Martin Barratt looks back on the life of his father, Ray Barratt, and the pivotal role he played in the development of the theme parks in the UK and beyond.
Johnny Rotten with his young fans in Huddersfield
Credit: Huddersfield Examiner
On Christmas Day 1977, the Sex Pistols played their final UK concerts for 19-years. A festive gift for the families of striking firefighters, and for the region’s lone-parent households, the venue for this historic occasion was Ivanhoe’s, a deeply unglamorous club in the West Yorkshire town of Huddersfield. As if this weren’t quite enough, the first of the band’s two sets was performed to an audience of children as young as six.
“A place like Huddersfield was pure hell,” John Lydon [Johnny Rotten], the group’s singer, told the filmmaker Julien Temple in his documentary Never Mind The Baubles. “If you were working class you just felt doomed and trapped and disenfranchised. Those were all the emotions that were running through me and my own culture from London. Having to endure an arsehole government in an arsehole country in an arsehole situation.”