The Sex Pistols: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols

Preconceived notions are a funny thing. For years, I was under the impression that the Sex Pistols, that rag-tag bunch of snot-nosed punks with safety pins through their noses and ears, spiky hair, and annoyingly pronounced Cockney accents, were terrible musicians, and all they ever produced was a bunch of noise. Judging by the few second blips and clips that I saw on the likes of VH1, where they consistently named the Pistols’ one and only album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols the most revolutionary punk album of all time, I couldn’t see the appeal. I like punk music – I’ve had London Calling for years, and have only recently gotten into Iggy and the Stooges and the MC5, bands which arguably started the whole punk revolution well before it actually started – but the Sex Pistols always struck me as overbearingly cocky and annoying. I elected to ignore their output, minimal enough as it was, for most of my life. No pain, no gain, right?

Well, I started thinking recently … what’s the point in ignoring an album that made such an enormous splash? It would be like saying the Beatles were nothing more than flashes in the pan, and that their impact on music wasn’t all that great simply because they’ve consistently been named as the most influential pop group of all time. (Amazingly, there are people who believe that is true. I know!) So, I actively went out of my way to find the album and listen to it, with hopes of being enlightened and edified.

What’s surprising about the album is that it shattered all of my preconceptions. Perhaps I’ve just been desensitized from all of the loud music I’ve listened to over the years, so that I don’t fully understand what all the hooplah is about, but Bollocks really is a whole lot different from what I was expecting. There are enjoyable melodies here, a clean production that doesn’t make everything sound like noise, and Johnny Rotten’s vocals aren’t entirely offensive. In fact, Bollocks is a great little album, and I was immediately hooked from opener ‘Holidays In The Sun’, though the lyrics are obscured quite a bit from the band thrashing away in the background (so upon first listen, I missed out on the climactic rant about meeting over the Berlin wall, though the marching feet at the beginning of the track make it obvious what the song’s undertones are … and Dave Marsh criticized Queen for being rock’s first fascist band!) and I felt like I’d heard the descending melody before. Apparently, this was a point of contention with Bruce Foxton of the Jam, whose band had just released ‘In The City’, and the similarities are obvious when the two songs are played back to back.

The punk mindset continues with ‘Bodies’, another energetic performance (similar, it seems, to the previous track), with Johnny Rotten screaming relentlessly “fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat” while angrily berating a girl named Pauline from Birmingham for having an abortion. ‘No Feelings’ is a joyous ode to self-absorption while Rotten lives up to his surname, gleefully extoling the fun of domestic abuse: “You follow me around like a pretty pot of glue / I kick you in the head, you got nothing to say … You come up and see me and I’ll beat you black and blue”. Subtlety is not a word these guys are fans of.

‘Liar’ is another dark, foreboding track full of confrontation over being wronged, with some positively raucous guitar solos from Steve Jones. (In fact, it should be mentioned that Jones is really an excellent guitarist, thus surprising me with another oft-mentioned but erroneous claim that the Sex Pistols couldn’t play their instruments. This was only true of Sid Vicious, who replaced Glen Matlock on bass, though Vicious was banned from the studio due to his complete lack of ability; Jones, incidentally, played bass on all but two songs on the album.) ‘God Save The Queen’, one of the most controversial singles by any band of the day, is a vicious attack of the British monarchy – not, specifically of the Queen herself – and was released to coincide with Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee celebration, which also saw the band playing the song loudly on a boat on the River Thames, in an attempt to upstage the celebration. Needless to say, the band was arrested, but controversy never hurt anybody, and enough people agreed with the sentiments of the song to purchase the single and send it to #2 in the UK charts.

The mayhem continues with ‘Problems’ and ‘Seventeen’, the former berating the “Establishment” for being the problem with society, while ‘Seventeen’ is one of those “you don’t get us, we don’t get you” types of songs that every good angry rock band has to record. ‘Anarchy In The UK’ comes next, and is the record that started it all. Another relentless song calling for an uprising, perhaps the most memorable part of it is the “Antichrist” / “anarchist” rhyme, though Rotten later explained he deliberately mispronounced “anarchist” to rhyme with “Antichrist” because he couldn’t find anything that rhymed with “Antichrist”. ‘Submission’ is unusually restrained (at least when compared to the other songs on the album), and its lyrics don’t make a whole lot of sense, alluding to some kind of strange lustuous oceanographic encounter. ‘Pretty Vacant’ is another memorable song, this time an apathetic ode to, er, apathy. “Vacant” is rephrased to sound like the second “a” was replaced with a “u”, undoubtedly causing an uproar among more conservative listeners. Despite having not been to North America to experience any of America’s culture, Rotten penned ‘New York’ seemingly to target the so-called punks who were drastically different from those in Britain. The oblique line “Ya poor little faggot, you’re sealed with a kiss – kiss me” was probably made just to incite a reaction. Perhaps it was this line that inspired Pete Townshend to dedicate his 1980 song ‘Rough Boys’, with its refrain of “I want to bite and kiss you”, to the Sex Pistols. The album concludes with ‘EMI’, a middle-fingered salute to the biggest record company in the world, who briefly had the Sex Pistols on their roster before they were dropped following the ensuing controversy over ‘Anarchy In The UK’. One thing’s for certain: they weren’t afraid to bite the hand that fed them.

It’s easy to see why Bollocks made the impact it did upon its release, and it would have been interesting to see what the Sex Pistols could have come up with as a follow-up album, but they imploded (as most landmark bands do) before they had the chance. Not all of the album is great, and it can become tiresome after a while, which each song sounding a lot like the preceding one, and Rotten’s voice can grate at times, making the album seem a lot longer than its 38 minute running time actually is. But still, any good punk rock fan should have a copy of Bollocks in their possession; despite their aversion to Pink Floyd, it is the late 70s equivalent of Dark Side Of The Moon, certainly in terms of impact, if not the staying power its more “bloated” counterpart enjoyed in the album charts. But the Sex Pistols probably didn’t even really give a damn about sales or charts, and that suited them just fine.

Essential listening: all of it, even if it’s not all perfect. It should be absorbed by even the most casual punk rock fan, or fan of music in general. Just don’t take the lyrics too seriously.