Sex Pistols at Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall films sell for £15k

The original footage captures two of the Sex Pistols' legendary shows in Manchester in 1976

The "only known footage" of two Sex Pistols gigs which ignited Manchester's music scene and spawned a generation of bands has sold at auction for £15,000.

Music fan Mark Roberts' Super 8mm films captured the punk band's shows at the city's Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976.

Future members of Buzzcocks, New Order, The Smiths and The Fall, and Anthony Wilson, who founded renowned label Factory Records, were at the shows.

Auctioneer Paul Fairweather said the films were "as unique as you can get".

The band's performance was shot on Super 8mm film by music fan Mark Roberts

Often described as one of the most influential gigs of all time, about 40 people were in the audience for the first show on 4 June 1976, including Peter Hook, who has said he was so inspired by what he saw, he bought a bass the next day.

He and friend Bernard Sumner, who was also there, went on to form Joy Division with Ian Curtis, who attended the 20 July gig, and later New Order.

Also at the first show was the then 17-year-old Morrissey, who would later form The Smiths before a long solo career, who wrote an "epistle" to the New Musical Express about it, stating that he would "love to see the Pistols make it".

The gigs were attended by future members of The Fall, New Order, The Smiths and Simply Red

A spokesman for Omega Auctions said the films were the "only known footage of the gigs", so the "historic nature" of them was "indisputable".

Mr Fairweather said the shows were "so important".

He said the gigs were "huge for bands that spawned off the back off them," adding: "It was the birth of punk."

Analysis - Paul Glynn, BBC News Entertainment Reporter

When the Sex Pistols played the first of two historic gigs at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall on 4 June 1976, there were famously only around 40 people in attendance.

But as Tony Wilson [played by Steve Coogan] later pointed out in the film 24-Hour Party People: "There were 12 people at the last supper".

A young Peter Hook was one of the punk apostles at the gig that appeared to change everything - put on by Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto of a nascent Buzzcocks. While the teenaged Steven Morrissey was impressed (though you'd never know it) by the Londoners' "discordant music and barely audible audacious lyrics", according to his letter to the NME.

For Wilson, the soon-to-be Factory Records boss who made it to the packed-out second gig two weeks later, it was nothing short of an epiphany. Ian Curtis and Mark E Smith were inspired by what they saw too.

The inspiration for all the above, who would go on to become post-punk and indie icons, came from the fact that suddenly now anyone with a guitar and some pent up emotions could have a go (the Pistols didn't even have an album out at the time).

"That was the day the punk rock atom was split," said Buzzcocks' Steve Diggle, about the first gig.

"That's where it exploded from, it changed Manchester and it changed the world."

It's hard to imagine the city today without the music that followed from the likes of Joy Division, The Smiths and the Hacienda nightclub.

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