Music Legends – Sex Pistols Special Edition by The Rock Review Music Legends Library

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CONTENTS INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................5 Chapter 1

ENGLAND’S DREAMING................................................................................ 7 Chapter 2

THE FILTH AND THE FURY......................................................................21 Chapter 3

HYPE AND GLORY............................................................................................. 39 Chapter 4

NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS..............................................................55 Chapter 5

THE GREAT ROCK ’N’ ROLL SWINDLE...................................... 71 Appendix

THE MUSIC............................................................................................................... 81

INTRODUCTION ‘I am an Antichrist. I am an anarchist...’

n 1976, something happened to British music that would send shockwaves around the world – and ensure that pop culture would never be the same again. A tight gang of spitting, swearing kids from the council estates of London burst onto a music scene grown fat and middle-aged, kicked in the doors of the record companies, stuck two fingers up at the establishment, tore up the rulebook, and gleefully set about destroying the whole pop music industry. It’s impossible to overstate the case: the Sex Pistols changed everything. They were a watershed, a line drawn in the sand, a full stop and a new beginning. There was life before the Sex Pistols and there’s life after. They rank alongside Elvis Presley and the Beatles as the twentieth century’s greatest cultural catalysts. 5

Their mission statement was clear from the start; it was emblazoned on their T-shirts, a single word: Destroy. Perhaps ironically, however, they gave rise to the last great creative revolution of the millennium. In a career that came and went in a blinding flash – they recorded only one official album, a handful of singles, and barely managed two years as a working band – their impact continues to be felt today in fashion, in art, in writing, in design, in attitude, and, of course, in music. As well as all the other stuff, the Sex Pistols wrote some great music; they wrote with a passion and a purpose never heard before. They redefined exactly what it means to be in a band. Rock music as we know it today simply would not exist without the Sex Pistols. The Sex Pistols were punk rock, and their story is one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll stories ever told. So sit back and enjoy it – a cheap holiday in other people’s misery… Daily Mirror editorial, 22 June 1977

PUNK FUTURE It’s not much fun to be young today. If you think otherwise take a look at yesterday’s jobless figures. Is it any wonder if youngsters feel disillusioned and betrayed? Is it any wonder if they turn to anarchistic heroes like Johnny Rotten? In the plight of the young, Britain is now beginning to reap the bitter harvest of inflation. A brave new generation of talent and purpose is turning sour before our very eyes.

Chapter 1

ENGLAND’S DREAMING ‘We’re the future – your future...’

icture the scene: the King’s Road, London, one-time coolest street on Earth and one of the great centres of the swinging sixties, but now a tad shabby around the edges, somewhat frayed at the seams. It’s 1975. The Summer of Love is already a distant memory, and a new generation raised on council estates and DSS handouts and rising unemployment aren’t buying into the hippy ideals any more. The flowers are wilting. Some of these kids hang out here, in this long, straight street that cuts through the heart of Chelsea to the World’s End. Some of them hang out at a teddy-boy and fetish-wear shop called SEX. Owned by Malcolm McLaren and his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood, it specialises in 1950s retro-style jackets and drainpipe trousers, ripped shirts, studs, and bondage wear – all a deliberate contrast to the flares 7

and flowing lines of the hippies. The kids don’t spend much money; they play old Who and Small Faces songs on the jukebox, they smoke, they cadge drinks off each other. They don’t really know what to do with themselves. They have no plans. Their teachers told them they lacked direction, motivation, and drive. They can’t see much of a future. McLaren, however, does have drive. He is motivated. He wants to go places; he wants a better, more successful life. All he needs is the right plan – and the right people. And then, one day, a tornado walks into his life. John Lydon, a green-haired, sneering, nineteen-year-old in an ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt ducks in off the street, where he had been busy spitting on posters and verbally abusing passers-by. Within two years Johnny and McLaren would be the most notorious men in Britain. The Sex Pistols actually began life as early as 1972, when schoolfriends Paul Cook and Steve Jones, then two messy-haired sixteen-year olds from Shepherds Bush, acquired some instruments, as it were, and thought it might be a laugh to form a band. With Jones taking vocal duties, Cook on drums, and their friend Wally Nightingale on guitar, they practised Beatles songs with a variety of bassists and went by the decidedly un-punk name of The Strand. It was about that time that they also started spending afternoons at McLaren and Vivienne’s shop on the King’s Road, then called Let It Rock, where they quickly struck up a friendship with the eccentric owner. Speaking later, Pistols guitarist Steve Jones remembered, ‘It was different from any other shop down the King’s Road. You felt you could go in there and no one would sort of bother you. We used to go in there because it was like teddy boy clothes. It was just like being not in a shop but a sort of hangout, you know what I mean? Somewhere to hang about for half an hour, just watch people, really.’ Working at Let It Rock was art student Glen Matlock, and when he heard that Steve and Paul were looking for a bass player, he immediately volunteered. 8

‘I wanted to be in a group because I’d never heard a band that I thought was exactly right, what I thought should be like,’ Glen remembered. ‘I wanted to do it for myself, so I could hear my own records on the radio.’ McLaren, though still to be convinced by the band, began to take an interest, and even came to see the boys rehearse. His advice was to stop the Beatles covers and play something with a little more balls. The fledgling outfit had a meeting and decided upon a shake-up. Out went Wally, Steve took over guitar, and they decided that they should actively look for a singer. In August 1975 they found him. John Lydon, an unemployed nineteen-year-old from the estates of Finsbury Park, North London, had started visiting the restyled SEX boutique, saving up his dole money for a bondage t-shirt or a teddy boy jacket, and even then stood out for his uncompromising style and attitude. With his spiked green hair, torn clothes, fierce stare, and sarcastic manner, he was punk before punk existed. McLaren asked him if he wanted to sing. Johnny said he didn’t mind. The following night Cook, Jones, and Matlock auditioned Lydon in the shop. He’d never sung before, but that didn’t matter – they could hardly play, anyway. Someone put some money in the jukebox and Johnny screamed along to Alice Cooper. He was in. ‘We thought, he’s got what we want,’ remembered Paul Cook. ‘Bit of a lunatic, a front man. That’s what we was after – a front man who had definite ideas about what he wanted to do. We knew straightaway, even though he couldn’t sing.’ Jones immediately rechristened him Johnny Rotten, in honour of his decaying teeth, and the band got to work. From the very start, Rotten’s ‘definite ideas’ were uncompromising. In the band’s first interview with Sounds magazine, he laid it all out clear and simple. ‘I hate shit,’ he announced. ‘I hate hippies and what they stand for. I hate long hair. I hate pub bands. I’m against people who just complain about Top of the Pops and don’t do anything. I want people 9

The Sex Pistols in 1977. Left to right: Paul Cook, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones and Johnny Rotten.

to go out and start something, to see us and start something, or else I’m just wasting my time.’ McLaren’s first priority was to get the band playing. He found them rehearsal rooms in Hammersmith. Their proximity to the Hammersmith Palais meant Steve had ready access to whatever equipment the boys required. According to some reports, David Bowie, Rod Stewart, and Roxy Music all unwittingly helped equip the fledgling band with guitars, amps, leads – whatever Steve could get his light fingers on. Suitably tooled up, the newly rechristened Sex Pistols started in earnest. As well as learning songs by Iggy and the Stooges, the Small Faces, and the Who – tracks like Whatcha Gonna Do About It, Substitute and Stepping Stone would become an integral part of their act – they started writing. For all McLaren’s later protestations that he deliberately cultivated a band that ‘couldn’t play’, the Pistols not only could handle their instruments, they did so in a way that had never been heard in this country before. Paul and Glen kept things tight and controlled, building a solid foundation, driving the rhythm irresistibly forward. Over this came Steve’s guitar – sharp and buzzing as a chainsaw, raw and primal and urgent. If the rhythm section hit you like a sledgehammer, the guitars picked you up and kicked you into life again. Coming at a time of supergroups and progressive rock, of concept albums and space operas and sonic landscaping, it was a timely reminder of just what you could do, in Bob Dylan’s phrase, with ‘a red guitar, three chords and the truth.’ There were no frills, no unnecessary complications, nothing self-consciously clever. It was three boys with an electric guitar, a bass and a drum kit making a beautiful, unholy racket. It was rock ’n’ roll stripped back to its roots. And then there was Rotten’s voice. What was it? A sneer? A scream? A howl of rage? A cry of pain? A demand for justice? It was all of these. It was a call to arms and a rage against the system. Rotten 11

sang like a siren going off, his voice full of danger, of emergency. It was impossible to experience it and not be moved, one way or another. Whether it was strictly singing, in the conventional sense, is another matter. There was no question of other people not hearing them. As autumn turned to winter and the old year ended, McLaren wanted to get the band out in the public’s face, whether the public liked it or not. The Sex Pistols first gig was hardly the stuff of legend. Arranged by Glen, it took place on 6 November 1975 at St Martin’s School of Art, ostensibly in support of a band called Bazooka Joe – complete with one Adam Ant on vocals – who were booked that night. The Sex Pistols were not booked, mainly because nobody had heard of them. In the end they simply marched up to Ant and Co, announced they were playing, plugged in and kicked straight off. They barely lasted a couple of songs before somebody pulled the plug and they were ejected. Still, the Pistols had played live. They had been seen. The next night they pitched up at the Central School of Art and Design and repeated the trick, and before the year was out had managed to gatecrash another four gigs at colleges across London, each time taking the stage without having been officially booked, and each time lasting a bit longer before the plug was pulled. Unbelievably, these guerrilla tactics began to work. Word of mouth began to spread about the incendiary new band with the intense, magnetic, malevolent singer and a sound unlike anything else out there. A small, dedicated fanbase began to build, sometimes so dedicated as to get nasty when they were inevitably hauled off stage after only a few numbers. Gigs would descend into fights. A furious energy followed the band around. Whispers began to be heard around the more switched-on in the London music community; an embryonic scene began to form, and so too did an 12

infant publicity machine. Nurtured by McLaren, it would become a behemoth, a vast publicity carnival that was as much a part of the phenomenon as the music itself. It was to follow the Sex Pistols to their messy demise. On 12 February 1976 the Pistols got their first big gig. Supporting Eddie & the Hot Rods at the famous Marquee club in London, it also bagged them their first headline. The following week’s NME contained a review by Neil Spencer. Under the banner, ‘Don’t look over your shoulder but the Sex Pistols are coming,’ he described Rotten and Co as a ‘quartet of spiky teenage misfits from the wrong end of various London roads, playing ’60s styled white punk rock as unself-consciously as it’s possible to play these days, i.e. selfconsciously. Punks? Springsteen Bruce and the rest of ’em would get shredded if they went up against these boys. They’ve played less than a dozen gigs as yet, have a small but fanatic following, and don’t get asked back.’ The review ended with a quote from Steve Jones. ‘Actually we’re not into music,’ he snapped. ‘We’re into Chaos.’ They were to play five gigs in ten days that month, and so set a working pace so relentless as to make their dismissal as ‘layabouts’ by some sections of the press rather ridiculous. In their first year as a band the Sex Pistols played no less than seventy-three shows, an average of one every five days and a workload most bands would struggle to match. They also never gave anything less than their all. Even when they were shambolic, they were memorable, and by the new standards they were setting, memorable was far better than merely competent. By April they had played at the prestigious 100 Club, and word had snowballed sufficiently for Sounds magazine to dedicate a whole two-page feature to them. Describing a typically chaotic night at El Paradiso, a Soho strip joint at which McLaren had secured them a brief residency, John Ingham laid out the growing scene that the Pistols were creating for themselves. 13

The Sex Pistols in 1977, shortly before Glen Matlock leaves and Sid Vicious replaces him.

