So was Wigan in for a visit by the anti Christ's of rock coinciding with punks joining a Right To Work march arriving at Wigan and so cementing the description ' dole queue rock'? On the 3rd September 1977 at the Wigan Casino (home of Northern soul all nighters)  a Rock Against Racism gig was held with two punk bands the Drones and the Nosebleeds. But what everyone was really wondering was just who were the 'special surprise guests' mentioned in the publicity.  Could those guests be the naughty Pistols?

Steve Holmes: The Wigan Casino gig came about after we heard the Pistols were playing there on their incognito 'S.P.O.T.S' tour and over countless phone calls Matt managed to somehow convince the Casino staff that we had been added to the bill. We turned up in the afternoon in a transit van & went for a wander round the town first as we were early & the place was all locked up.

There were the four of us plus a couple of roadies. Within about five minutes, out of nowhere came a group of local ads who tried to jump us. Not knowing what was happening or how many of them there were, we proceeded to 'leg it' out of there back to the van. Unfortunately, when we got there we found that Paul was missing - they'd grabbed him & given him a bit of a roughing up but nothing too serious. Later the same lads came up to the van & we all got talking. It seems their local paper had printed a scare story about how there was going to be this huge punk invasion that day so, being good, northern soul fans they thought it was their duty to defend the town!!

Sadly, that tip-off from the local paper meant the Pistols didn't turn up. I don't know how the crowd reacted as we didn't stay very long - we knew by then the Pistols weren't going to play and Saturday nights at the Lodestar were too good to miss back then!

In actual fact the special guests were Exodus and China Street. The audience comprised a full house of marchers (who had been let in for free) and punks some who had travelled miles to see the band. That said there was no disappointment at the Pistols no show and NME reporter Phil McNeill despatched to the gig recorded:

Fortunately it was a great gig anyway. Pistols or no Pistols - but simply because of the spark in the audience mix of punks and marchers.

That night, however, there was violence with numerous arrests, two stabbings and gang riots reported in the local papers. Probably not surprising with the newspaper coverage and that as the gig ended the exiting crowd would have come up against the waiting crowd for another all nighter of Northern Soul . Then again in a town Wigan's size probably a normal night!