Sex Pistols 01/10/1978 Dallas 07/21/1977 Stockholm

One week after the Zeppelin show I just finished reviewing, the Sex Pistols took the stage in Stockholm. I'm not going to go any further than that. There are plenty enough books to tell you what it all means. The horse has been flogged to nothing but a stain in the road.

4.05 GB mpeg 2... 10800 kb/s vbr... 29.970 fps...NTSC... 720X480... DVD_LPCM_AUDIO

The disk I got has three things on it.
36:30 of Dallas 3:41 of "anarchy" from the So It Goes TV show(i think) and 20:16 of Stockholm. The quality of the footage is pretty good...Both shows are multi-camera with pretty much clean sound. There are upgrades of all of this, if you get this and want better...The Dallas has some occasional vhs farty tape rolling that came about in a generation loss. The European stuff is NTSC on my disc, so that tells you right there you can probably see this stuff a little more cleanly in boots from the original format. In fact, I have a whole disc of Tony Wilson doing a greatest moments retrospective TV special somewhere- pretty hazy memory but I think it's pretty sharp disc.
Strictly speaking, this Dallas show is not a bootleg. It's been released on VHS and DVD a couple of times over the years. The official Sex Pistols site mentions it as official product and offers a link to an amazon page. This DVD is, however, out of print- at least the region 2 north american version. Getting a new copy could set you back $100. While that's a little out of my price range, I would like to have a cleaner copy of this show. The quality of the you tube embedded below is a dozen times better than the disc that I possess.



Both of the shows are interesting to watch. The Stockholm is the better filmed of the two. The crowd is eager to get swept up into the phenomena and the camera operators run about the stage framing all the expressionistic camera angles that would become MTV ten years later. The colors are kind of fucked up. It took all my resolve to keep from photoshopping the screenshots to look better. The Dallas gig is sort of like watching a sporting event. You kind of only can see it once: all the while, you're wondering if the band is going attack the audience or the audience is going to attack the band. There's three cameras, but they are all cautious and distant.


The official fan site has a list of all the fifty or so shows that were done. I wonder exactly how many total minutes of Sex Pistols on camera there is prior to their split in 78? It can't equal more than a few hours. I've only seen bits of the many documentaries. Watching those with a paper and notepad would probably be the best way to get started answering it. For other full shows, there's Winterland, of course. Not much else seems to be traded. One of the heavyweight hoarders on tapetrader is the exclusive owner of three other gigs: 11/22/1976 Fagons,/07/15/1977 Beach Disco Halmstad, 12/11/1977 MAF Centrum Maasbree.



Came across THIS interesting bit of parasitism on the first google page for "Sex Pistols Dallas"...It's apparently some sort of aggregator of postings of concert videos-damn if people aren't working overtime trying to regurgitate content in order to funnel the surfers over ad links .