‘Flared jeans were out,’ he wrote. ‘Leather helped. All black was better. Folks in their late twenties, chopped and channelled teenagers, people who frequent Sex, King’s Road avant leather, rubber and bondage clothing shop. People sick of nostalgia. People wanting forward motion. People wanting rock ’n’ roll that is relevant to 1976. At the moment, that criteria is best embodied in the Sex Pistols. They fill the miniscule, mirror backed stage, barely able to move in front of their amps. They are loud. They are fast. They are energetic. They are great… ‘Coming on like a Lockheed Starlighter is more important to them than virtuosity and sounding immaculate. This quartet has no time for a pretty song with a nice melody… Guitarist Steve Jones doesn’t bother much with solos, preferring to just pick another chord and power on through.’ The buzz was growing. Although still confined to a relatively tiny group of people, they were all people of a certain sort. Young, bored, restless – full of energy, but with no obvious outlet for it, they felt unappreciated, forgotten, and undervalued. The sixties had been their parents’ thing; the protest rallies and love-ins and talk of changing the world had no relevance anymore. Life went on after 1969, and for those on the sharp edge it just seemed to get progressively worse. If their parents had lived the hippy age’s great rush, theirs was the hangover, the come-down. It was against this cultural backdrop that experiencing a Sex Pistols gig came like an epiphany, a revelation. That’s why the guys from the NME and Sounds got excited. Finally, they sensed, something was happening. The old order was changing. A typical gig would be short and brutal – Glen and Paul hammering through the songs, Steve only ever just on the edge of keeping time, Rotten slumped over the microphone stand like a kind of teenage Quasimodo, staring down the audience, daring them to stare back. Lyrics would be delivered with a sneer and a snarl in a voice dripping with contempt and ennui. 16

The crowd responded in kind. A new dance developed, a kind of violent, erratic jumping on the spot they called the pogo, or else the dance floor was simply a whirl of flailing limbs and flying fists. Others were content just to spit at the band in a bizarre declaration of both disgust and solidarity. The sense of kinship was inescapable, and it was what gave the performances their power. Just being there made you a part of the show. Naturally, those allying themselves with this bright new order wanted to show the world their colours. It wasn’t enough to simply declare your admiration for the Sex Pistols, you had to prove it. You had to pin it, literally, to your sleeve. Just as the music was deliberately anti-music, so the fashion, the look of these early punks, became deliberately ugly. Hair was chopped, shaved, dyed and spiked. Clothes were ripped, worn purposely too big or too small and in jarring colours and styles. Slogans dominated, and were deliberately chosen to be as antagonistic as possible – Destroy! Anarchy! Safety pins were worn as a kind of anti-jewellery, and became a symbol in themselves of the movement. To be a Sex Pistols fan meant total allegiance. People had to know it from the moment they set eyes on you. In an interview in the Melody Maker headlined, ‘Punk Rock: Rebels Against the System’, journalist Caroline Coon created a portrait of Rotten that served as a kind of ideal for every aspiring young rebel. ‘Johnny Rotten looks bored,’ she wrote. ‘The emphasis is on the word “looks” rather than, as Johnny would have you believe, the word “bored” His clothes, held together by safety pins, fall around his slack body in calculated disarray. His face is an undernourished grey. Not a muscle moves. His lips echo the downward slope of his wiry, coathanger shoulders. Only his eyes register the faintest trace of life.’ If the band awoke a sense of individuality amongst the kids who came to see them in those early days, they also sparked a creative 17

‘I wasn’t planning on being a guitar player; I was going to be a singer. And I was for a little bit in the Sex Pistols - that is, until we got John Lydon. And then I realised I wasn’t really suited as a front guy.’ – Steve Jones

impulse, a desire not only to reject the status quo, but to get up and change it. People were travelling the length of the country to see the Sex Pistols, and they were leaving the gigs fired up and full of ideas. Kids started writing, and putting together their own fanzines. They started creating artworks, posters, and t-shirts. They started getting together and forming bands of their own. The conventional wisdom is that the Pistols inspired others to form bands simply because they were so bad most of the audience figured they could do at least as well themselves, but the truth is that that’s an oversimplistic view. People formed bands after seeing the Sex Pistols because, for the first time since the early rock ’n’ rollers, they saw what being in a band could give them. It wasn’t just about the money, the flash cars, and the fast girls, and it wasn’t about virtuosity either, about creating great, untouchable art. The Pistols showed that being in a band could be about finding your own voice, saying your bit, expressing yourself. So what if you couldn’t play that well? So what if you couldn’t sing? You just had to mean it, man. On 4 June that year, the Sex Pistols played the Lesser Free Trade Hall, Manchester, in one of those gigs that have gone down in history as an ‘I was there’ moment. Except, that of the couple thousand or so who have later claimed to have been there, at least nine-hundred are lying. Less than one-hundred people turned up on a humid night in Manchester to see the band rattle through a set that included No Feelings, No Fun and Pretty Vacant, but it’s said that it changed the lives of every one of them. In the audience that night were Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto of the Buzzcocks, Mark E Smith of the Fall, Morrissey of the Smiths, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook of Joy Division, Mick Hucknall of Simply Red, and TV presenter Tony Wilson, who went on to create Factory Records and the Hacienda nightclub. The pattern was repeated across the country; kids who had come to watch the Sex Pistols play one week would be performing themselves 19

the next. Within a few months of their first gig a whole host of Pistols-inspired bands were getting up and having a go. The Clash, The Damned, the Buzzcocks, and Siouxsie and the Banshees were all formed this way, and soon all the music papers, plus a few switchedon hacks from the mainstream press, were picking up on the Pistols. Naturally, it wasn’t long before the A&R men, the guys the record companies employ to scout out new talent, began to take notice. From the start, McLaren had a plan. The way he saw it, the trick was not to approach the record companies looking for a deal, but to have the record companies come begging to him. In an early interview he laid it out in black and white. According to McLaren, when the Rolling Stones first started gigging, ‘no-one came to sign up the Stones, no-one wanted to know. But when they saw a lot of bands sounding like that with a huge following they had to sign them. Create a scene and a lot of bands – because people want to hear it – and they’ll have to sign them even though they don’t understand it.’ That’s what the Sex Pistols did. They created their own scene, their own youth culture. The Sex Pistols inspired so many others to form bands that the record companies could no longer afford to ignore them. First in the queue were the biggest of them all: EMI. Creative Director Terry Slater had seen the band play at the 100 Club and had immediately recognised their commercial potential, the possibility of tapping into a youth market alienated by and uninterested in the rock dinosaurs of the day. He started negotiations with McLaren, and on 8 October 1976 they shook hands. The Sex Pistols signed with EMI. ‘Sex Pistols join “Establishment”’ was how trade magazine Music Week reported the news, but if EMI thought that by signing up Rotten and Co they were somehow putting a leash on the boys, taming their wilder instincts, they couldn’t have been more wrong. The anarchy hadn’t even begun. 20

Chapter 2

THE FILTH AND THE FURY ‘Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it...’

ix weeks after the Sex Pistols signed their first record contract, they released their first single, Anarchy in the UK. Anarchy in the UK was a new song, and its lyrics were a deliberate statement of intent. It represents the Sex Pistols at their finest – three minutes and thirty-two seconds of distilled rage, a study in barely controlled anger, bleeding menace and purpose, and with a lyrical content so sharp you could slice your wrists on it. The opening few bars set the agenda. There was no intro; the band went from silence to total noise without warning. Bass, drums and guitar all kicked in at the same time, the deceptively slow pace only increasing the effect, hammering out a single chord before an intake of breath, a drum roll and the same thing all over again a note lower. And then, for the first time on record, Rotten’s voice. ‘Right! Now…’ 21

ringing clear and loaded with animosity, followed by a cackle straight out of a cheap, nasty horror flick. It remains one of the greatest rock ’n’ roll intros ever, and is a serious contender for the greatest opening to a debut single of all time. Once the song kicked in proper, the intensity only increased, and if the music was unrelenting, Rotten’s lyrics showed that there were brains as well as brawn here, and that a fierce intelligence lay behind the posturing. ‘I am an Antichrist I am an anarchist Don’t know what I want But I know how to get it I wanna destroy passers by ‘Cause I wanna be anarchy No dogs body ‘Anarchy for the UK It’s coming sometime and maybe I give a wrong time stop a traffic line Your future dream is a shopping scheme ‘Cause I wanna be anarchy In the city ‘How many ways to get what you want I use the best, I use the rest I use the NME I use anarchy ‘Cause I wanna be anarchy It’s the only way to be 22

‘Is this the MPLA Or is this the UDA Or is this the IRA I thought it was the UK Or just another country Another council tenancy ‘I wanna be anarchy And I wanna be anarchy Know what I mean And I wanna be anarchist I get pissed, destroy!’ As a laying down of the agenda, it can’t be faulted. It begins with ‘I am an Antichrist’ and it ends with ‘Destroy!’ Britain, Johnny Rotten was saying, beware. The Sex Pistols had arrived. ‘Anarchy in the UK’? They didn’t know the half of it. The single hit the shops on 26 November. One week later the Sex Pistols would have the whole country in an uproar. It’s fair to say that on the morning of 1 December 1976, most of the UK had no idea that the Sex Pistols even existed. Exciting and important and revolutionary as their impact was on the music scene, the vast majority of the British public had never even heard of them. By the following morning all that was to change. The band were called by EMI at rehearsals that afternoon and told that they had a slot on the Thames Television early-evening magazine show Today, hosted by Bill Grundy, a popular and avuncular London presenter. It had transpired that Queen had dropped out and the record company thought the programme, which was broadcast live, would be a great opportunity for their latest signing to work up a bit of publicity for their debut single. Be careful what you wish for, Rotten could have told them, because it might just come true. What happened that night was to put the 23

‘Punk was never about one particular clean-cut imagery... it’s about many, many individuals coming very loosely together.’ – Johnny Rotten

Sex Pistols on the front page of every newspaper in the land and catapult them from a fringe youth culture movement into a genuine national phenomenon. The band had been drinking. According to most reports, so had Grundy. By the time they got to the Thames TV studios they were all well lubricated and in high spirits. The four Sex Pistols, plus assorted other members of their entourage, including Siouxsie Sue, were ushered in and arranged around a sofa. They then listened as Grundy introduced them with, ‘They are punk rockers, the new craze, they tell me.’ After taking issue with their advance from EMI by asking, ‘Doesn’t that seem to be opposed to your anti-materialistic view of life?’ ‘No, the more the merrier,’ replied Glen. The host, clearly unimpressed with his guests, decided to try to goad them into misbehaving. The results were spectacular. After Grundy had directed some questions to Siouxsie Sue, Jones, resplendent in a T-shirt with a pair of naked breasts on the front, chided the middle-aged presenter for his obvious flirtation with the teenage punk. ‘You dirty sod!’ he laughed. ‘You dirty old man!’ Grundy rose to the bait. ‘Well keep going chief, keep going,’ he replied. ‘Go on, you’ve got another five seconds. Say something outrageous.’ ‘You dirty bastard!’ ‘Go on, again.’ ‘You dirty fucker!’ shouted Jones, as the rest of the band started to laugh, and Grundy realised things were slipping out of his control. ‘What a clever boy,’ he said, attempting to rescue the situation at the death. No such luck. ‘What a fucking rotter,’ came the gleeful reply. Grundy signed off and as the titles rolled and the Sex Pistols kept laughing, he could be seen mouthing the words, ‘Oh, shit’ to his off-screen producer. The phone calls began almost immediately. 26

