The Fake Sex Pistols Poster

Why the Yellow Caird Hall 1st December Sex Pistols Poster is a Fake

Among the prized ephemera associated with the Sex Pistols, few have achieved the same degree of recognition as the poster advertising the 1st December 1976 performance at Dundee’s Caird Hall.

Its image has circulated widely for decades, appearing in auction catalogues, private sales, books, and newspaper features, and has long been treated as an unquestioned document of punk history.

The nature of posters from this part of the band’s history means there are many, many ‘cancelled’ concert posters. This is almost always due to the huge public outcry that resulted from their notorious appearance on Billy Grundy’s Today programme, resulting in the vast majority of their subsequent tour being cancelled. This is from where the Dundee poster gains its historical significance. The story being that the band cancelled this gig at short notice to capitalise on the opportunity to appear on the television show, thus heralding in the ‘punk rock’ movement to the mainstream.

The difficulty, however, is that the poster could not plausibly have been produced at the time it claims to represent. The poster is a fake.

What initially appears to be a simple (if historically important) date on the familiar and well-documented Anarchy Tour begins to unravel when the supporting acts listed on the poster are examined against contemporary sources.

The assumption that the details must be accurate is understandable, given how firmly embedded the narrative of the Anarchy Tour has become in popular memory. Yet when the music press from late 1976 is reviewed in sequence, a rather different picture emerges — one characterised by shifting plans, aborted arrangements, and considerable confusion, in other words - anarchy!

On 6 November 1976, Melody Maker announced a proposed joint tour by the Sex Pistols and The Ramones. The support line-up was presented as Chris Spedding, Talking Heads, The Vibrators, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Notably, no dates were specified, although the tour was expected to begin at the end of the month.

By 13 November, Melody Maker published an update on the proposed tour including a schedule of performances. Dundee’s Caird Hall appeared for the first (and only) time, listed as the 1st December.

However, the support acts, had already changed: Siouxsie and the Banshees were absent, leaving Chris Spedding, Talking Heads, and The Vibrators. The tour itself continued to be framed as a Pistols/Ramones co-headline venture, rather than the Anarchy Tour with which it would later be retrospectively associated.

Importantly, Sounds, reporting on the same day, offered a slightly different version of events, describing an itinerary that diverged significantly and, crucially, made no mention of Scottish dates at all. Even at this early stage, the documentary evidence reveals significant inconsistencies.

And a week later, on the 20th November, Melody Maker reported the collapse of the Pistols/Ramones tour. All previously announced support acts had withdrawn, now replaced by Johnny Thunders, The Damned, and The Clash, while the revised tour was stated to commence on 3 December at Derby. In practical terms, the tour now being discussed is completely different to the initial announcement.

And on the 25th of November, the below advert appeared in the Dundee Courier. Note the date.

When these developments are considered together, two observations become difficult to avoid. First, the scheduling of a Dundee performance on 1 December was never part of a stable or settled plan. Second, the support bands which appeared on the later Anarchy Tour did not coincide with the TINY window during which Dundee was even mentioned.

Had such a poster been produced in mid-November, when the Dundee date was first floated, it would almost certainly have reflected the support acts then attached to the tour. Furthermore, because the Ramones were at that stage positioned as co-headliners, their omission from the design would be extremely unusual.

I asked the Vibrators drummer, Eddie Edwards if he remembered anything and this is what he told me:

“The tour with the Pistols was mooted to us in ‘76 but I remember our manager, Dave, saying that Malcolm McClaren wanted a few grand tour support to do the tour which we didn’t have. We had a single out on RAK but had no advance as he thought; so we could not afford to do the tour. Also we had gigs booked, which would have paid us to play so it was an easy decision to make as we didn’t have the money.”

Obviously, there is 50 years of time passed but this certainly appears to suggest there was little chance of this tour happening, despite what was in the press.

The 1st of December had been planned as a rehearsal for the tour, not a Dundee date, confirmed later by the Damned’s Brian James.

There was only one date for the Dundee Caird Hall gig and it was the official 16th December 1976 that was finalised when it appeared in the Dundee Courier on the 25th of November.

These listed discrepancies relating to 1st of December alone should be enough to consign that poster to the history bin. But there is further weight to ensure it stays there forever.

Additional irregularities arise from the poster’s characteristics. The inclusion of a specific year within the date, while not impossible, was atypical of Caird Hall promotional material from the period (or any concert poster for that matter). Surviving examples from late 1976 and early 1977 display comparable layouts but consistently omit the year. Such deviations are not definitive but within a pattern of anomalies they acquire greater significance.

First-hand accounts further complicate any claim of authenticity. The Entertainments Secretary of Dundee College of Technology, responsible for promoting the Sex Pistols 16th December 1976 date recalled neither chaotic date revisions nor collaborative promotion with the Caird Hall. I asked Robin Paterson, the promoter and Entertainments Officer at Dundee College of Technology (who had previously promoted the band two months earlier at the student union) why the Caird Hall was chosen.

“[The Pistols] were getting bigger by that time so we were going to put it on at the Caird Hall. We booked the hall, the council [who owned the hall] was only involved in telling us how much it cost.”

