The Sex Pistols played their first gig on 6 November 1975 and their last on 14 January 1978, not long after the release of their first and only album. No major rock band has had a shorter career. The phenomenon occurred in a particular place at a particular time — and then it stopped.
Their story was one of the first I learned when I was getting interested in the history of pop music because the simplified, mythologised version was so easy to grasp. Britain was grotty, violent and boring. Everyone was listening to prog-rock keyboard solos. And then punk happened and everything changed! Was it true? Not entirely, but what a narrative!
For Craig Pearce and Danny Boyle, writer and director of the new Disney+ series Pistol, the compressed timeline cuts both ways. It helps in terms of dramatic unity: no long slog to the top, no slow decline. It hurts because the crucial events are so well-known. The convergence of a mediocre rock band called the Strand, manager Malcolm McLaren and the snot-haired outcast who became Johnny Rotten. “Anarchy in the UK”. The accidental scandal of the Bill Grundy show. The calculated scandal of “God Save the Queen” and the Silver Jubilee boat trip. The arrival of Sid Vicious. The record labels who decided they were too hot to handle before a young Richard Branson took a punt on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Their final implosion in San Francisco: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” The hideous coda of Sid and Nancy. What more is there to say? What mysteries to reveal? It all happened too fast.
The release of Pistol in time for the Jubilee, alongside a somewhat tawdry reissue of “God Save the Queen”, reaffirms the peculiar connection between the Sex Pistols and the Queen: two radically different visions of England, both now united by nostalgia. Boyle, who managed to squeeze both of them into the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, brings his usual wit and velocity to the show — the concert scenes are thrilling — but the actors are far too attractive and say implausibly tidy things like “We’re outlaws and tonight we’re going to change the world” and “No one gives a shit about us so we don’t give a shit about no one else”. Pearce, who has written five screenplays for Baz Luhrmann, makes this too much of a jolly showbiz caper and even the tragedy is sentimentalised. Pistol entertains but it doesn’t disturb.
Pistol does at least recognise that the Sex Pistols were an unstable compound from day one because the key players were not great friends and they had very different missions. Guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook and original bassist Glen Matlock wanted to make noisy rock’n’roll. “From that day on, it was different,” Jones later complained about the Bill Grundy furore. “Before then, it was just music; the next day, it was the media.”
But to Malcolm McLaren, who advertised that the Pistols were more incompetent players than they really were, it was never just about the music. It was a Situationist art project that would help him flog T-shirts and give him a reputation as a devilish impresario. “The only rule I had was that if it didn’t annoy anyone and create problems, it wasn’t worth doing,” he explained.
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Subscribe‘The simplified, mythologised version was so easy to grasp. Britain was grotty, violent and boring. Everyone was listening to prog-rock keyboard solos. And then punk happened and everything changed! Was it true? Not entirely, but what a narrative!’
I too am weary of the myth that punk swept away all of the boring old music and culture of the seventies, and that it was somehow ‘the only music that mattered’.
Ok, there was some rot in the charts, but the 70s were a decade where all kinds of music could find a big audience. Glam, disco, prog, reggae, the beginnings of electronics, metal, the list goes on.
And lest we forget that punk was a base ingredient of many of the awful fashions of the eighties.
Correct about the impact that punk (at least the sounds they produced) had on the overall music scene. Prog-rock solos were also a minority taste, but as you rightly say there was an explosion into different genre at the time which punk had no influence on whatsoever.
As a student, I turned up to a SP gig in London in late 1976 – just as they were about to make headlines – and had no idea what to expect. It was about making energetic noise and trying to cause offence, at which they were pretty successful. My own preferences lay with Led Zeppelin, whose film “The Song Remains The Same” started appearing in cinemas about the same time (a somewhat ironic title, in retrospect!)
The SP were perhaps necessary, and only in the UK could “anarchy” be spittle-drawled about in such a way that actual anarchy would never happen.
Has the author never seen ‘The Great Rock and Roll Swindle’?
He certainly doesn’t understand the point of punk and Rotten’s motivations.
Yes, I expect those middle class psuedo punks who inhabited art schools up an down the country in ’77 are disappointed with Lyndon’s support of Brexit. W**k*rs.
The punks I knew weren’t middle class or pseudo – and they would have supported Brexit for the revolution it represented, just like I did. Though I never wore the tribal colours I loved punk music and it’s ethos, and I loved prog rock too.
Still love them both now.
Confused author. Trump’s doctrine was MAGA, and it was, provably and palpably, for four years. It’s the Biden Whatever They’re Calling It that proudly displays its ecstasy of making things worse.
Sex Pistols were greatly overrated. Lydon’s best work came long after. Actually, his best performance comes from his 1993 guest feature in Leftfield’s ‘Open Up’ as far as I’m concerned. His politics were always anti-establishment and for that I always respected him far more than most of the swots that play music.
God save the Sex Pistols
They’re a bunch of wholesome blokes
They just like wearing filthy clothes
And swapping filthy jokes
Great article. But please remember that The Dictators, MC5, Iggy Pop, Ramones, etc… predate all these English punk bootlegs.
A case can be made for The Who’s My Generation as the first punk song.
The SPs were talentless, gobby adolescents, a marketing machine created by the Svengali-like McClaren. They belong in their time and place, and the most charitable interpretation of the motives of people like Boyle who want to revive them is that they’re suffering from arrested development. However, one of the band (can’t remember which one) appears to have grown up – interviewed by Johnny Walker the other day, he said he now preferred Steely Dan to the Pistols’ stuff. Good man!