It was the end of Bill Grundy. Thames were to suspend him, and although he was later reinstated, his career never recovered from the incident. It was just the beginning of the Sex Pistols, though. The following day’s Daily Mirror splashed with a front page headline that was to become as much a part of the band’s sloganeering as anything Rotten or McLaren ever wrote. ‘THE FILTH AND THE FURY! ‘Uproar as viewers jam phones ‘A pop group shocked millions of viewers last night with some of the filthiest language heard on British television. ‘The Sex Pistols, leaders of the new “punk rock” cult, hurled a string of four-letter obscenities at interviewer Bill Grundy on Thames TV’s family teatime programme Today. ‘The Thames switchboard was flooded with protests. ‘Nearly two-hundred angry viewers telephoned The Mirror. One man was so furious that he kicked in his £380 colour TV. ‘Lorry driver James Holmes, 47, was outraged that his eight-yearold son Lee heard the swearing… and kicked in the screen of his TV. ‘It blew up and I was knocked backwards,’ he said. ‘But I was so angry and disgusted with this filth that I took a swing with my boot. ‘I can swear as well as anyone, but I don’t want this sort of muck coming into my home at teatime.’ The Mirror was not the only paper to profess outrage at the lads’ bad language. ‘Angry viewers demanded the sacking of TV interviewer Bill Grundy last night,’ claimed the Daily Mail. ‘The switchboard of Thames television in London was jammed by thousands of calls. There were hundreds to the Daily Mail and other newspapers. One man said he was contacting his MP and others said they would complain to the Independent Broadcasting Authority. Another said he would take legal action against the TV company, the rock band, and fifty-two-year-old Grundy.’ Even The Daily Telegraph felt concerned enough to get involved. After noting that the Sex Pistols ‘are celebrated for their bizarre style,’ 27

The Sex Pistols in performance at The Screen on the Green. The venue was the location for the first performance of Sid Vicious with the band on 3 April 1977.

the paper quoted yet another outraged parent. ‘Our children were waiting for Crossroads when suddenly they heard every swear-word in the book,’ said a Mr Leslie Blunt. ‘Surely a button can be pressed to stop this filthy language.’ Most of the country, it has to be remembered, did not see the programme live. Most couldn’t even if they wanted to. Today was only broadcast to the London area. Rather than sparking some immediate national outrage, most of the country only learned of the incident when they read about it over their cornflakes the next day, and they had to rely on their tabloid’s interpretation of events. The presentation couldn’t have been better if McLaren had planned it himself. Words like ‘Filth’, ‘Fury’, ‘Horror’, and ‘Outrage’ screamed off the page, and were accompanied by pictures of Rotten and Co at their most yobbish and in-your-face. The famous Mirror splash of 2 December was illustrated with a shot of Rotten spraying a can of lager into the camera lens. Clearly drunk, they were rushing out of a doorway and straight at the photographer; they looked caught in the aftermath of some A Clockwork Orange-like misdemeanour. Rotten’s spiked hair dominated the centre of the shot, framed by a motley outfit held together by chains, badges and safety pins. They looked every bit as dangerous and corrupting as the headlines were suggesting, precisely the sort of boys you wouldn’t want to let your children near. After a couple of editorials it was easy to lose perspective, to forget that what was being discussed was a handful of swearwords broadcast on a regional television show, blurted out by a rock ’n’ roll band under direct encouragement to be as shocking as possible. From the hysterical reaction of the press, one would have thought that pure anarchy itself had broken out, that Sex Pistols-inspired raping, pillaging, rioting and looting had engulfed the country. For McLaren, this was pure publicity gold, the kind of exposure money couldn’t buy. Suddenly everyone was talking about the Sex Pistols, and suddenly everyone knew that the band who were 29

bringing about the collapse of civilisation as we knew it had a record in the shops that week. A record brilliantly, perfectly called Anarchy in the UK. Only the Daily Express grasped the real implications of the furore. Under another headline that would later resurface as a Sex Pistols banner, they got to the heart of the matter. ‘PUNK? CALL IT FILTHY LUCRE ‘Concerts for the Sex Pistols were cancelled and interviewer Bill Grundy was suspended last night in a row over the group’s four-letter outburst on TV. But the real four-letter word behind it was CASH. For EMI, Britain’s biggest record company, has a big financial interest in the “punk rock” men… ‘[An] official admitted: “After this row it’s anyone’s guess how big they could be.” But it was denied the incident was a publicity stunt.’ If the Bill Grundy incident, as it came to be known, was important in the development of the Sex Pistols as a commercial brand, if it exposed them to a huge record-buying public, it is also important for far deeper, if less immediately obvious, reasons. Suddenly, punk was out of the clubs and backstreets and council estates and into the hearts and homes of middle England. Steve Jones’s mocking laugh, Rotten’s sardonic leer, the outlandish outfits and the sneering venom and the violent, vicious music – it was all catapulted out of the underground and into the mainstream. And whilst the tales of complaints to MPs, threatened legal action, and kicked-in televisions were almost certainly exaggerated, what is undeniable is that the Bill Grundy incident was like the country peeling off an old plaster and revealing a diseased wound underneath. What had been festering quietly, unbeknown to the vast majority for years, had suddenly been exposed. The punks had arrived. The parents of middle England may have frowned and worried and written concerned letters to their MPs, but their children reacted in a completely different way. All the things that repulsed the over-thirties about the Sex Pistols made them irresistible to the younger generation. 30

On 3 December, even as the newspapers were continuing to work themselves up into a lather over the shocking new punkrock phenomenon, the Sex Pistols had been scheduled to start a tour in support of the single. Twenty-one dates had been planned throughout December with the cream of the new punk movement, including The Clash, The Damned, and the Buzzcocks, in support, but post-Grundy, many of the promoters got cold feet. The cancellations came faster than McLaren or the band could handle them. In the end they managed a total of seven concerts, four of which were as a result of last-minute rescheduling. Meanwhile, Anarchy in the UK peaked at No. 38 in the charts. The Sex Pistols might have broken the Top 40, they might have generated unprecedented amounts of publicity for a new band, they might have become the leaders of a whole new youth movement that was seeing brash new bands such as The Clash, The Damned, the Buzzcocks and Siouxsie & the Banshees getting snapped up by eager record companies, but there were rumblings of discontent at their own corporation. Some senior figures at EMI weren’t happy with their most exciting new signing. In his address to the Annual General Meeting, Sir John Read, Chairman of the EMI Group, could not hide his distaste at recent events. ‘The Sex Pistols incident,’ he said, ‘which started with a disgraceful interview given by this young pop group on Thames TV last week, has been followed by a vast amount of newspaper coverage in the last few days. ‘Sex Pistols is a pop group devoted to a new form of music known as “punk rock”. It was contracted for recording purposes by EMI Records Limited in October 1976 – an unknown group offering some promise, in the view of our recording executives, like many other pop groups of different kinds that we have signed. In this context, it must be remembered that the recording industry has signed many pop groups, initially controversial, who have in the 31

fullness of time become wholly acceptable and contributed greatly to the development of modern music. ‘Sex Pistols have acquired a reputation for aggressive behaviour which they have certainly demonstrated in public. There is no excuse for this. Our recording company’s experience of working with the group, however, is satisfactory. ‘Sex Pistols is the only “punk rock” group that EMI Records currently has under direct recording contract, and whether EMI does in fact release any more of their records will have to be very carefully considered. I need hardly add that we shall do everything we can to restrain their public behaviour, although this is a matter over which we have no real control…’ The careful consideration didn’t last too long. On 4 January the band left for a five-date tour of Holland. The British press saw them off at the airport. The London Evening Standard revealed to a public now eager for their daily dose of Sex Pistols-related outrage that the band, ‘caused an uproar’ at Heathrow, and told how they ‘shocked and revolted passengers and airline staff as they vomited and spat their way to an Amsterdam flight.’ It was too much for EMI. On 6 January 1977 they issued a press release declaring that the record company and the band ‘have mutually agreed to terminate their recording contract,’ adding that they felt ‘unable to promote this group’s records internationally in view of the adverse publicity which has been generated over the last two months.’ They did, however, agree to honour the financial side of their contract. The Sex Pistols’ three-month stint as an EMI band saw them net £40,000, release one single, and become the most talkedabout rock ’n’ roll band in the country. The twists in the tale, though, were only just beginning. The day after they were dropped by EMI, the Pistols played the Paradiso Club, Amsterdam. It was to be Glen Matlock’s last gig with them for nearly twenty years. 32

‘I’ve done no harm to no one. In fact, I think I’ve improved the world.’ – Johnny Rotten

As the band, still unable to secure a date in Britain, retreated to the studio, as McLaren began schmoozing for another record deal, tensions within the Pistols began to reach breaking point. In a sense, the Sex Pistols had always been Paul and Steve’s band. Glen had been brought in through McLaren, and Rotten had joined last of all. It was these two additions to the Cook/Jones foundation that proved the problem. Paul and Steve may have been the heart and soul of the band, but Glen and Rotten were undoubtedly what gave the Sex Pistols their edge. They were the creative fulcrum. Johnny had the look, the attitude, the ferocious intelligence and fierce nihilism, as well as a voice and charisma that marked him out as one of the all-time great front men, and Glen wrote the songs. To view the Sex Pistols from a critical standpoint, to try to ignore the surrounding circus and concentrate purely on the music, is all but impossible. Half the point of the Sex Pistols is that their phenomenon was not just about the music. Nevertheless, heard in what isolation a person can manage, Glen’s songwriting skills stand up to serious critical scrutiny. The opening riffs on Anarchy in the UK and God Save the Queen particularly crackle with a freshness and intensity rock music hadn’t heard since Chuck Berry, and of course the famous two-note intro to Pretty Vacant remains a bona-fide classic to this day. If Rotten had given McLaren exactly what he needed to shock and awe the world into remembering the name of his band, Glen gave the Pistols musical credibility. He gave them a set of songs that would ensure their legacy went beyond the merely shocking. As a writer of fast, controlled, exhilarating three-minute rock ’n’ roll songs he remains extraordinarily undervalued, but, as one of the Sex Pistols, he never really became part of the gang. ‘When you’re abroad, surrounded by strangers,’ he later said, ‘you need to get on with your bandmates, you’ve got to be friends. And we weren’t any more. There was John – and Steve and Paul – and me. That’s when I decided I should get out.’ 34

Rotten later sneeringly described Matlock as too ‘middle class’ for the Sex Pistols, as an ‘ego tripper’, and a story even appeared in the press saying that the bassist and principal songwriter had been kicked out of the band ‘for liking the Beatles’. Steve Jones even remarked that the real reason had been because he was ‘always washing his feet’. Matlock’s replacement was swift and typically non-compromising. Rotten’s friend Sid Vicious (or John Simon Ritchie-Beverly, to give him his correct names) had been kicking around the fringes of the band since the earliest days. Skinny as a snake, with sharp, angular features, hair even more extreme in its short, spiky unkemptness than Rotten’s, and often dressed in little more than a filthy pair of ripped drainpipe jeans, Converse sneakers and a biker’s jacket, the nineteenyear old had acquired a reputation amongst those in the know as an extreme embodiment of the new punk rock. Often credited with inventing the pogo, he was certainly responsible for much of the violence at early gigs. On one occasion he wrapped a rusty bicycle chain around the face of NME journalist Nick Kent; on another he threatened Whistle Test presenter ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris in the 100 Club. Legend has it that Harris was rescued by roadies for prog rock supergroup Procol Harum. For Sid, though, being near the band wasn’t enough. He was desperate to move from the audience to the stage, and after stints as drummer for Siouxsie and as a vocalist-guitarist in the short-lived Flowers of Romance (named after an early Pistols song), Rotten and McLaren viewed him as the perfect replacement for Glen, even though – or maybe because – he could barely play a note. ‘The first rehearsals with Sid were hellish,’ said Rotten later. ‘Everyone agreed he had the look. Sid tried real hard, but boy, he couldn’t play guitar.’ It seemed like an inspired replacement, but in replacing Glen with Sid, the Pistols had unwittingly given an indication of the direction they were to take from then on. Sid-for-Glen was almost 35

‘I’m not here for your amusement. You’re here for mine.’ – Johnny Rotten

the perfect metaphor for what happened to the band. Out went the tunesmith, the creative force, the steady hand, and in came the wild, erratic, destructive, addictive headline-junkie. From that point on, the image, the style, and the impact was what mattered most. The music became less important. The Sex Pistols had an album’s worth of groundbreaking, incendiary songs behind them, but after Glen’s departure would write little new stuff that could compare. Not that it mattered to McLaren. According to him, ‘When Sid joined he couldn’t play guitar, but his craziness fit into the structure of the band. He was the knight in shining armour with a giant fist.’ It was a giant fist that was to smash the whole game wide open, and first up was A&M records. For McLaren, selling records was still the raison d’etre for any band, no matter how revolutionary or inspiring or influential they might later turn out to be, and although the Grundy incident, the cancelled tour, the sacking by EMI, and the recruitment of Vicious all made for fantastic publicity, all increasing the notoriety of his act, they remained a band without a record deal. No record deal meant no records in the shops, and if no one can buy you, if no one can hear you, then really, what was the point? As McLaren put it in an interview with Sounds magazine, with his customary mix of insight and hyperbole, ‘What sells records is plays on the radio… what sells records is if you were on TV last week, singing it. Because you’re living in a generation brought up on radio and TV… The people who’re really buying the records, they just listen to what’s on the radio. And what’s on the radio’s what sells records. The Ramones don’t sell records, they’re not on the radio. It doesn’t matter if they’ve got a six-page spread in Creem with a front cover… it don’t mean anything. ‘Bay City Rollers sold thousands and thousands of records; who is replacing them? What are those kids buying now? ‘I think the only reason for doing it is to get those teenage kids really excited about something, instead of being handed the normal 37

fodder from the industry, with bands that have little content or value.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; The Sex Pistols needed another record label, and for their sins, they got one â&#x20AC;&#x201C; just not for long.

