Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols
We watched Creation Stories tonight, the Alan McGee biopic. Great movie, but one scene that struck me in particular was his musical watershed moment: seeing the Sex Pistols on TV. When “God Save the Queen” came on, it almost brought tears to my eyes. See, much like Alan McGee, that record changed my life. I’m not the first, nor will I be the last to say that, but musically, everything I heard before that became secondary to it within a few bars of “Holidays in the Sun”.
I can’t remember for sure how I heard about the Pistols, only that it was sometime in the summer of 1993. I rode my bike to Karma Records and bought The Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream and Never Mind the Bollocks. The twenty-something girl checking me out said something to the effect, “Your mom will be okay with the Smashing Pumpkins, but I don’t think she’ll like the Sex Pistols.”
Twelve-year-old me just smiled back at her, but that kid had no idea what he was about to step into.
In the last thirty years, I’ve pretty much watched, listened to, or read, everything I could on the Sex Pistols. This includes the biographies or autobiographies of folks like Billy Idol or others who were around at the time. I’ve heard enough of different people’s accounts to know, more or less, what the truth is about a particular topic. And yet, even to this day, when I hear the sound of Steve Jones’ guitar, it’s magical. No amount of backstory can diminish the pure power of that record and the statement it made, both in rock music and in our culture.
When I put that CD into my boombox in my bedroom, I’d never heard anything like it. It was like that scene in Almost Famous where William’s sister leaves him the note about listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s “America” with candles lit and he’d be able to see his whole future. Except it wasn’t utopian, it was dystopian. It was real. It was a look into my future without the rose-colored glasses. My eyes were opened for the first time, and it excited me.
Somehow, though I wouldn’t have been able to explain it at the time, I knew what Alan McGee had to learn the hard way… it’s all bullshit. It’s all about power and money. He learned this by working to elect Tony Blair, only to find out that Blair associated with Jimmy Savile, who, let’s just say was the British Harvey Weinstein, it was an open secret and yet it didn’t stop the rich and powerful from rubbing shoulders with him.
See, while the Sex Pistols, and all of the early punks, were considered dumb trash, it was obvious to even the young me, that Johnny Rotten’s lyrics meant something. As much as I love the Ramones, this wasn’t the Ramones. And as much as I love the Clash, this wasn’t educated, middle-class “rebels” preaching to the listener. This is one of the reasons the Clash are better regarded all these years later, the gatekeepers are educated, middle-class secular preachers. Johnny Rotten was a working-class, Irish immigrant who was intelligent, but mostly self-educated. He wasn’t surveying the damage from the ivory tower, he was living in it. As was Steve Jones and Paul Cook. Rotten’s delivery of songs like “Holidays in the Sun” where he sees the commonality with the folks on the other side of the Berlin Wall from him is a bit different than Joe Strummer singing about the Sandinistas.
As Rotten said about “God Save the Queen”, “You don’t write ‘God Save the Queen’ because you hate the English race. You write a song like that because you love them, and you’re fed up with them being mistreated.” In “Bodies” he sings about the horrors of abortion. This isn’t done from the perspective of an outsider, it’s done from the perspective of a girl who continually would go on and on about her many abortions. One time she went so far as to show up at his house with the aborted baby in a plastic bag. While many, including the insanely pretentious Robert Christgau, have called it “anti-woman”, that is reading quite a bit into it. As Rotten himself said, “That song was hated and loathed. It’s not anti-abortion, it’s not pro-abortion. It’s, ‘Think about it. Don’t be callous about a human being, but don’t be limited about a thing as ‘morals’ either. Because it’s immoral to bring a kid into this world and not give a toss about it.”
Great art can be political without being preachy. Before becoming an ivory tower, plastic surgery disaster who spends most of his time hanging out with and raising money for politicians, Bruce Springsteen wrote songs like “The River” and “Atlantic City”. Same with Steve Earle, before he got old and out of touch, he wrote “Copperhead Road”. He painted the picture and left you to think about it. No one likes being preached to, including by preachers, much less some old rich white dude.
The passion is what sells the songs. Rotten’s better than credited singing and snarling. Cook beating the drums like a red-headed-step-child. Jones’ assault on the guitar and bass (he played the majority of the bass parts on the record) which is so rock solid, you could set a metronome to him. It’s why, along with Malcolm Young and Mike Campbell, he’s one of my favorite guitar players.
Another one of my favorite artists, who also grew up working class, Noel Gallagher, had this to say on the BBC in 2013:
As soon as that starts, everything that has gone on before is now deemed fucking irrelevant, as soon as he (Rotten) starts anti-singing… I made ten albums and, in my mind, they don’t match up to that, and I’m an arrogant bastard. I’d give them all up to have written that, I truly would.
No one made music like this before, and very few have made music like this since. Especially in 2023, everyone wants to play it safe. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, no-talents like Sam Smith are evoking Satanic imagery and celebrating sex pretending it’s rebellious. Besides the fact that sex is the absolute number one thing everyone in this country talks about and thinks about non-stop, even to the point of forgoing a personality in order to identify as their favorite sexual activity, it’s ignorant and narcissistic. As if Madonna, Ozzy, The Doors, Screaming Jay Hawkins, Oscar Wilde, Rimbaud, Caligula and millions in between never existed.
You want to be a rebel? Look at John Lydon (Rotten). After fronting the Pistols, he walked out on the band because he was tired of being a victim of the grifter, Malcolm McLaren. He founded Public Image Limited and made the music he wanted to make. He and his wife Nora adopted their grandkids when Ari Up, Nora’s daughter and founder of the Slits, couldn’t take care of her kids. They stayed married almost fifty years, until her death. The last years of which he was her caretaker as she slowly withered away from Alzheimer’s.
And have a big enough pair of brass ones to pop your head out the window wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat even though you know what kind of heat that will bring you. Because, “we don’t care.”
All these years later and I still get that same feeling I got the first time I hit ‘play’ in 1993. It still makes me want to stand up and, to quote Nick Cave, “kick against the pricks.” I still know that no politician, whether a D behind their name, or an R, is going to give a fuck about me. I still know I’m expendable to my corporate employer. I still know that life is not fair. And rather than bitching and moaning about it, I want to do something about it. I want to make the art I want to make. I want to think the way I want to think. And I don’t give a shit what anyone thinks about it.
This record was the first time I’d ever given myself permission to not be a cog in the machine. And I’m forever grateful.