Last updated: July 14, 2014



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Sex Pistols

Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) and Steve Jones from the band Sex Pistols. Picture: Matthew Munro

Sid Vicious

Sex Pistols star and punk rocker Sid Vicious, seen here with girlfriend Nancy Spungen, died in 1979 at age 22 from a heroin overdose. Source: Supplied


It sounds implausible, but this is how the British punk band spent Christmas Day 1977.

Unseen footage of Sex Pistols in this unlikely scenario will be broadcast for the first time in a new documentary to be aired on BBC television on December 26.


"To most people they were monsters in the news," director Julien Temple, who filmed the punks performing that day, told the Guardian newspaper on Tuesday.

"But seeing them playing to seven- and eight-year-olds is beautiful. They were a radical band, but there was a lot more heart to that group than people know."

The charity gig was to be the Sex Pistols' last British performance. Bassist Sid Vicious died of a heroin overdose in 1979, four months after he was charged with murdering his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, who was found stabbed in their New York hotel room.

Temple's documentary, Never Mind the Baubles: Xmas '77 With the Sex Pistols shows frontman Rotten leaping into a giant Christmas cake before the band and audience hurl chunks of it at each other.

"It's probably the best footage of the Pistols on film but it's never been seen," he told the Guardian.

The band had been banned from performing at most British venues by December 1977, Temple recalled, including the Holiday Inn hotel chain.

Snippets of the footage appeared in Temple's 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury, but this is the first time it will be shown in what the director called its "full, unbelievably energetic glory".