Chapter 3

HYPE AND GLORY ‘God save your mad parade...’

y March 1977, the Sex Pistols had a new member and a new song ready to record, but no recording deal. Rotten and Matlock’s unofficial national anthem, God Save the Queen (also known as No Future and, at one stage, No Hope, No Glory) was scheduled to be the next single release. Malcolm McLaren knew that in a jubilee year such a song was guaranteed to keep the Pistols trading at the very top of the tabloid shock exchange. Since parting with EMI, McLaren had deliberately resisted the advances of Richard Branson’s Virgin label. Branson, who had made his name with the release of Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, was very much seen as exactly the kind of old hippy the Pistols were opposed to. He had instead continued to court the multinational majors. 39

His persistence paid off. On 10 March 1977, the Sex Pistols signed with A&M records in a press ceremony held outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, although the band had actually officially signed the day before. Jubilant record company boss Derek Green told the music press that, ‘The Sex Pistols becoming available presented us with a unique business opportunity to be linked with a new force in rock music which is spearheaded by this group. ‘The notoriety which they have already received was not a dissuading factor, and would not be to anyone who has been around during the last fifteen years of rock music and its fashions. ‘I believe the Sex Pistols will effect some major changes in rock music, and we at A&M are excited by them, their music, and to have entered into a world-wide recording agreement.’ For the record company itself, the signing ceremony was just about the high point of their relationship with their newest band, as things went dramatically downhill pretty much straight away. As Green found out, the Sex Pistols’ ‘notoriety’ was not purely tabloid fabrication, and if you’re going to mix it with the bad boys, you have to be prepared for their bad behaviour. Clearly the worse for wear for drink and happily mugging for the cameras as they put their names to a deal reputedly worth £150,000, John, Paul, Steve and Sid left the press conference and set about the complimentary bottles of vodka stocked in their new record company bosses’ limousine. The limo – its insides thoroughly trashed by this time – eventually pulled up at the A&M offices on the New King’s Road, and the band duly stormed the building. In an office upstairs Malcolm and Derek Green listened to the Pistols’ latest demos, confirming that God Save the Queen was to be the first release. In the building below them the Sex Pistols were causing mayhem. Johnny Rotten stalked the floors, taunting the long-haired executives, sneering and insulting and goading them for their 40

flares and their wing collars and the ‘hippy shit’ records they were producing, whilst Steve Jones, so drunk he could barely stand, took up residence in the ladies’ toilet, groping whoever came within reach. Never one to be second-best when it came to bad behaviour, Sid duly went one better than either of his bandmates, first kicking in a toilet bowl so badly that he gashed his foot, before staggering across a boardroom, trailing blood all the way, launching some potted plants out of the windows, and finally collapsing into an alcoholic stupor by someone’s desk. If a few rude words and a bit of tabloid controversy was too much for EMI, this was certainly beyond what Green and A&M were prepared to put up with. Just one week after signing the Sex Pistols, A&M put out the following press release: ‘There is no longer any association between A&M Records and the Sex Pistols. Production of their single God Save the Queen, which had been tentatively scheduled for release later this month, has been halted.’ The band were paid off with £75,000, but once again, and with the all-important Jubilee then just three months’ away, were without a record deal. McLaren didn’t know whether to feel exultation or despair. As he told the Evening Standard, ‘They knew what they were getting, and managing director Derek Green even said that he wasn’t offended by the group’s behaviour and that he thought they were fresh and exciting… ‘The Sex Pistols are like some contagious disease – untouchable. I keep walking in and out of offices being given cheques. When I’m older and people ask me what I used to do for a living I shall have to say: “I went in and out of doors getting paid for it.” It’s crazy.’ McLaren bit the bullet and called Richard Branson. Branson may have been a bit of a hippy, but he was also an astute businessman, and he knew, as did that Daily Express editorial after the Grundy incident, that there was money to be made from the Sex Pistols. He was convinced that if he could get the product out there 41

‘Sometimes the most positive thing you can be in a boring society is absolutely negative.’ – Johnny Rotten

the kids would buy into it, and as long as the band were going to make Virgin money, he really wasn’t about to get too fussed about a bit of punkish high spirits from the boys. And Branson also had an edge on his more established rivals. He was young enough and hip enough to understand where the punks were coming from. His first move was to issue a press release, but while EMI and A&M had sent out the standard few sentences, he went to town, commissioning punk journalist Caroline Coon to produce a two-thousand-word lowdown on the band. The result was a handy cut-out-and-quote guide to the Sex Pistols and all the angry, alienated kids they spoke up for. According to Coon’s release, the Sex Pistols sang ‘anti-love songs, cynical songs about suburbia and songs about repression, hate and aggression. They have shocked many people. But the band’s music has always been true to life as they see it. Which is why they are so wildly popular. The fans love the Sex Pistols and identify with their songs because they know they are about their lives, too.’ For the first time outside the fringe press, the Sex Pistols were being taken seriously. Coon, and by default Virgin records, did not see them simply as a bunch of louts, a gang of filthy-mouthed hooligans. On the contrary, Rotten was the ‘angelically malevolent Scaramouch… [the] style-setting, opinion-forming generalissimo of the new sub-cultural movement.’ Steve Jones was ‘great fun’, Paul Cook ‘good humoured’, and Sid Vicious? Well, Sid really was as bad as they said. Or worse. The press release ended with the ominous line, ‘Not a man to be messed with, our Sid – his bite is reputedly worse than his bark.’ Most importantly of all, ‘the Sex Pistols have remained unrepentant and adamant. They want to shock people out of apathy. They want other young people to “do something!”. And most of all they want to have fun playing rock ’n’ roll. Which is why they’ve kept going.’ They were, of course, available exclusively through Virgin Records. On 26 May 1977, the Sex Pistols finally released God Save the 43

Queen. It was, and is still, an extraordinary record, and it would be accompanied by an extraordinary blitz of controversy. The song began, if anything, with even more of a shock than Anarchy in the UK. Where the first single took off with a roar, here the Pistols nicked the traditional Chuck Berry guitar opening and twisted it into a squealing shot to the arm. Bass and drums scattered a machine-gun rhythm and Rotten’s first line couldn’t be loaded with more sarcastic venom. The shocks come fast and deft in eight opening lines that spat loud and clear and unrepentant: ‘God save the queen The fascist regime It made you a moron Potential H bomb. God save the queen She ain’t no human being And there is no future And England’s dreaming’ The intensity didn’t let up from there on in. Through an explosive solo and more throwaway damnings of society, such as, ‘cos tourists are money!’, the band’s tight-as-a-drum performance was matched by Rotten’s clear-eyed apocalyptic vision of an England gone awfully wrong, with a figurehead who was ‘not what she seems’ steering the sinking ship. The worst thing of all? It’s that what hope there was lay in proles like Johnny Rotten himself – the flowers in the dustbin, the poison in the human machine. We’re the future, he mocked, your future. The call-and-response refrain at the end is at once gloriously exhilarating and utterly chilling: ‘No future! No future! No future for you!’ The worm had turned; the lunatics had taken over the asylum. The peasants had revolted. 44

At just three minutes and seventeen seconds it was a breathtaking assault on both the senses and the sensibilities of 1977 Britain. Never before had music and lyrics and meaning come together so succinctly and with such force. It took the art of the single release to a new level, and so of course the BBC banned it. God Save the Queen was to become the subject of just about the most concerted campaign of censorship, obstruction, double-dealing, and double standards ever to darken the music industry. The record was marked out from the beginning. The national press, although happy to run front-page shock stories on the punks, refused to review the single, although the music press were unanimous in their praise of it, and both the BBC and the Independent Broadcasting Authority slapped bans on it, meaning that it could not be legally played on any British TV or radio show. Remember McLaren’s assertion that ‘what sells records is plays on the radio… what sells records is if you were on TV last week, singing it’? By those standards this was little short of a disaster. Things got worse. The band couldn’t get a gig in the UK; a thirtysecond radio advert was rejected by all the biggest commercial stations, and a ten-second TV advert was similarly rejected by Thames TV. Then, showing a rather blinkered attitude for a news agency, the Associated Press agency declared that they would no longer run any stories featuring the Sex Pistols. WH Smith refused to stock the single, and many other shops likewise wouldn’t even acknowledge its existence, some simply leaving a gap in the chart spaces where God Save the Queen should have been. Despite this, God Save the Queen flew out of the shops. During Jubilee Week, pressing plant demand for the Pistols’ single was three times its nearest rival, and yet, somehow, when it came to the official chart rundown, God Save the Queen peaked at No. 2, with Rod Stewart’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It holding on to the top spot. 45

Had there been foul play? It seemed to many that something funny had gone on. The question was, why? After all, the idea of a pop song provoking such widespread outrage and action seems ridiculous now, and the thought of the whole of the music industry conspiring to suppress a single simply because it dared to express anti-royalist ideas is nothing short of laughable. Pop music, however, is all about context. In 1977 the Sex Pistols were considered to be a genuine threat to the Jubilee. The country may have seemed outwardly on a patriotic high, but the royal fervour was perhaps only skin deep, for the truth was that Britain’s Greatness was no longer quite so assured, and some might have interpreted the two-and-a-half decades of Queen Elizabeth II as something of a national slide. The Queen’s twenty-five years on the throne had taken Britain from a postwar high through the free excesses of the sixties and Swinging London and into a new era of Cold War paranoia, rising unemployment, and a population getting increasingly restless with the way things were being run. Things weren’t great out there, and certainly not as great as they used to be. The establishment needed the Jubilee to inject a bit of national pride back into the people. They needed a good flag-waving celebration to keep the people from looking too closely at the way things were really going. What they really didn’t need was a song that talked of H-bombs, dehumanisation, fascism, lost dreams, and of there being no future – all illustrated with a mutilated picture of Her Majesty with eyes blacked out like a kidnap blindfold and a safety pin through her mouth. What they really, really didn’t need was that song going to number one during the very week we were all supposed to be singing the real God Save the Queen. It simply was never going to happen. Whether or not Rod Stewart sold more records than the Sex Pistols that week, he was never not going to hold them off the top of the charts. 46

‘If there’s not a rebellious youth culture, there’s no culture at all. It’s absolutely essential. It is the future. This is what we’re supposed to do as a species, is advance ideas.’ – Johnny Rotten

