In a challenging year which tripped over itself with back-slapping anniversaries to numb the chaos (Ziggy Stardust and Roxy Music’s half-century, 60 years since The Beatles’ debut single and the first James Bond film, blah blah blah), most of the inevitable throwbacks played the nostalgia card.
But one stands out as different and a moment in time still casting a shadow: a 33 at 45 special, this is one of the greatest music debits of all time — Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.
“Texts are worldly,” the Palestinian-American literary theorist Edward Said wrote in 1983, “[they are] a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.”
Of all modern musical genres, it’s arguably punk music that exemplifies Said’s thesis that texts — in the broadest definition — are produced by and engage with the historical, political and aesthetic concerns of the world around them.
The early punk imported and transposed from American miscreants like The Stooges and The Ramones (and to a poppier extent, Blondie) expressed, above all, the socio-political concerns of those who felt excluded from the mainstream discourse of late ’70s Britain and its terminal trajectory of decline and disillusion. Yet, while it is clear that “punk is political”, it would be a mistake to see the genre as a coherent ideological critique of mainstream values, proposing a clear alternative for society.
The myth of punk as a proletarian, left-anarchist movement obscures the fact that the main figures of the movement were a somewhat stereotypical mix of working-class disaffected youth and middle-class art school types who espoused a variety of views (often vaguely) in critique of the British political and musical establishment.
“The thing is that pop music is so much better when it’s bad. At the moment pop is so nice and respectable, and it takes the edge out of the music — it becomes bland and boring. It was much more fun when the Sex PIstols were being bad and slagging everyone off!“ — Chris Lowe, Pet Shop Boys
An exploration of the music and lyrics of the triumvirate of bands at the core of UK punk – the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Damned – shows this broad range of agendas, yet also reveals the unifying program of the movement as an anti-establishment cri de coeur that embodied an irreverent, nihilist, do-it-yourself youth perspective.
While it would be easy to dismiss the Clash as middle class whingers and the Damned as the party boys of punk, they were in fact astute observers of the inner politics of the musical world. The Damned’s Politics (1977) offers a scathing critique of the “fascist manager’s dreams” of machiavellian figures like Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, who used bawdy political slogans to sell clothes and capitalised on a “politically fashionable scene”.
Punk rock articulated, and in some sense created, an oppositional attitude toward mainstream society which captured the voices of its generation, and paved the way for a new approach to music. The genre was able to do so precisely because of its committed (though multivalent) engagement with the world in which it emerged.
The historical world into which British punk arrived was, undoubtedly, a key factor in its accelerated rise to prominence. British music had become disconnected from the world of youth, and failed to articulate key concerns in the public consciousness.
David Simonelli, an author and associate professor in History at Youngstown State University in Ohio, noted in Working Class Heroes that: “Teens were gloomy and fatalistic. It seemed there was little hope of a future in 1975 if you were young and working class, and there was little question that the rock music they listened to did nothing to reflect their plight … to a core group of working-class youth, the economic privations of 1975 demanded that their music reflect their values more exclusively.”
Punk emerged as a response to this demand, and capitalised on the dissatisfaction of youth by providing them with a voice in an angry, insurrectionary music that uses history to articulate a youth agenda. This agenda can be seen in one of the early Pistols hits, Holidays In The Sun, where Johnny Rotten sings “I wanna see some history” and draws on the image of the Communist constructed Berlin Wall to explore adolescent anxieties.
The past/future John Lydon’s lyrics draw an analogy between a concrete symbol of Soviet-led oppression and the prevailing sense of economic entrapment felt by working-class youth within Britain, who could barely afford “a holiday in the sun” even if they wanted to. The arrangement also makes use of the loud opening guitar riff appropriated from The Jam’s In the City, a punchy polemic that critiques police brutality in the seventies.
Released as a 45 two weeks before its parent record, Holidays In The Sun would be notable as the fourth and final single from the band’s only bona fide studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, issued on 28 October 1977.
In fact, both flashpoint LP and single would be the band’s last releases with Rotten at the helm, who would walk out after a combative American tour and promptly form new wave musical transgressors Public Image Ltd.
Given the Pistols’ signature set came to define punk for many (“a necessary enema,“ David Bowie offered), it’s interesting how late in the day the album arrived. By the time of its release, the Ramones – an inspiration for various young Britpunks – had already released two long-players and even the Damned, Jam and Clash got their debut albums out before the Bollocks hit the fan.
Still, you had to forgive the Sex Pistols, who they were busy getting beaten up, banned, abused and arguing amongst themselves.
Though their moment in the sun was brief, the Sex Pistols were a vital breath of fresh air, and arguably the most influential punk outfit precisely because “they married … the bitter and bilious anger of Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones with the intellectual art school rebellion of Glen Matlock and manager Malcolm McLaren,” according to Simonelli.
Paul Cook? He banged the drums of course, and Matlock‘s Bowie and ABBA-obsessed replacement Sid Vicious? Well, he was Sid. Years after his death, my own mother shocked me more than the Pistols ever could by referring to Sid Vicious and offering that “he was quite good looking, wasn‘t he“
The messages of many of the Pistols’ most incisive songs are peppered with Situationist discourse with its critique of “fascist regimes” of capitalism and the promotion of “anarchy”, even though members of the group — most famously Lydon — later admitted they weren’t necessarily as ideological as their lyrics would propose. It’s as if butter wouldn’t melt…
Nevertheless, the key factor to the Sex Pistols success was the fact that these messages were mediated through the anti-social outcast lens of Lydon, who wasn’t ultimately concerned with constructing an ideological alternative, but rather wanted to tell the youth of the day to “get off your arse” and engage with the world. Sounds almost Thatcherite, doesn’t it?
The band’s manifesto-like debut single and first to be extracted from Bollocks, Anarchy In The U.K. is a coruscating example of the Rotten agenda in action. In the song, he uses the discourse of “anarchy”, but it’s not an attempt to provide any constructive ideology, but rather “to destroy” the structures which suffocate and bind him.
In the famously Artful Dodgerish line “Don’t know what I want, but I know how to get it,” Lydon doesn’t attempt to answer the problems of working-class youth, but uses music to express a visceral angst with the current state of affairs that tapped into the prevailing teenage attitudes of the time.
And they’d also delivered such an exciting and electrifying salvo of singles – Anarchy in the U.K. in 1976, then the following year God Save the Queen, Pretty Vacant and Holidays In The Sun – that the album almost seemed an afterthought. It pulled together those singles, the older No Feelings, the thrilling/revolting Bodies and some live favourites like New York, Problems and Liar.
But its provocative nature and raw power, coupled with their socio-political stance and Johnny Rotten’s confrontational personality, made it one of the great albums of the era. It went to number one on the UK charts despite not being stocked in many stores.
It was also, and this has become more apparent over time, rather conservative in its construction. They are short, spiky songs riddled with pop hooks and the traditional verse-chorus structure culminating with crisply tidy anti-fadeout endings. Problems busts the four minute mark but everything else comes in under three and half. And that’s its repeat-play strength.
The short, sharp shock maxim is everything where Bollocks is concerned.
The Sex Pistols discography is, in theory, simple: four singles and one album. That’s it. Done.
Ever get the feeling you‘ve been cheated?
Steve Pafford
Previously, the greatest music debuts of all time include: Malcolm McLaren’s Buffalo Gals, Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights, Roxy Music by Roxy Music, and Air’s Moon Safari
Further instalments coming soon