In July 1977, the Sex Pistols embarked upon their first Scandinavian tour, a 12-date trek taking in two shows in Denmark, two shows in Norway, and eight shows in Sweden, culminating in two nights at a Stockholm club called Happy House. The tour gave the London punk quartet an opportunity to do something they were struggling to do on home turf due to their notoriety - play live - and ended up providing bassist Sid Vicious with a career highlight, a meeting with his favourite band, Abba.
In truth, Vicious wasn't the only Abba fan in the Pistols. Famously, Vicious' predecessor Glen Matlock was inspired to write the bass line for Pretty Vacant after hearing Abba's hit single SOS ("I didn't pinch it note for note," he insisted in 2017, "but the structure of that song gave me the idea"), and, according to a Norwegian journalist who covered the quartet's July tour, the band listened to nothing but the Swedish band: "They had one cassette and it was ABBA," she recalled. "They played it 24/7, all the time."
That the Pistols ended up meeting Abba at an airport in Sweden was sheer coincidence, however.
"We’d been drinking all day in Scandinavia because flights were cancelled but Sid couldn’t handle alcohol," John Lydon recalls in a new [paywalled] interview with The Irish Independent. "As soon as he’d seen Abba, all in matching white fur coats, looking like polar bears, he went running over. ‘Abba!’ Then he vomited.
"They were horrified," the singer tells journalist Pat Carty. "I think we got carted off. There was a police wagon involved.”
Writing in his 2016 autobiography Lonely Boy, Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones described the tour as "mental."
"It seemed like - between the media, the police, the fucking bastards at the GLC, every other local council in Britain, and Malcolm [McClaren] getting bored - there was some kind of conspiracy keeping us from playing live in the UK," he wrote. "So we fucked off to Scandinavia and did a tour there instead."
"It was true what they said about Sweden," Jones continued. "It wasn't just how good looking the birds were, they were really into sex, as opposed to what we were used to, which was grudging Northern slags with big ankles and spotty backs. I'm sorry if the truth hurts."
Charming.
You can watch footage of the Sex Pistols playing in Stockholm on July 28, 1977 below.