If some thought Rotten and McLaren and Co’s sneering outfit little more than thugs, others saw them as genuinely dangerous, and some even had the sensitivity to try to understand rather than simply condemn. On 12 June, the Sunday Mirror ran a front page editorial in which they seemed to want to move past the shocks and into the real issues. ‘What’s burning up the kids? A disturbing report on the amazing new cult. ‘Punk rock – the spitting, swearing, savage pop music of rebellious youth – is sweeping teenage Britain. ‘Today, after a Silver Jubilee week in which the Queen’s popularity has never been higher, she is the subject of attack by a punk group. ‘The Sex Pistols have burst into the Top Ten with a record which calls the Queen a moron. ‘Some charts already put God Save the Queen at No. 2. And it is forecast to go to the top next week. ‘Yet it has reached this position despite the BBC refusing to play it. ‘The song is also banned by many commercial stations. ‘Top chain stores are refusing to stock the record. Concert promoters have cancelled Sex Pistols appearances. ‘But such is the new-found and disturbing power of punk that nothing can stop the disc’s runaway success. ‘The record may even become the fastest-seller in pop music history. No pop song has ever contained verses like these before.’ And as if all of that controversy wasn’t enough, the band had one last statement to make on the Jubilee. To mark both the Jubilee itself and the Sex Pistols’ own hijacking of the national mood, McLaren and Branson hired a boat for 7 June, and as the nation toasted its monarch, the band and a select few guests set off down the River Thames for their own party. Steaming upriver towards Parliament like the tattered advance party of a punk invasion force, the band launched into a set of blistering songs that have gone down in music history as one of the greatest (and shortest) gigs ever. 48

Writing in the 18 June issue of Sounds, Jon Savage captured the adrenaline and the panic, the hope and the glory beautifully. ‘Rotten gives up on losing the feedback,’ he wrote, ‘and the band slams into Anarchy, right on cue with the Houses of Parliament. A great moment. It’s like they’ve been uncaged – the frustration in not being able to play bursts into total energy and attack. Rotten’s so close all you can see is a snarling mouth and wild eyes, framed by red spikes. Can’t shake that feedback: he complains won’t sing for the first verse of No Feelings but the others carry on. More frustration to explode. ‘By now the atmosphere is electric/heart thumps too hard/people pressing, swaying – it’s like they have to play to blast them away. They’re also playing for their/our lives – during Pretty Vacant and the next song two police boats start moving around in earnest. ‘Now all adrenalin is flat out do it do it do it now now now NOW – suddenly in I Wanna Be Me they get inspired and take off/No Fun SCREAMED out as the police boats move in for the kill is one of the rock ’n’ roll moments EVER. I mean EVER. (Think about that).’ It was too much for the police, however. They ordered the boat to be pulled over, where more officers were waiting. The band and their entourage stormed off the quay, but the authorities were well prepared and, although the band and Branson escaped unscathed, both McLaren and Vivienne Westwood were arrested and hauled away, sustaining injuries as they left. The point had been made: the Sex Pistols had taken on the country. And most of the country wasn’t very happy about it. For some of the country, outraged editorials and even arrests weren’t enough in the face of such an invasion. In the fortnight following the boat trip, Rotten and Paul were both attacked, although separately – the singer with a razor to his face outside a north London pub, the drummer by five men with an iron bar near Shepherd’s Bush underground station. Things were escalating; the stakes were being raised. 49

‘I got this feeling I’m gonna die before I get old. I don’t know why. I just have this feeling.’ – Sid Vicious

It was about this time that Sid started using heroin in earnest. After taking up with American groupie Nancy Spungen, who he had met as long ago as the Pistols’ abortive Anarchy Tour, he had been eager to join her in experimenting with the drug. Before long they were both dependant on it. As the band – paranoid and edgy and their every move the subject of hysterical headlines – left for a tour of Scandinavia, McLaren raised the stakes higher still. On 2 July the Sex Pistols released their third single, Pretty Vacant. If their first two singles had dealt with such big issues as the state of the nation and where the country was headed, their third was a big, screaming, ‘Look at me!’ In that sense it picked up beautifully from the end of God Save the Queen. There Rotten had told us that he and his kind were the future. Here he was showing us exactly what future he was offering. The answer read like a new definition of nihilism. The first line said it all. ‘There’s no point in asking, you’ll get no reply.’ The lyrics were both a comment on the furore surrounding the band – we’re so pretty, oh so pretty! – and a kind of rejection of any agenda that might have been ascribed to them. It was a manifesto of nothingness. What do we have to give you? Nothing, sneers Johnny. We’re vacant. Once again, the song culminated in a euphoric call-and-response coda, hammering the point home (‘We’re pretty/Pretty vacant’) until the devastating cackle and snarl of the lingering last phrase – the most painful twist of the knife of all. Not only did the leaders of the ragged punk invasion have nothing to offer beyond their own nihilism, they didn’t even want to help themselves, let alone anyone else: ‘We’re pretty vacant… and we don’t care.’ Musically, Pretty Vacant was another of Matlock’s sparselypowerful masterpieces, a perfectly honed three-minutes-eighteenseconds of razor-sharp guitar and driving bass, all offset by some remarkably accomplished drumming by Cook. If it contained what 52

may be the most famous intro in punk, Steve Jones’s repeated two notes ramped up the menace perfectly, building into a siren-like wail until all the tension exploded into a series of crashing power chords, it also had the most unlikely inspiration. Matlock later claimed that he took the idea from the chorus of the ABBA song SOS. The single climbed as high as number six in the charts, and it saw the band appear on Top of the Pops. The move attracted criticism on both sides. With the Sex Pistols’ contemporaries, The Clash, publicly refusing to play the flagship music show, many punks took the Pistols’ appearance on it to be a sign of them selling out, and finally taking the traditional, establishment way of doing things. The band themselves agonised over the invitation to play, but finally, and perhaps under pressure from both Branson and McLaren, agreed to perform. The BBC hadn’t taken the decision lightly either. After all, this was a band upon which they had imposed a blanket ban just a month before. In the end, however, and with Pretty Vacant seemingly free from the blatant controversies of the first two singles, the executives agreed that a show like Top of the Pops simply could not ignore the burgeoning phenomenon. There was one proviso, however. If the BBC were just about prepared to let the most vital, most important, most controversial band in Britain and possibly the world on to their show, they certainly weren’t about to let them loose live in a studio full of people. Bill Grundy had taught them something, and they didn’t want any rude words on their network, thank you very much. They insisted the Sex Pistols film their performance separately. Unfortunately, for the BBC, the Sex Pistols appearance on Top of the Pops remains most notable for the repeated use of one of the most offensive swear words of all. The story goes that the bookers, executives, and men responsible for checking such things thought Rotten’s idiosyncratic pronunciation of ‘vacant’ to be due to his Irish accent. The reality, of course, was that millions of viewers watched 53

as, for the only time in its history, the C-word – ‘we’re vaaay-cunt!’ – was used fully nine times on the nation’s favourite music show. ‘The BBC’s decision to put the punk rockers on TV is certain to enrage thousands of parents and other viewers,’ noted the Daily Mirror the morning of the show. They were more right than they realised, and things were about to get even more controversial. The Sex Pistols finally had an album ready to release.

Chapter 4

NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS ‘I didn’t ask for sunshine and I got World War Three...’

he Sex Pistols’ only official album had been recorded between March and June of 1977, in the period spanning the A&M debacle and the madness of the Jubilee, when the band were arguably at their most explosive, most controversial, and most fired up with the idea that anything was possible, that this adventure could take them anywhere they wanted to go. All but two of the songs had been written with Glen Matlock. Only Bodies, Rotten’s obscene take on abortion and mental illness, and Holidays in the Sun, a straight-up-and-at-’em riffer, were credited to the Pistols without him. The strength of these two tracks, however, should not have been taken as an indication that the band were anything like as creative a unit without Glen Matlock, and despite Steve Jones’s continued 55

improvement as a guitarist, they certainly weren’t anything like as accomplished musicians. Whatever his other qualities, the reality was that Sid Vicious could barely play his instrument. Rumours persist that even after his sacking-or-quitting, Matlock was drafted into the studio to help record the album’s tracks, and whatever the truth of it, it’s undeniable that Sid simply wasn’t up to the task most of the time. With the bassist living the role of a Sex Pistol rather more than he embraced any ideas of musicianship, it was often left to Steve Jones to record Sid’s bass parts. As Jones himself remembered later, ‘Sid wanted to come down and play on the album, and we tried as hard as possible not to let him anywhere near the studio. Luckily he had hepatitis at the time.’ When he did make it to the studio, his contributions were often all but unusable anyway. Jones recalled, ‘We just let him do it. When he left I dubbed another part on, leaving Sid’s down low. I think it might be barely audible on the track.’ By the time Pretty Vacant had scored the Sex Pistols their second consecutive Top 10 hit, the album was ready to go. Before its release, however, they were to put out one more single, their last true single release as a coherent unit. Holidays in the Sun, one of the pair of post-Matlock compositions, is a fast, simple rocker with a descending hook that some thought suspiciously similar to the Jam’s In the City. The guitars, however, are layered up and fuzzed up to create a wall-of-sound effect, and it features yet another astonishing vocal performance by Johnny Rotten. Again, he’s got us from the very first line. ‘A cheap holiday in other people’s misery…’, a chillingly accurate description of the media circus that the Sex Pistols had become, a lurid tabloid spectacle for the nation to gawp and tut at over their breakfasts. The insight was immediately followed by a slap in the face. ‘I don’t wanna holiday in the sun, I wanna go to the new Belsen.’ To reduce the Nazi concentration camps to the level of just another tourist attraction was 56

shocking enough, and by following it with mentions of World War Three and the repeated ‘Berlin Wall’ refrain, Rotten was making it clear that his apocalyptic view of society was not limited simply to his own country. Even its title was a mocking reference to their first single. How does a person escape Anarchy in the UK? By taking Holidays in the Sun. Subtleties, of course, are lost on the unsubtle. London’s Capital Radio immediately banned the record, unhappy with the Nazi allusions. Rotten himself claimed that this spitting hymn to ‘cheap essential scenery’ actually reflected an affection for the German city. ‘Being in London at the time made us feel like we were trapped in a prison camp environment,’ he explained. ‘There was hatred and constant threat of violence. The best thing we could do was to go set up in a prison camp somewhere else. Berlin and its decadence was a good idea. The song came about from that. I loved Berlin. I loved the wall and the insanity of the place. The communists looked in on the circus atmosphere of West Berlin, which never went to sleep, and that would be their impression of the West.’ The song peaked at number eight in the British charts, and it was followed almost immediately by the Sex Pistols’ debut, and only true, album. On 28 October, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was unleashed. Its impact was immediate and profound. Pre-order sales alone guaranteed it would enter the charts at number one. Although not an unusual occurrence these days, in 1977 it was almost unheard of for a debut album to go straight to the top of the charts. Such things hadn’t happened since the Beatles’ heyday. Within a month of its release it would receive Gold Disc status. Musically, it was an extraordinary album, a watershed. Although not the first of the punks to release a long-player, with Never Mind the Bollocks, the Sex Pistols showed exactly why they were still the undisputed leaders of the movement. Although the songs screamed 57

The Sex Pistols performing live at Winterland in San Francisco on 14 January 1978. This was the bandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s last ever concert (before their reunion in 1996).

