Here is a list of known articles around the time of the tour. If you know of anything that is missing please do let us know.

Record Mirror archive 1955-1981
Searchable, most editions

Fanzines: Great Collection
Great collection of scanned fanzines from the 1970s and 1980s

Joe Strummer and the Legend of the Clash
By Kris Needs

Joe Strummer and the Legend of The Clash provides a personal insight into the life of Joe Strummer, lead singer of pivotal punk band The Clash. Since his untimely death in 2002 Joe Strummer has been mourned as a rock'n'roll icon. The enormous sense of loss felt at his death reinforced the importance of The Clash ..

England's Dreaming
By Jon Savage

England's Dreaming is the ultimate book on punk, its progenitors, the Sex Pistols, and the moment they defined for music fans in England and the United States. Savage brings to life the sensational story of the meteoric rise and rapid implosion of the Pistols through layers of rich detail, exclusive interviews, and rare photographs. This fully revised and updated edition of the ...

The England's Dreaming Tapes
By Jon Savage

All of these interviews were taped in 1988 and 1989, during the research for England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (London: Faber and Faber, 1991). At that time punk was only a decade old. Very few people were interested in the period, and so the interviews I got were at once vivid and untainted by layers of myth and historiography.

The starting-point for the book was the story of the Sex Pistols, an > unlikely tale of how four ill-assorted youths transcended their shoddy beginnings to become the starring players in a great pop drama, one of the best ever. During 1976 and 1977 punk became a national and global event — it had politics, scandal, violence, weird clothes, radical aesthetics, kinky sex and hard, hard rock.

The Anarchy Tour
By Mick O'Shea (and good friend)

The Anarchy tour was indeed in a state of flux. By midday Friday, instead of ferrying the Sex Pistols, The Heartbreakers, The Clash and their retinues to Norwich’s East Anglia University for the opening show of the tour, the coach was still standing idle at the kerb on Denmark Street. While the beleaguered Sophie fielded calls from indignant council officials and anxious promoters over at Dryden Chambers, an equally irate Malcolm — sporting a silver-flecked fur coat that he’d purchased specially for the tour — was relating the constantly changing situation to the bemused musicians. He’d just spent the last half-hour or so cooped up in the public phone box outside St. Giles’ Church on nearby St. Martin’s Lane remonstrating with the ...

Images of England Through Popular Music: Class, Youth and Rock 'n' Roll ...
By K. Gildart

[extract] "The Derby debacle had also caused conflict amongst the groups that were accompanying the Sex Pistols on the tour. McLaren had decided that all the performers should refuse to appear in front of the councillors. One of the supporting acts, the Damned, broke ranks and agreed to play. Glen Matlock, bass player with the Sex Pistols, returned to the subject of the Derby debacle in his autobiography and claimed that the decision was based on ‘narrow-minded, pig ignorant, provincial censorship’.°’ The reaction of the Derby councillors indicates the way in which local authorities outside of the capital were unwilling to accept metropolitan influences in their districts that they viewed as damaging to the ‘morality’ of the local population. ...

NME cover only

Sex Pistols: The Pride of Punk - Chapter 4 The Anarchy Tour
By Peter Smith

[extract] "The four bands set out from London on a tour bus and drove off to play the first concert of the tour. Rather than the expected and highly anticipated tour of major concert halls, what actually followed was a tour of hotel rooms as they traveled from town to town, only to be told that each concert had been canceled, as each local council and promoter buckled to the media and public pressure in order to prevent these nasty punk bands from corrupting the young people of the United Kingdom.

The first three gigs were scheduled for the University of East Anglia Students’ Union, Norwich (December 3, 1976), the Kings Hall, Derby (the gig that DJ John Peel turned up to on December 4, 1976), and the City Hall, Newcastle, on December 5, 1976 (the concert that my friends and I had tickets for). All these concerts were canceled. The students at the University of East Anglia held a sit-in protest, to no avail. The Pistols’ tour bus headed straight for Derby, where the bands stayed in the Crest Hotel and were met by a group of reporters who would follow them on the tour. It was a cold winter; not the weather to be traveling around the country on a bus. The economic climate also remained poor, with inflation at 16 percent, and the government had just negotiated a £2.3 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund". ...

Passion is a Fashion:
The Real Story of the Clash
By Pat Gilbert

[extract] "The Anarchy Tour due to start on Friday, 3 December 1976 at Norwich Polytechnic. Twenty-four dates were scheduled, the last on Boxing Day at the Roxy Theatre in Harlesden. The Clash, booked to play bottom of the bill to Johnny Thunders’s new group The Heartbreakers, as well as The Damned and The Pistols, were understandably thrilled about their first major tour, if not their place in the running order" ....

In Pictures: The ‘Anarchy In The U.K. Tour’ of 1976, the infamous tour that never really toured
Jack Whatley
March 14, 2019

University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich saw the first show of the tour on 3rd December 1976. “A Punk-Rock Evening” on the bill, the tickets cost £1.25 in advance and £1.50 on the door. But like so many others, the gig would never start, as vice-chancellor Dr Frank Thistlethwaite would be the first of many to ban the concert “on the grounds of protecting the safety and security of persons and property.” PDF

Interview 9: Rob Harper - Part 1 (October 2017): Original U.K. Subs drummer and The Clash's 1976 'Anarchy Tour' drummer
UK Subs Time and Matter

My recollections of the Anarchy Tour are many, various, disjointed and probably blurred by the mists of time... however: the first I knew that anything had gone wrong was when I read the headlines on other peoples' papers on the underground on the way to rendezvous with the tour on its first day... by the time I got there I already had a pretty good idea that cancellations were likely! PDF version

Ray Stevenson's Extraordinary Photos of the Clash and the Sex Pistols...
online or archived PDF
The February 21, 1976, issue of the New Musical Express warned readers: ìDonít look over your shoulder but The Sex Pistols are comingî. ìThey were like a million years ahead,î The Clashís Joe Strummer later told

HOW I MET THE CLASH by KRIS NEEDS
online or achived PDF
It would be utterly predictable for me to say I was prompted to write a book about Joe Strummer and The Clash after the unbelievably sad event of December 2002. Also totally true. But I'd been working on this for years - since October 1976, to be precise, when I wrote my first article on The Clash for America's now long-gone New York Rocker magazine - after witnessing them live for the first time.

BBC: Sex Pistols: Anarchy in the UK and the tour they tried to ban
online or archived PDF
By Jon Welch
Exactly 40 years ago the Sex Pistols were due to begin a 19-date UK tour to promote their new single Anarchy in the UK. Today the tour is remembered as a key moment in music history - as much for what didn't happen as for what did. In the furore that followed the band's appearance on TV show Today with Bill Grundy, all but a few of the gigs were cancelled.

God Save the Sex Pistols run by Phil!
What was recorded and what wasn't. DAY BY DAY - The God Save The Sex Pistols' exclusive guide to Anarchy Tour (and more)

God Save the Sex Pistols run by Phil!
Online or archived PDF
Anarchy in the UK press cuttings following Bill Grundy episode

Rockscene Anarchy
Photo review
page 1
page 2
page 3

Bombed Out by Peter Alan Lloyd
online or archived PDF
The Sex Pistols Anarchy Tour in 1976.
The boredom. We didn't know what the fuck was going on.
The Punk scene may never have ignited up and down Britain had the Sex Pistols not done three things in quick succession.