Shanne Bradley first saw the Sex Pistols in November of 1975 when they gatecrashed a show at St. Alban’s Art College, where she was a student at the time. This would have only been their third or fourth time performing together, doing a lot of sloppy 60s pop covers, and Shanne and her friends thought it was all so bad it was almost good. Almost good, but it was still enough to dance to. Shanne herself might have stood out in a crowd that were probably mostly confused by the noise onstage, not just for dancing, but her outfit. She wore torn stockings, ice skates with the blades removed, an old corset, suspenders, and badly bleached hair.
This style might have blended in at future Pistols gigs, but Shanne wasn't a “punk”. There was no “punk” yet. She was an art student, and she told Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren as much when they asked her about her clothes. She always dressed like this. McLaren and Shanne exchanged numbers and he'd soon be calling her about every gig the Pistols were playing around London. Shanne and her friends would be the only people in the crowd at first, but it would soon snowball and unfold into something huge, obviously.
Today there's a lot of talk about the Sex Pistols being a “boy band”, about how McLaren fully stole the aesthetics of New York acts like Richard Hell and the Voidoids for the Pistols, and how they were only formed to sell clothes from McLaren and Vivian Westwood's shop, SEX. If you asked McLaren himself he might have told you that punk rock itself was an avant-garde Situationist happening that he created and manipulated. Whichever take you might agree with, it is obvious that Malcolm McLaren influenced things more than a typical band manager, and we likely wouldn't have punk as we know it today without his scheming. It's interesting to me that he was influencing who was coming to the shows, too. He wanted Shanne there because she might have been one of the only kids dancing, sure, but also because she looked the part. Or she looked like someone new entirely.
Now, I don't think Shanne Bradley was unwittingly playing some role in a master manipulator’s plan. I don't think Malcolm McLaren was acting on much more than intuition and doing what was best for what was a pathetic little project at this stage. And I don't think the Sex Pistols themselves were necessarily pawns or anything, either. I believe this was all very organic, or at least the real magic of it happened organically.
Sometimes these things need a little push. For all we know, McLaren may have been phoning everyone in the audience after every show, asking them to come again. Or maybe just the kids with bleached hair. Whatever he did, it worked. He wanted the Sex Pistols to compete with the Bay City Rollers on Top of the Pops. Instead they changed music and culture forever in a few short years. Shanne Bradley would be steeped in this scene for as long as it lasted and into its further mutations. A lot of legendary acts broke new ground after hearing this music. But she was dancing to it before any of them. In broken skates, no less.