their credentials in uncompromising fashion, with an attack and intensity never before heard on record, they managed to do so with something like a polish. Whilst other punk bands strived to sound ever more raw, or live, as if this somehow made them more authentic, the production on Never Mind the Bollocks was clear and sharp, making use of multiple overdubs to achieve layered guitar effects, and of course the band played as tightly and as controlled as possible. It was against this sharp backdrop, taut with harnessed power, that Rotten could let himself go, giving free reign to the whole range of his voice, screaming and snarling and whispering and spitting, shouting his voice ragged in places, still able to summon up a bloodcurdling cry in others. However, contrary to the more blinkered critics’ interpretations, this was not the sound of someone merely making noise over the music. Rotten’s lyrical content was at least as important to the Sex Pistols as anything Jones or Cook or Matlock or Vicious were doing musically. Nobody had written lyrics like these before, with their casual, coruscating intelligence, their sneering contempt for society, their sick joy in annihilation and loss. It was fundamental to the whole ethos of the Sex Pistols that the words should not only be heard, but understood too. They were a manifesto for a whole youth culture, a searing testament to what the kids were actually feeling out there. The twelve tracks on the album clocked in at a total of just thirty minutes, and no one song lasted longer than four minutes and ten seconds. In the days when some guitar solos lasted longer than that, this was an uncompromising return to rock ’n’ roll fundamentals. There was no flab, no filler, no frills. The songs launched and exploded and disappeared again like bombs, or earthquakes. Their real impact lay in what they left behind. Kurt Cobain was later to say of Never Mind the Bollocks that it had ‘the best production of any rock record I have ever heard. It’s totally in-your-face and compressed.’ Pete Townshend of The Who agreed, 60

declaring in 1996, ‘Never Mind the Bollocks is one of the greatest records of the twentieth century.’ In the years that followed it would go on to feature in just about every greatest-albums-ever chart and be cited as a defining influence on just about every important subsequent songwriter. At the time, however, not everyone was so happy. Even amongst the fans there were some rumblings of discontent. For some the very idea of doing an album at all was a sellout, just as performing on Top of the Pops was a sellout. They felt a true punk band would stick to single releases, presumably given away as cheaply as possible. Albums were for bands like Genesis, or Led Zeppelin – bloated dinosaurs only in it for the ego and the money. Others bemoaned that all four singles featured on Never Mind the Bollocks, thus ensuring that maximum cash was extracted from the long-suffering fans, who found that after shelling out for each of the four previous releases, they already technically owned one-third of the album. Both arguments missed the point. For a start, hardly anybody actually had a copy of the single release of Anarchy in the UK. EMI had deleted as many of the original pressing as they could when they’d dropped the band, and no fan of the Sex Pistols could seriously go without owning the song. For another thing, the Pistols had never set out their stalls as guardians of the moral and ethical high ground; they’d never made any claims to integrity other than that they believed in what they were doing. And they were, after all, a rock ’n’ roll band. They weren’t making music for charity, for the good of their health. Of course they were going to release an album. With twelve tight songs in the bag it was the smart thing to do. Talk of selling out was nonsense to Rotten and McLaren, anyway. Whilst both had insisted that what they were about was real and worth something and even important, neither had made any pretence that those were their only motivations for doing it. Indeed, McLaren was later to claim in The Great Rock ’n’ Roll 61

‘I never intended for the Sex Pistols to be immeasurably successful.’ – Malcolm McLaren

Swindle that his prime motivation as Sex Pistols manager had been to make a million pounds. Even Rotten was mockingly to call their 1996 reunion the Filthy Lucre Tour. The point was that you could release an album and be true to your punk ideals; you could release an album and still mean it, maaan. The tracklisting of Never Mind the Bollocks is noteworthy on two counts. First, the band put both the post-Matlock compositions right at the start of the record, presumably to show both their strength as songwriters without him and to signify their having moved on from the Matlock-Rotten writing days. How successful this was is up for debate. Both are undeniably powerful tracks and easily the equal of much written with their original bassist, but hindsight tells us that they weren’t to signify any kind of songwriting renaissance within the band, and turned out to be the only new tunes of any worth they wrote without him. Second, the four singles are spread out more or less evenly across the two sides of the record, and not in the order that they were released. Side A opened with Holidays in the Sun and has God Save the Queen as its penultimate track; Anarchy in the UK is the second track on Side B, with Pretty Vacant the fourth, meaning that, of the twelve songs, the singles clock in at positions one, five, eight and ten. This shows either great confidence or slight timidity. Making the listeners wait until almost the end of the first side before hearing the biggest hit, God Save the Queen, is a sign of a band sure that everything else on the album will keep them interested enough to keep going, but spreading the previously known songs over the record ensured that listeners never go too long without hearing something with which they’re already familiar. The truth, of course, almost certainly lies somewhere in the middle. What is undeniable is that Never Mind the Bollocks works as a cohesive whole; it’s the kind of album a person can listen to in one sitting. The intensity doesn’t drop for a moment. The attack is sustained throughout. 63

After the marching feet and pounding riffs of Holidays in the Sun came Bodies. The song began with a drone of discordant guitars, a pause, and a single drumbeat like an intake of breath before a single, sustained, three-minute scream. It was the sound of the Sex Pistols at their most uncompromising. Guitars and bass hammered out a single note as a ferocious Rotten launched into an intense tale of Pauline, an obsessed and mentally ill fan who went through a series of abortions. ‘In a packet in a lavatory,’ he spit, ‘Die little baby, screaming.’ It is horrible stuff, and extraordinarily powerful. Bodies was followed by the altogether lighter No Feelings, a jaunty insight into what it was to be a Sex Pistol. With the rhythm moving briskly through four repeated chords we can almost hear Rotten capering around the stage as he sang, ‘I got no emotions for anybody else, you better understand I’m in love with myself…’ At less than three minutes, it was the second shortest track on Never Mind the Bollocks; only Liar, which came straight after, did the job in less time. After the moment of relative jollity that was No Feelings, the intensity was ramped up again. ‘Tell me why, tell me why, why’d you have to lie?’ screamed the lyrics as the layered guitars built up the feedback, before the dam broke with a long wail in the chorus, ‘You’re in suspension…’ Next came God Save the Queen. Removed from its stand-alone status and taken in the context of an album, the band’s most controversial song was, if anything, even more powerful here than it had sounded as a single. The rising tension of the album’s first side reached its zenith as bass-guitar-drums-vocals meshed in a glorious, furious slice of pure rock drama. After that, the hundred-mile-an-hour Problems sounded almost tame, the droning chorus‘ and its spat punchline of ‘the problem is YOU!’, taking us to the halfway point wired and exhilarated. Side B started with another bang. Seventeen had been talked of as a single, and was one of the band’s ‘declaration of intent’ songs. 64

A hammering drum and bass set a deceptively slow pace as Rotten relished every word: ‘You’re only twenty-nine Got a lot to learn But when your mummy dies She will not return. ‘We like noise, it’s our choice It’s what we wanna do We don’t care about long hair I don’t wear flares. ‘See my face, not a trace No reality I don’t work, I just speed That’s all I need… ‘I’m a lazy sod.’ It’s a sly trick, this pretence at apathy, because the last note of Seventeen (‘laaaazzyyyy!’) had barely faded before the attack of Anarchy in the UK kicked in, and Rotten was no longer a lazy sod, he was the Antichrist. Anarchy in the UK is, of course, the Sex Pistols’ real declaration of intent, their real agenda-setter. It’s followed on the album by what might be their most musically sophisticated song. A wailing, dubdrenched, almost spooky paean to either mermaids or bondage, depending on who you believe, Sub Mission stands out on the album as being its most musical song, in the conventional sense, and was also the closest the band ever came to writing a love song. After that came the explosive third single, Pretty Vacant, its long intro giving us time to readjust ourselves after the Sub Mission 65

‘It’s not every day you get to create a band like the Sex Pistols, and what it changed, on a musical level. I love that we’ve done something that was important.’ – Steve Jones

interlude, and then the album ended with a pair of songs with which most fans would have been unfamiliar. New York was a driving, urgent, not-so-thinly veiled attack on the American punk scene, specifically the New York Dolls, who McLaren briefly managed. The contempt is withering; the song declared that US punks are ‘an imitation’ and ‘just a pile of shit’. The final track was no less contemptuous, and if the target was closer to home, the assault was rather more gleeful. Just in case anyone was still unfamiliar with the Sex Pistols’ erratic record company history, EMI laid it all out. Against a pogoing rhythm and typically sharp-layered Steve Jones guitars, Rotten stuck two fingers up to the men in suits. According to Rotten, the breakdown between band and label was all down to the latter’s craven pursuit of money and fame. ‘I can’t stand these useless fools’ he spat. A hastily added final line included their other former record company with, ‘goodbye A&M’. And with that, it was over – less than forty minutes long and with barely a pause for breath. The first listen left a person exhausted, the second exhilarated. By the third we couldn’t help but be awestruck by the sustained vision, the incredible force of the thing. Regardless of snipes over the inclusion of the singles, the better critics agreed that Never Mind the Bollocks was an incredible record, one of the most significant albums of the century. Rolling Stone magazine described the sound as, ‘two subway trains crashing together under forty feet of mud, victims screaming’, and declared it to have ‘an energy and conviction that is positively transcendent in its madness and fever.’ Pre-release orders may have ensured the number one spot, but there were, however, problems beyond demand. The album’s title, supposedly inspired by Steve Jones responding to a Russian journalist’s badgering him for a clue as to what the record might be called by saying, ‘Oh, never mind the bollocks of it all!’, was always going to make some trouble, but even McLaren couldn’t have guessed how much. 68

In a sense, of course, they were asking for it. Rather than attempt to conceal the obscene album title, they made a feature of it. The album sleeve was a lurid fluorescent yellow with the words ‘NEVER MIND THE BOLLOCKS’ in stark black newsprint capitals. It was genuinely shocking. For years bands had got away with album covers featuring semi-naked girls, but none had ever flagged up a swear word so blatantly on the cover. Several leading high-street retailers, including Boots, Woolworths and WH Smith, refused to stock the album and the Independent Television Companies Association slapped yet another ban on the Sex Pistols, this time refusing to broadcast adverts for the album. This wasn’t enough for some, however, and in Nottingham the owner of a record shop and Virgin boss Richard Branson were prosecuted for displaying the album in the shop window, under the 1889 Indecent Advertising Act. Branson and McLaren weren’t about to take this one lying down, though. Showing the kind of eagerness for a fight that had taken the Sex Pistols through controversies from their very earliest days blagging other people’s gigs, past Bill Grundy, Anarchy in the UK, and the Jubilee, they contested the case, hiring top QC John Mortimer, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, to help them prove that ‘bollocks’ was not, in fact, obscene at all. Of course, the disingenuousness of the move was obvious to all. Naturally, ‘bollocks’ is obscene, that’s exactly why it was chosen for the album title, that’s why the album’s cover looked like it did, but in Mortimer they had a man from the very heart of the establishment who had both the brains and the mischief to help stick two fingers up at that establishment. So it was that on 24 November, the whole circus finally ended up in court, in a case ostensibly about the use of ‘indecent printed matter’, but which seemed to be mostly about the very existence of the Sex Pistols themselves. Mortimer destroyed the case, calling in expert witnesses, including one Reverend James Kingsley, professor 69

of English Studies at Nottingham University, member of the Royal Academy and a former Anglican priest. Asked about the derivation of the word ‘bollocks’, Kingsley showed how the word had been in use since about the year 1000, to mean a small ball, and how in the 1800s it had also been used to describe priests. ‘The word has been used as a nickname for clergymen,’ he said. ‘Clergymen are known to talk a good deal of rubbish, and so the word later developed the meaning of nonsense… they became known for talking a great deal of bollocks, just as old balls or baloney also come to mean testicles, so it has twin uses in the dictionary.’ The case was thrown out, the Sex Pistols were innocent, and ‘bollocks’ was officially an Anglo Saxon word meaning ‘nonsense’. Summing up, the chairman of the hearing declared, ‘Much as my colleagues and I wholeheartedly deplore the vulgar exploitation of the worst instincts of human nature for the purposes of commercial profits by both you and your company, we must reluctantly find you not guilty…’ Just ten years later, Rolling Stone magazine would conclude that Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was the second most important album of the previous twenty years, lying just behind Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. For the moment, however, the Sex Pistols were top of the heap. They had a number-one album in the charts, a shiny new Gold Disc, three back-to-back Top 10 hits, and had somehow just had the word ‘bollocks’ declared officially legal. All this was despite numerous bans on their music by both the BBC and the Independent networks, virtually no TV or radio advertising, several major retailers refusing to stock their records, a couple of serious assaults, and a few arrests. They were the most famous, most notorious band in Britain, and so, like so many great British bands before and after them, they did the natural thing and looked West. The Sex Pistols were going to America. It would be the death of them. 70

Chapter 5

THE GREAT ROCK ’N’ ROLL SWINDLE ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’

fter the success of Never Mind the Bollocks, the Sex Pistols might have looked like the most exciting, excited band in the country, ready to take on anyone or anything, and with a whole world of possibilities before them, but the truth was that behind the headlines and the hits, as autumn 1977 turned to winter, the Sex Pistols were falling apart. Tensions between McLaren and Rotten, always the two strongest personalities and always the two who thought it their particular creative vision that should be the Sex Pistols’ guiding force, were coming to an explosive head. By Christmas they were barely talking. 71

