Sex Pistols - Never Mind The Bollocks

While mostly accurate, dismissing Never Mind the Bollocks as merely a series of loud, ragged midtempo rockers with a harsh, grating vocalist and not much melody would be a terrible error. Already anthemic songs are rendered positively transcendent by Johnny Rotten's rabid, foaming delivery. His bitterly sarcastic attacks on pretentious affectation and the very foundations of British society were all carried out in the most confrontational, impolite manner possible. Most imitators of the Pistols' angry nihilism missed the point: underneath the shock tactics and theatrical negativity were social critiques carefully designed for maximum impact. Never Mind the Bollocks perfectly articulated the frustration, rage, and dissatisfaction of the British working class with the establishment, a spirit quick to translate itself to strictly rock & roll terms. The Pistols paved the way for countless other bands to make similarly rebellious statements, but arguably none were as daring or effective. It's easy to see how the band's roaring energy, overwhelmingly snotty attitude, and Rotten's furious ranting sparked a musical revolution, and those qualities haven't diminished one bit over time. Never Mind the Bollocks is simply one of the greatest, most inspiring rock records of all time.

In the summer of 1977 the UK was gripped with unprecedented patriotic fervour, with street parties being held up and down the country in celebration of the Queen’s 25th anniversary rule (her Silver Jubilee). Into this pandemic outpouring of joy, this euphoric coming together of the nation, stepped a man with green hair, rotten teeth and an “I hate Pink Floyd” t-shirt; who promptly gobbed on the home-made cakes, pissed in the lemonade shandies and tore the flags of his benevolent ruler into tiny little pieces.
In one sense Johnny Rotten was the typical teenager, with his desperate desire to shock, such as the gleeful stressing of “c*nt” in Pretty Vacant and the gratuitous swearing in Bodies. Except that most teenagers are obsessed one way or another with sex, whereas Rotten seems strangely asexual. He doesn’t write about love and relationships. In fact he even had a massive hit with a song saying exactly that (This is Not A Love Song - Public Image Ltd). 

His sneering take on the national anthem (“God Save The Queen and her fascist regime”) was considered so subversive, the BBC had to rig the charts (really!) to keep it off the no.1 spot. The Sex Pistols had already caused pandemonium with their debut single Anarchy in the UK, causing questions to be asked in Parliament and the national newspapers. The furore forced EMI and then A&M to dismiss them from their recording contract and the BBC to ban them from the airwaves. A record shop that sold the single was prosecuted for indecency.

Listening to the record now, it is surprisingly good. Despite what you may have heard, they sure can play. Steve Jones guitar evokes Johnny Thunders of the New York Dolls. Paul Cook’s drumming keeps everything tight. Matlock’s songwriting has plenty enough melodies. With the exception of Sub-mission, the songs are played at two paces: fast and even faster, recalling the Ramones. But it is the iconoclastic Johnny Rotten who single-handedly spawns the UK punk movement; his lyrics spewing all forms of bile and vitriol, dripping with confrontation and screaming defiance.

Before the Sex Pistols, there was heavy metal, rock operas, glam rock and prog rock: all various forms of musical escapism. Yet thirty years after World War II, the country still writhed not just in economic disorder but social disarray, with unresolved issues such as mass immigration, welfare dependency, terrorism and cold war paranoia. Johnny Rotten returns us to earth with a bump, espousing a basic humanist philosophy, an articulate and eloquent diatribe on a post war dream gone wrong:
“You won’t find me working 9 to 5. It’s too much fun being alive. I’m using my feet for my human machine. You won’t find me living for the screen. Are you lonely? All your needs catered? You got your brains dehydrated!” (Problems)

What Rotten is concerned with is the here and now. He attacks all types of invocations to higher powers including God (“I kick you in the brains when you pray to your god” (No Feelings), political institutions (God Save The Queen) and business corporations (EMI). But more specifically he also attacks all forms of escapism (Holiday In The Sun), whether it be drugs (New York), moral mendacity (Liar), indolence (Seventeen) or intellectual pretension (Pretty Vacant). Above all else he urges the primacy of life, forever posing the question: what is a human being? Are we “morons”; “faggots”; “fools”; “stupid people”; “flowers in the dustbin”; “animals”? The genuinely disturbing Bodies reduces the matter of humanity to its barest of bones:
“Die little baby screaming! Body screaming f*cking bloody mess!
Not an animal, it's an abortion! Body! I'm not animal!
Mummy I'm not an abortion.” (Bodies)

