)
I’m not sure the Sex Pistols had “available for children’s parties” on their press release, but on a cold and grim Christmas in 1977, that’s exactly what happened. While many Britons were settling in for a warm yuletide, the Pistols decided to host a party/benefit for the children of striking firemen and miners at a venue called Ivanhoe’s in Huddersfield, UK. It turned out that this afternoon gig, along with an evening concert with full-grown punks in the audience, would be the Pistols’ final UK appearance. In a few weeks the band would fly to America for a set of ill-fated gigs and then break up. Soon after that Sid Vicious would be dead. At the children’s concert John Lydon handed out t‑shirts, buttons, records, and posters. There was a pogo dancing competition with a skateboard as a prize, disco music on the sound system, and a gigantic cake with “Sex Pistols” written on it. (A food fight not only broke out, but was encouraged.) Understand that by December 1977, the Pistols were pretty much banned from playing anywhere in Britain, so the announcement of this benefit show was a big deal, and what we would now call “community outreach” was the opposite of the monstrous image that the British gutter press had whipped up against the band. But Lydon knew they weren’t monsters or any threat at all, except towards the establishment. And his memory of the day is nothing but sweet.
Film director Julian Temple caught the entire gig on a “big old crappy U‑matic low-band camera” and while clips from the footage have been used in various docs beforehand, it was only in 2013 that the entire footage was shown on British television, along with reminiscences from the adults who were children at the time of the gig. In the Guardian interview with Temple, he looked back at the footage and commented on the strangeness of a UK Christmas in 1977:
via The Guardian Related Content: Watch the Sex Pistols’ Very Last Concert (San Francisco, 1978) The Sex Pistols’ 1976 Manchester “Gig That Changed the World,” and the Day the Punk Era Began Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here. |
| 10:00a | Hear Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds Radio Broadcast from 1938: The Original Tale of Mysterious Objects Flying Over New Jersey
A month ago, drones were spotted near Morris County, New Jersey. Since then, reports of further sightings in various locations in the region have been lodged on a daily basis, and anxieties about the origin and purpose of these unidentified flying objects have grown apace. “We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus,” declared the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security in a joint statement. But the very lack of further information on the matter has stoked the public imagination; one New Jersey congressman spoke of the drones having come from an Iranian “mothership” off the coast. If this real-life news story sounds familiar, consider the fact that Morris County lies only about an hour up the road from Grovers Mill, the famous site of the fictional Martian invasion dramatized in Orson Welles’ 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Presented like a genuine emergency broadcast, it “fooled many who tuned in late and believed the events were really happening,” writes Space.com’s Elizabeth Fernandez. The unsettled nature of American life in the late nineteen-thirties surely played a part, given that, “wedged between two World Wars, the nation was in the midst of the Great Depression and mass unemployment.” Some listeners assumed that the Martians were in fact Nazis, or that “the crash landing was tied to some other environmental catastrophe.”
In the 86 years since The War of the Worlds aired, the story of the nationwide panic it caused has come in for revision: not that many people were listening in the first place, many fewer took it as reality, and even then, drastic responses were uncommon. But as Welles himself recounts in the video above, he heard for decades thereafter from listeners recounting their own panic at the suddenly believable prospect of Mars attacking Earth.“In fact, we weren’t as innocent as we meant to be when we did the Martian broadcast,” he admits. “We were fed up with the way in which everything that came over this new, magic box — the radio — was being swallowed,” and thus inclined to make “an assault on the credibility of that machine.” What a relief that we here in the 21st century are, of course, far too sophisticated to accept everything new technology conveys to us. Related content: Edward Gorey Illustrates H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in His Inimitable Gothic Style (1960) Hear Orson Welles’ Radio Performances of 10 Shakespeare Plays (1936–1944) Horrifying 1906 Illustrations of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds Carl Jung’s Fascinating 1957 Letter on UFOs The CIA Has Declassified 2,780 Pages of UFO-Related Documents, and They’re Now Free to Download Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall. |
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