1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 387. The Sex Pistols – Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols (1977)

 

There’s no denying that of all of the punk bands so far, The Sex Pistols are the hardest and most raucous. The American punks are limited to semi-ironic thrash takes on Fifties teen bops, The Clash may have taken the genre into nihilism, but it’s the Pistols that really amp up the aggression levels, both musically, lyrically, and on- and off-stage.  

A lot of this comes from the sneering delivery and mad-eyed stare of John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten, a man who can roll his R’s in a surprisingly threatening way. Some of it comes from the chaotic and violent behaviour of Sid Vicious, a bassist so rubbish that his contribution to this album is overdubbed by guitarist Steve Jones (Glen Matlock having left the band by the time they come to recording this album).  

The best tracks on this album are the most enduring, the nihilistic two fingers up at the British Establishment that are God Save The Queen, Anarchy In The UK, and Pretty Vacant. These skewer the pomp and circumstance of the Silver Jubilee, declaring “no future” for the disaffected youth of the UK under the “fascist regime” of the monarchy. It’s kind of an inchoate cry of rage, so generalised as to be meaningless, but the Pistols did cause a lot of concern among the more conservatively-minded at the time. Submission is surprisingly musical, showing a more melodic side to the group (the kind of thing Lydon would carry forwards with Public Image Limited). Bodies is an uncompromising track about abortion, shot through with disturbing imagery. 

Their profanity-laced interview with Bill Grundy in 1976 is a thing of legend, unseating Grundy rather than the Pistols, and it has to be said that viewed with hindsight, Grundy comes across as the kind of slimy, smarmy, establishment-backed figure that feels comfortable with asking Siouxsie Sioux to come and meet him afterwards, the kind of moralistic hypocrite that Lydon’s hard-eyed glare cuts through like a knife (see also his comments on Jimmy Savile well before the truth finally came out). 

Musically they nowadays seem both quaint and also still relevant. I saw them at the Phoenix Festival during their re-union tour in 1996 (with Matlock back in the fold again) and they really rocked the stage. Malcolm McClaren may have felt that he created and promoted the group as some kind of art project, while Lydon and Matlock in particular saw themselves as serious musicians, and both views are probably correct (Sid Vicious, meanwhile, probably embraced the nihilistic and destructive ethos the most strongly). Certainly by 1996 there was a sense that the Pistols took themselves seriously as performers, still as iconoclastic as ever. But also, as an endeavor, it suits the Pistols to have been more like an explosion on the music scene – causing a big mess at the time but ultimately short-lived.