This album represented a call to arms of the nation that was far more empowering than any Silver Jubilee. Think of all the bands that were formed on this premise that music was about emotion, not technical proficiency: knowing three chords was sufficient. Think of all the fanzines that sprung up to describe these bands and the independent record labels formed. It wasn’t just the birth of a punk movement and its splinter groups. A whole series of radicalised and energised music movements broke out, grounded in realism and humanism, such as Ska (The Specials), Skinhead (Madness), Mod (The Jam), Rockabilly (The Polecats), New Wave (Elvis Costello), Post Punk (Joy Division), even Folk (Billy Bragg) and Irish Folk music (The Pogues); all defiant, confrontational and politicised; and all revering the Sex Pistols.
Don’t let yourself be fooled by Malcolm McLaren, the band’s avaricious and rent-a-quote manager, that the Sex Pistols were some kind of social experiment that he had fabricated. He was just hanging on to their coat-tails, milking the phenomenon for all it was worth. His subsequent interventions, such as his mockumentary “The great rock and roll swindle”, his replacement of Matlock with Vicious (as bass player), of Rotten with Vicious (as lead vocalist), of Vicious with Ronnie Biggs (a notorious career criminal), were woeful. Despite recording only one album and four singles, the impact of the Sex Pistols was phenomenal.

Sex Pistols - The Original Recordings

Released to coincide with Pistol, the predictably controversial six-part Disney+ mini-series based on Steve Jones’s autobiography Lonely Boy, here again (collected together “for the first time in over 20 years”, apparently) are the Sex Pistols’ finest recordings. Possibly the most straightforward job of compilation available to modern man, considering the fact that the band only released 15 self-penned songs during their brief tenure as a John Lydon-fronted quartet. And yet UMC have still managed to overlook EMI, Liar and Seventeen (aka I’m A Lazy Sod) in favour of the band’s admittedly raucous, if hardly essential, live-in-the-studio covers of The Monkees’ (I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone and The Who’s Substitute, originally hiked from the file marked ‘trash’ to make up numbers on The Great Rock ’N’ Roll Swindle. But, hey, it’s on double vinyl. And transparent green vinyl. And yellow vinyl. And CD. And digital. And even cassettes – five different cassettes with individual artwork. And ours is not to reason why, ours is simply to consume. Oh, and this proudly touted individual artwork – can you guess what it looks like? Yes, it’s that bad. Somewhere Jamie Reid is wincing. Maybe even as he’s pocketing a large cheque. Well, one can only hope. Lydon-channelling gripes aside, what’s actually good about it? Sonically speaking, almost everything. Kicking off with Pretty Vacant (the enduringly irresistible hook that upon its July ’77 release finally silenced the loudly doubting, music press letters page-haunting hippies of yore) and closing with doomed human circus Sid Vicious’s My Way swan song, it’s a 20-track object lesson in punk attitude. And commercial cynicism. ’Twas always thus.

By Ian Fortnam

Sex Pistols - The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

History only acknowledges one Sex Pistols. That’s the Sex Pistols that existed from November 6, 1975 (their first show, at Cental Saint Martin’s College in London) through to January 14, 1978 (their last, at Winterland in San Francisco). The purists refine it further: the Sex Pistols only really mattered in those days when punk was the property of an art elite, across the course of their first year and a bit. Yes, yes, the records that tumbled forth in 1977 were insurrectionary, the pamphlets of a radical cult intent on tearing down statues, scorching fields, razing cities and proclaiming nothing less than the end of everything. But the real work had been done the previous year, when contact with the Sex Pistols was a matter of intimacy, when lives could be redirected by a glance from Johnny Rotten, or an ill-disciplined musical guerrilla attack from Jones, Cook and Matlock. This was the group that inspired Joe Strummer and Adam Ant and The Slits and Siouxsie And The Banshees and Generation X and, history records, somewhere in the region of 30,000 people in Manchester who saw them at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in the summer of 1976.