Meanwhile, Sid Vicious had become chronically addicted to heroin. It was almost to be expected. Sid had embraced the idea of being a Sex Pistol so wholeheartedly, throwing himself into the violence and the anarchy and the nihilism, that it was inevitable that the rock star’s destructive drug of choice should lie at the end of it all. As he told the Daily Mirror as far back as June 1977, ‘I’ll probably die by the time I reach twenty-five. But I’ll have lived the way I wanted to.’ Together with girlfriend Nancy Spungen, heroin became Sid’s new raison d’etre, and it was only a matter of time before it came between him and the band. Meanwhile, there was America. Oddly, it seemed that all were agreed that a tour of the States could be exactly what the Sex Pistols needed. For Rotten, there was a whole new populace to antagonise and seduce; for McLaren a vast potential market and a lot of money to be made. Paul and Steve had both heard great things about American groupies, and everyone figured that an enforced separation might even help Sid kick both the heroin and Nancy. For some reason, however, McLaren eschewed the two stateside centres of punk and youth culture, LA and New York, where the Sex Pistols would have almost certainly received something like a rapturous reception by kids into the Ramones and the New York Dolls, and instead booked a bizarre tour of the Deep South. In January 1978, from Atlanta, Georgia to San Francisco, California, via Memphis, San Antonio, Baton Rouge, Dallas, and Tulsa, the boys from the estates of north and west London were to be playing in the heart of redneck country. Before they left, however, there was one last British date to be played. In Huddersfield, on the afternoon of Christmas Day 1977, at a benefit for the families of striking firemen, the Sex Pistols performed a matinee show for the children, and they went down a storm. These were the kids McLaren had always talked about, the ones who only wanted to hear the music, and they were loving it. The 72

show ended in a food fight, of all things. It was to be the last time for nearly twenty years the Sex Pistols would play in this country. Just over a week later, and after some minor trouble with their visas, their criminal records initially seeing them denied entry, the Sex Pistols touched down in America. Within a fortnight the band would be no more. The seven-date American tour kicked off with a fairly uneventful gig in Atlanta, but once the band hit Memphis the writing was on the wall. The home of the king of rock ’n’ roll greeted the punks with a barrage of beer cans lobbed at the stage. Outside, two-hundred fans who had been denied entry to the seven-hundred-capacity Talyesin Ballroom went berserk, smashing windows and fighting police; on stage Rotten taunted the audience. ‘I’m not here for your amusement,’ he drawled. ‘You are here for mine.’ Sid, meanwhile, stood semi-catatonic for most of the show, only coming to life when he ripped off his leather jacket to reveal a scarred and bloody chest. Later, desperate to score some heroin, he went AWOL from his room in the Holiday Inn and was later found semicomatose in a hospital. It was just the beginning of Sid’s decline. Reacting both to the easily-outraged American audiences eager to lap up the antics of the new wild man of rock ’n’ roll, as well as to the instructions of his own security guards not to let him near drugs, Sid went spectacularly, fatally off the rails. Rotten later sardonically observed, ‘He finally had an audience of people who would behave with shock and horror. Sid was easily led by the nose.’ The next gig was at a venue called Randy’s Rodeo, in San Antonio, Texas. News of the Memphis riot preceded the band, and all 2,000 seats were sold out. Sid didn’t disappoint his public. When one heckler got a bit too close to the stage he unslung his bass and smacked him full across the head with the instrument. Things got worse in Dallas. Now strung out to breaking point with heroin withdrawal, Sid appeared onstage with the words ‘Gimme a 73

fix’ carved into his chest with blood. He spent most of the concert screaming, ‘All cowboys are queers!’ into his microphone, and when a female fan punched him in the face let himself bleed freely onstage. After the show he attacked both a female photographer and a security guard before being badly beaten by one of his own bodyguards. The Sex Pistols’ final gig with Sid Vicious was at the 5,000-capacity San Francisco Winterland on 14 January 1978. The band were barely talking to each other by then, and as Steve Jones later put it, ‘Things were definitely coming to a head. Rotten was doing his thing and all Sid wanted to do was get high, and I was hanging out with Cookie – everyone had just gone off in all different directions.’ Rotten’s own recollection is rather more pointed. ‘I hated the whole scenario,’ he said. ‘It was a farce. I felt cheated. Sid was completely out of his brains – just a waste of space. Malcolm wouldn’t speak to me. But then he would turn around and tell Paul and Steve that the tension was all my fault because I wouldn’t agree to anything. It was all very bitter and confusing.’ The band went through the motions, and, ironically, even earned themselves an encore. They played the sprawling seven-minute Iggy Pop cover No Fun, with Rotten sitting on the drum riser, drawling, ‘This is really no fun at all…’ As the band left the stage he was to deliver a now famous kiss-off to the world, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ Within a few days Rotten announced that he had left the band. The Guardian newspaper ran the story as, ‘Rotten day for punks’, with arts reporter Nicholas De Jongh writing, ‘In an outbreak of mystifying sensationalism the Sex Pistols succeeded in breaking the bounds of most things believable yesterday. ‘Johnny Rotten was reported from New York as saying that the group had broken up. And Sid Vicious was taken to hospital in the city after what was described by doctors as a “drug overdose” having taken pills and alcohol during a flight from Los Angeles… 74

‘I’m not chic, I could never be chic.’ – Sid Vicious

‘Later Mr McLaren issued a statement on behalf of his company, Glitterbest. It said: “The management is bored with managing the successful rock ’n’ roll band. The group is bored with being a successful rock ’n’ roll band. Burning venues and destroying record companies is more creative than making it.”’ Despite his statement, McLaren wasn’t ready to kill the Sex Pistols just yet. He had to finish his film, The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, before allowing the band to die completely, and so he took Jones and Cook to Brazil to put the last part of his plan into action. Without Rotten’s acerbic intelligence, and free from Sid’s intense self destruction, Steve Jones and Paul Cook became a kind of ‘Carry On Sex Pistols’. Their motivations for being in a band had never really been about revolution or politics or shaking up the status quo anyway; they’d simply been after a good time. In Brazil they recorded a song with Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs called No One Is Innocent. Released under the Sex Pistols banner in June 1978, it’s a rousing enough stompalong, but the tone is altogether different from anything Rotten had been involved with. Gone was the withering contempt, the pitiless scorn, replaced instead by a cheekiness, a humour, a kind of lovable-lads-up-to-no-good mentality. The Sex Pistols, we were told, ‘just like wearing filthy clothes and swapping filthy jokes.’ Likewise, references to Ian Brady, Myra Hindley, and former Nazi Martin Bormann lack the genuine shock of anything in God Save the Queen or Anarchy in the UK. Whilst Steve and Paul lived it up in Brazil, for Sid there was only one place left. Now free of his minders and whatever steadying influence Rotten might have been, he promptly overdosed in San Francisco before heading for New York, Nancy Spungen, and as much heroin as he could lay his hands on. Once there he overdosed again. Sid was to record a number of tracks as a Sex Pistol, rousing versions of Eddie Cochran numbers C’mon Everybody and Something Else, before signing off with a song that would ensure that, despite 76

everything, the junkie bassist who couldn’t play bass would be remembered for a musical contribution, after all. Sid Vicious’s version of the Sinatra standard My Way is, in a sense, the perfect song for the arrogant, doomed punk rocker. Sid’s delivery brings to life all the swagger and bullshit in the lyrics, unrepentant to the last. A video, shot for The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, showing him performing the song in leather trousers and a white dinner jacket and spraying the audience with gunfire, only added to the legend. It’s impossible to hear it now and not think of Sid leaving the stage and walking off to his death. On the morning of 12 October 1978, Sid woke from a drugged stupor in the room he shared with Nancy at the Chelsea Hotel in New York to find the bed and carpet covered in blood and Nancy dead in the bathroom, killed by a single stab to her abdomen. Charged with murder, Sid was sent to the notorious Riker’s Island Prison, and after Virgin put up the $25,000 bail, emerged from jail apparently intent on clearing his name and cleaning up his habit. Neither were to happen. On 2 February 1979, Sid Vicious took a massive overdose, and this time he never woke up. The Sex Pistol was dead at twenty-one. A week later his cover of Something Else was released, followed a fortnight later by the compilation album The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle. Although the album, and later film, contained songs credited as the Sex Pistols, with vocal performances by Ronnie Biggs and Ed ‘Ten Pole Tudor’ Tudor-Pole, the band, now without Glen, Rotten, and Sid, was effectively dead. A series of further album releases containing just about every song, demo, live performance and interview ever committed to tape were released over the following couple of years, as well as the feature film, also called The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, telling the story of the band from McLaren’s point of view. Then, by the end of 1980, McLaren and Branson finally decided that the world had probably had just about enough of the Sex Pistols. They were wrong. 77

‘When you come from desperate poverty, and that’s exactly what I come from, you know that nonsenses are not to be tolerated. I’m not sure who gains from chaos, but I know it’s not the poor folks in the council flats. The politics of vindictiveness is never, ever anything like a solution.’ – Johnny Rotten

On 18 March 1996, twenty years after they first burst into the public consciousness with a barrage of swearwords on the Bill Grundy show, the Sex Pistols called a press conference in the old surroundings of the 100 Club. There they announced that the original four Pistols, Johnny, Paul, Steve and Glen, were to reunite for a tour, called, in honour of that old Daily Express headline, The Filthy Lucre Tour. In typical style, Rotten fielded questions from a room of sarcastic journalists with something like the old vigour. ‘Listen, we invented punk, we write the rules. You follow. Not the other way round,’ he said. ‘And quite frankly, the Sex Pistols never finished properly so this is what this is about, to put a full stop on it.’ Asked what Sid Vicious might have made of the band’s public reunion with Matlock, Rotten was unequivocal. ‘Sid was nothing more than a coat hanger to fill in an empty space on stage,’ he sneered. ‘These are the people that wrote the songs and now we’d like to be paid for it.’ The tour was a success, both in terms of fan reaction and for making the band their money, and a gig at London’s Finsbury Park garnered positive reviews in papers, including the Times, as sure a sign as any how the world had changed since the Pistols had been considered too shocking for middle England to handle. Since then, further tours have seen the band reunite in 2002, for the Golden Jubilee, naturally, and for a triumphant North American tour of 2003. All the shows, however, have been little more than greatest hits exercises. There has effectively been no new true Sex Pistols material written since Holidays in the Sun. Asked in 2006 if that situation would ever change, Glen thought it unlikely, but then, he also thought it unnecessary. Whatever they do now, it is for those two furious years in the mid-seventies that the Sex Pistols will always be remembered, for those two years when they changed everything about rock ’n’ roll for ever. That same year the Sex Pistols were invited to be inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. They turned it down, calling the 79

institution a ‘piss stain’, and declaring, ‘We’re not your monkeys… we’re not coming. You’re not paying attention.’ ‘We’ve got something in common, the four of us, nobody else in the whole world has,’ said Glen last year. ‘When we get in a room and plug in, we’re the Sex Pistols. No one comes close to that.’