Robin and his brother Ross (who also worked for the Student Union) described a straightforward venue hire arrangement, with publicity generated only through the now-familiar Jamie Reid poster and the Courier advert.

In fact, this poster sold at Bonham’s a few years ago and came with an excellent provenance via a council worker. https://www.bonhams.com/auction/25996/lot/136/sex-pistols-a-rare-anarchy-in-the-uk-tour-poster-for-the-cancelled-show-at-caird-hall-dundee-16th-december-1976/

Robin told me that these Jamie Reid posters were later sold for 50p after the event was cancelled. Luckily he still has one. He was actually not aware of the yellow 1st of December poster and reasserted it was only the pink Jamie Reid poster which was provided and used.

I was aware there may be a small possibility that the Caird Hall had provided some promotional assistance. I managed to trace their general manager at the time, John Maguire and he also strongly stated that the only posters came from the Dundee College of Technology.

So who did make them then?

The terminology “Tech Ents.” — prominently displayed on the disputed poster may offer a clue. It was unfamiliar to both Robin and Ross from the Dundee College of Technology. It was not a term they or their colleagues ever used as a contraction of their union.

As noted below for their earlier date.

Gordon Gurvan from the Retro Dundee page, who has been instrumental in this investigation, being the first to notice the irregularities and a dogged ally in getting to the bottom of the story, uncovered this Runrig poster from the mid-80s, which appears to be the first use of the “Tech Ents” contraction, long after Robin and Ross left the union.

This information potentially dates the poster to the mid 80s but, amazingly there are still people who are adamant the poster is a 1976 original because they obtained it from The Caird Hall.

Many Facebook pages, eBay listings and Auction listings offer claims from recipients obtaining the poster from a relative/friend/friend-of-a-friend, who in turn obtained it for them at The Caird Hall.

What is not clear is when they obtained it.

What is clear is that many have claimed this route of acquisition. Can there be any truth to these claims and could they provide any authenticity to the poster?

*It should be noted that this stage of the investigation took weeks of reverse image searching, social media stalking, archive digging and cold-calling to some very confused respondents - I’ve purposely not included their details.

I managed to trace the first confirmed sighting of the poster to a local newspaper in 1991. A local memorabilia dealer was pictured as part of an exhibition, a highlight of it being the Sex Pistols Caird Hall poster. The dealer claimed the poster had been ‘taken from a hoarding’. The picture was black and white and very low quality but a news contact managed to provide me with the original photograph. I was expecting a high resolution version which would allow me to zoom in, in the hope that I could compare it - this hoped for patient zero - with those recently sold at auction.

What surprised me was that it was RED and not YELLOW! This meant there were multiple versions.

Someone who was also ‘100% sure their friend had also received their poster from a caretaker at the Caird Hall’ promised to send me a photo of it.

A few weeks later this is what I received:

A BLUE one. And it was noticeable there were differences beyond just the colour. I sent these to Gordon who put together the below:

They were all different! The more I uncovered the more differences there were to be seen. There were seemingly hundreds of these posters kicking about Dundee!

A pattern was noticed from referencing against old photos, videos and modern postings - that I won’t go into - but I eventually managed to track down three different people who had been manufacturing these from the mid 90s onwards. It should be noted that none of these manufacturers were purposely misleading the public into believing they were buying original 1976 posters. They were created purely as a memento of a significant event from their home city, albeit one that had by then become mythical (and unknowingly false).

The 1990s and onwards variations do not count for the posters sold at auction however, whose origin is still shrouded in some mystery and will be returned to.

It is possible, though, to reconcile the repeated stories of various Caird Hall employees providing friends and relatives with the poster. Unfortunately this relies on a hypothesis from available data rather than a smoking gun. A variation of one or more likelihoods does offer a reasonable conclusion.

I was told by one ‘friend of a nephew of a Caird Hall bouncer’ that their poster was taken ‘from a large pile of posters in a storage room’. I think this opens up the key to the mystery.

The Caird Hall was used for punk gigs in the late 70s and early 80s, most often in the complex’s smaller hall - the Marryat Hall next door. Fans remember the hallway being covered in punk posters. Punk was a far more acceptable phenomenon two years after the banning of the 16th of December concert. It is not inconceivable that a near-remembered event would be mythologised at a later but similar event promoting punk band. And, to ensure that youngsters were not misled into believing there was an upcoming gig -by the leading lights of the punk movement - a year was added to the date — 1976. This scenario aligns with posters being taken from the Caird Hall, a date appearing on the poster, and the design of the poster being more closely aligned with how Caird Hall posters looked in the 80s.

I don’t believe any malice was ever intended. As the Entertainment Secretary who put the gig on, and as others have contested the now £5K+ Jamie Reid poster was being sold for 50p, well into the 80s. Punk ephemera was disposable so no financial gain could conceivably have been planned.

The poster is a fake but its an old fake and it surely would have been made for the same purpose it is celebrated for now - to commemorate a significant cultural event. Unfortunately, they just did a REALLY bad job with it.

A HUGE thanks to Gordon Gurvan for all his help on this, Ross and Robin Paterson, John Maguire, those I promised not to mention but whose kindness was invaluable, and every one else who kindly (if bemusedly) got back to me regarding posters on their walls; memories of Den’s Road Market. And Helen for putting up with me obsessing over this for weeks