But there’s another Sex Pistols, too. The Sex Pistols for those too young to have been at the Nashville or the 100 Club in 1976. The Sex Pistols for those whose idea of punk was shaped not by fanzines, but by newspapers. Those for whom the idea of the Pistols as the emissaries of destruction was a piece of received wisdom rather than any kind of reality. Those for whom the influence of the Sex Pistols was more apparent in The Toy Dolls taking ‘Nellie The Elephant’ into the charts rather than in their wildness opening the door for The Slits to fling together unconnected musics into one serendipitous whole.

The Sex Pistols that these people – the adolescents of the early 80s – grew up with was the Pistols of Flogging A Dead Horse, and of The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle. The Pistols as vaudeville, taken from something threatening into something almost comedic. The laughter is jeering, and cruel, but it’s still laughter, not hatred or rage or vitriol. And on The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle it often feels as if the real butt of the joke is the Pistols themselves. You thought this band could change the world? This band doing covers of ‘Rock Around The Clock’ and ‘Something Else’ and ‘C’mon Everybody?’ This band who you hear falling apart as they rehearse Johnny B Goode, with Rotten insisting, “I hate that! It’s fucking awful! Stop it!”? This band singing ‘Friggin’ In The Riggin’’ for goodness’ sake? World changing? Epoch making? Well, as a pop singer once wondered: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle was the playground Pistols album. The person who owned it never had to explain the word “Bollocks” to their parents, for one thing. If memory serves, it was cheaper to buy than the only “proper” Pistols album. It was the soundtrack to a film that, at that point, was still a big deal. And it was perfect for the new age of home taping: The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle would just fit on two sides of a C90 cassette, to be passed around like a samizdat publication, and when you heard it – if you were 12 or 13 or 14 – it sounded like everything, because between the terrible joke songs and the rock & roll songs, it encompassed everything that the Sex Pistols could be. It presented the Pistols in their entirety, as what Malcolm McLaren – if not John Lydon – had seen them as: a huge conceptual art project, that could encompass the most amateurish garage band, the most terrifying punk band, the most oddly compelling strange funk band (The Black Arabs), an experiment in globalising British culture (Louis Brennon’s ‘L’Anarchie Pour le UK’), and in the final knockings of Cook and Jones, the most brutal of yob rock bands.

It’s that latter iteration that was the one that echoed around the playgrounds, and – I suspect – the one that shaped punk in the 80s (one of the lesser Lydon tracks had a similar effect: Minor Threat apparently believed ‘(I’m Not Your) Stepping Stone’ was a Pistols original when they covered it). ‘Silly Thing’ and ‘No One Is Innocent’ bear the same relation to ‘God Save The Queen’ and ‘Holidays In The Sun’ as, say, ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ does to ‘Virginia Plain’: the thuggish, stunted cousin that might appal aesthetes but connects viscerally. This version of the Pistols was still dangerous, if you were a kid (not, doubtless, if you had been around in 76) but it was a very containable danger because it felt predictable. Listening to late-era Pistols felt like being on a fairground ride, whereas the first time you heard Lydon’s Pistols felt like being in a car crash.

Ronnie Biggs symbolises the fissure between the two versions of the Pistols. Whereas the original Pistols were excoriated for being a threat to the very fabric of society, ‘No One Is Innocent’ was banned from the radio for being sung by a Great Train Robber, in exile in Rio de Janeiro. This was “shock” at its most juvenile level; no wonder it worked for 13 year olds.

Naturally, that’s not how it seemed when I was 13, when it was just shockingly and uproariously transgressive: OHMYGODHAVEYOUHEARDTHIS? It occupied precisely the same space as ‘Friggin’ In The Riggin’’: something that seemed unutterably daring to a kid, but which to an adult now seems pathetic, just like Sid singing “You cunt, I’m not a queer,” on ‘My Way’, a performance that is transformed into tragedy only by the fact of his death. Or, to go back to the original argument, just like The Toy Dolls’ version of ‘Nellie The Elephant’.

But whisper it quietly: I’d rather listen to The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle than to Never Mind The Bollocks these days. For all the undimmed power of the quartet of singles, most of the rest of the album cower’s in their presence, and Chris Thomas’s production – the guitars layered until they resemble a tank battalion – becomes overwhelming. By contrast, The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle might be a mess, but it’s an entertaining mess, hopping around between styles, singers and even groups. And for all the orchestras, and the sprawl, it’s a far more democratic album than Never Mind The Bollocks precisely because it wasn’t the final expression of what originated as an elitist movement.

It’s the Pistols not as harbingers of doom, but as people: flawed, difficult people.