Appendix

THE MUSIC

lthough the Sex Pistols as a complete band only ever officially released one album and four singles, their impact has been enormous. Sure, the clothes, the artwork, and the attitude all have their place, but none of these would have mattered without the music. The Sex Pistols were first and foremost a rock â&#x20AC;&#x2122;nâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; roll band, and no analysis of their impact or importance can be complete without a look at the songs themselvesâ&#x20AC;Ś

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols Clocking in at less than thirty-nine minutes in total, and with no song longer than four minutes and ten seconds, Never Mind the Bollocks is still viewed as being amongst the greatest debuts of all time, and justifiably so. No album before or since has captured a mood or a movement so perfectly, and very few have rocked so hard. Holidays in the Sun The fourth single and album opener contains what might be Rotten’s definitive take on the media circus that the Sex Pistols became, ‘a cheap holiday in other people’s misery.’ Musically, it’s extraordinarily menacing, their finest post-Matlock musical hour. The tramp-tramptramp of marching feet faded up like the sound of an invading hooligan punk army before Jones’s single chord cut the air like a knife. Then came a moment of chaos before a trademark riff – descending bar chords, simple and brutal. From there the pace didn’t drop. Rotten’s voice rasped and whined, and with lyrics referencing the Berlin Wall and Nazi concentration camp Belsen, it laid out an agenda of alienation and pain. The last line, ‘Please don’t be waiting for me,’ sounds like both a plea and a threat. Bodies The second of the album’s songs not credited to Glen Matlock is perhaps its most lyrically intense. The discordant opening gave way to a relentless driving rhythm that matched Rotten’s tale of abortion and mental illness. The amount of lyrical profanity – one verse alone contains more f-words than the whole of the Bill Grundy interview – reflects the strength of the subject matter. When Rotten screamed, ‘I’m not a discharge, I’m not a loss in protein, I’m not a throbbing 82

squirm…’ it’s difficult not to be moved one way or another. This is not the fun Sex Pistols. This is Rotten at his most confrontational. No Feelings Another Matlock gem, the four repeated chords of the intro gave way to a typically post-blues rhythm, with a surprisingly funky guitar for such a definitively punky song. It’s structurally amongst the tightest of the Pistols’ songs, moving with real economy from verse to chorus to solo and back to verse. The combination of the deft chord structure and Rotten’s playfully violent lyrics (‘you never realise I take the piss out of you/you come up and see me and I beat you black and blue’) made this a live favourite and it was originally scheduled as the B-side to God Save the Queen. Liar Although not one of the strongest tracks on Never Mind the Bollocks, Liar is nevertheless a song most bands would be more than proud of. The single note opening, extended way beyond breaking point by first Steve’s guitar and then Rotten’s droning monotone, broke gloriously for the rising chorus (‘You’re in suspension!’), before falling back into line with the bass and drums. The ending hammers the point home repeatedly, like being punched again and again. God Save the Queen The Pistols’ second single still holds its own over thirty years after being written. Described by Matlock as a marching song, it kicked off with a signature Jones-Matlock opening, a traditional Chuck Berry-style rock ’n’ roll riff put through a grinder and spat out the other end, before the fuzz-laden guitar settled into a kind of call-andresponse game of tag with Rotten’s vocals – and what vocals they are. Rotten never sounded more spiteful, malicious, and mocking. Bass and drums rattled along like machine guns and Jones’s guitar feels barely controlled. As the song built to a climax, Rotten’s voice 83

‘I was the only guy with any bit of anarchy left.’ – Sid Vicious

rose in despair – ‘We mean it, maaan!’ – before the whole band came together to settle into the triumphalist/despairing ‘No future’ chant. At just three minutes and seventeen seconds it managed to fizzle with more ideas and energy than most bands can muster in a lifetime. Problems Another live favourite, Problems was driven by a tight rhythm section, with the bass leading the guitar through a series of twelve-bar blues riffs given a fresh injection of energy by the sheer pace at which they’re played. The droning chorus suited Rotten’s voice well, and, perhaps oddly, can sound now rather more like early PiL than Sex Pistols. Seventeen One of the great almost-singles, Seventeen (or ‘Lazy Sod’ as it was more usually called) was another great agenda-setting call to arms by Rotten and Matlock. The drums and bass set a marching rhythm as Rotten laid it out, ‘We like noise, it’s our choice, it’s what we wanna do…”, before collapsing into another call-and-response chorus and outro. Without any of the heavier sentiments of Anarchy in the UK or God Save the Queen, it’s a simple pogo anthem, and has at its core a gleeful joy at the prospect of a life wasted as a punk rocker. Anarchy in the UK The decision to make the first single the second track on side two of the album may have seemed odd, but it reflects the strength of the record as a whole. With all four singles spread out more or less evenly across the album, there’s no sense of a bright opening dwindling into complacency. Anarchy in the UK is a surprisingly slow song, but even by the time of the album’s release still a battle cry for a generation, and with EMI having withdrawn so many of the original singles so soon after its release, this was the first time many fans had a chance to own the song on vinyl. 85

Another of Matlock’s marching songs, it once again shows just what a fearsome songwriting combination he and Rotten could have blossomed into; words, music, and vocal performance marry perfectly. From the crashing intro and deliberately perverse ‘anarchist’ mispronunciation of the opening couplet to the ringing ‘Destroyyyyyy’ at the death, and through two separate guitar solos, it remains a near flawless slab of controlled musical fury. Sub Mission A Sex Pistols love song? The longest track on the album, though still an economical four-minutes-ten, it had begun life as a request by McLaren for a bondage anthem. Rotten’s mickey-taking punning on submission seemingly inadvertently produced a paean to a mysterious mermaid girl that actually works as a love song. The stuttering, almost dub-like chords crashed across the steady rhythm like waves and the reverb-soaked yelps at the end showed a level of songwriting sophistication previously only hinted at. Live, the band would either drag the song out beyond six minutes or else thrash through it in an exhilarating three, but here it stands out as an oddly cultured high point of the album. Pretty Vacant Another Matlock-Jones dazzling two-note intro again stretched the tension to breaking point before releasing us into a flurry of fast, controlled power chords. If the band’s first two singles dealt with the state of the nation, their third was directed wholly inwards, and the relish with which Rotten screeched, ‘And we don’t care!’ at the end is little short of chilling. The song is of course also notable for both the camp ‘We’re so pretty’ chorus, especially when sung live by a drunken Steve Jones, and for Rotten’s unique phraseology effectively allowing him to get away with singing a word that would have certainly seen the record banned: ‘We’re vaay-cunt!’

New York The band’s two fingers to the American punks, and specifically McLaren’s old band the New York Dolls, may not have slotted as easily into the album as the other tracks, but it has many merits in its own right. Musically it pushed towards the boundaries of what the band were capable of; lyrically, it’s unforgiving of a scene Rotten felt to be too obsessed with art, image, and drugs. ‘Four years on you still look the same,’ he spat, and later, ‘You’re condemned to eternal bullshit!’ Ouch! EMI ‘Too many people had the suss,’ screamed Rotten. ‘Too many people support us!’ Just in case the executives at the band’s first record label hadn’t quite heard enough about the Sex Pistols, they wrote a whole song about their ninety days at their expense. Musically it’s a regular catchy-as-hell Matlock call-and-response stompalong, lyrically it’s gleefully uncontrite. ‘They only did it cos of fame,’ is the conclusion we’re given, and right at the end, following their second sacking, A&M even got a mention too.

Covers, B-sides and miscellaneous I Wanna Be Me (Anarchy in the UK B-side) One of their earliest songs, this was the Pistols at their most raw, and a far cry from the relatively polished production of such tracks as Pretty Vacant. Against a backdrop of thrashing guitars and barelyheld-together drums Johnny snarled hoarsely, ‘You didn’t fool me, I fooled you.’ Did You No Wrong (GSTQ B-Side) Original guitarist Wally Nightingale’s parting gift to the band – a rousing, rollicking twelve-bar blues workout that showed hints of the electrifying energy that was to follow. It remains a hidden gem, tucked away on the flipside of God Save the Queen. No Fun (Pretty Vacant B-side) In the hands of the Sex Pistols, this Iggy and the Stooges song became a nasty, sprawling masterpiece, and some versions last well into seven minutes. The rhythm section remained controlled whilst Jones’s guitars bit and cut and sawed through the chords, and over it all a spitting Rotten declared himself to be, ‘In love… with nobody else.’ It became most famous for being the last song the band played live – before their later reunion – at the end of which Rotten posed the question, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ Satellite (Holidays in the Sun B-side) Author and punk historian Jon Savage called this ‘the great lost Sex Pistols recording’, and for many it wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Never Mind the Bollocks. With lyrics scorning the satellite towns of London where the band spent their early days blagging gigs, and an explosive guitar riff, it almost seems wasted as a B-side. Although, of course, like just about every Pistols song, it was to turn up on numerous posthumous compilations. 88

‘Music can describe emotions far more accurately than words ever can. As soon as I realised that, I knew music was where I wanted to be.’ – Johnny Rotten

No One Is Innocent Technically, the Pistols’ fifth single, although it was released after the departure of everyone but Cook and Jones. This saw the band become little more than lovable scamps. It features Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs on vocals, and was originally going to be called Cosh the Driver, before that was decided to be too tasteless. Musically, it’s unremarkable if exhilarating, and such lyrical gems as, ‘God save television, keep the programmes pure/God save William Grundy from falling in manure’ take some beating. But really – it’s not Anarchy, is it? Something Else If My Way was Sid sneering his way to the grave, this version of the Eddie Cochran classic, released after his death, showed him at his most exhilaratingly alive. Of course, it helps that it’s a great song to start with, but Sid’s performance is wholehearted and infectious and took the song to number three in the charts. Silly Thing A rare Cook-Jones song that managed not to fall into the kind of ‘carry on up the Sex Pistols’ trap of tracks like No One Is Innocent, this rocks along at a fair pace, with Jones’s guitar recapturing some of its former sting and verve. C’mon Everybody Another Eddie Cochran cover by Sid, this worked mostly because it was a great rock ’n’ roll song to start off with. Sid’s voice is again loaded with attitude, but there’s not too much in the way of inspiration here. My Way Sid Vicious’s great musical legacy, this is for many critics the definitive take on the Sinatra standard. Perhaps unwittingly, he gave 90

it exactly the swagger, arrogance, and bravado the song needs, but in doing so also revealed the vulnerability at its core. It was a staggering performance – somehow even his sloppily rewritten lyrics work – and rendered all the more poignant by his subsequent early death. It’s typical of Sid that the most musically inept of the Pistols should have produced one of punk’s essential tracks. Friggin’ in the Riggin’ (Something Else B-Side) Another song recorded without the help of Rotten, this is a further example of the Sex Pistols’ descent from cultural revolutionaries into a saucy end-of-the-pier show. The traditional sea-shanty as rearranged by Steve Jones became a cartoon punk romp through as many gleeful obscenities as the boys could fit into four minutes, and even to diehard punk purists it can still raise a smile in places. Whatcha Gonna Do About It? The Small Faces mod anthem was amongst the earliest the Pistols learnt together and was a live favourite throughout their career. Whilst the band kicked the original chords all over the place in shambolically brilliant fashion, Rotten’s half-cut vocals somehow manage to sound both menacing and ridiculous. Belsen Was a Gas Supposedly written by Sid whilst still in the Flowers of Romance, this spiky little number works well musically, though the controversial title and lyrics are either downright anti-Semitic or else simply in extremely poor taste. It was thought that the song was even being lined up as a potential single, and on the Pistols’ reformation they played a version on their 2003 US tour called Baghdad Was a Gas. Who Killed Bambi? Recorded under the Sex Pistols banner but with Ed ‘Ten Pole Tudor’ Tudor-Pole on vocals, this glorious oddity almost defies description. 91

‘The band broke up because I couldn’t bear Rotten anymore because he was an embarrassment with his silly hats and his, like, shabby, dirty, nasty looking appearance.’ – Sid Vicious

Whilst it certainly confirmed that the Pistols had become little more than a novelty act by the time Tudor-Pole took to the microphone, it is worth noting purely for the infectious lunacy of the singer yelping and screeching ‘The crime of the century! Who shot little Bambi?’ over baroque-style strings. Lonely Boy Another Cook-Jones offering, this ended up sounding rather like a remix of Silly Thing, with an almost identical backing track. If that song was rescued by the urgency of the guitars, however, this just sounds tired. The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle Written by Cook and Jones and Ten Pole Tudor, and with the latter again on vocals, this musical autobiography of the band (‘EMI said you’re out of hand/And they gave us the boot…’) served only as a rather sad footnote to the Sex Pistols’ career. Listen to this, and then to a track like No Feelings. It’s like hearing two completely different bands. Which, in a sense, is exactly what they were.