Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols

Sex Pistols, The

album cover

Punk Version 1

For better and worse, this thirty-nine-minute blast of loud and proud scruffiness has become punk's ground zero. That's not to say it's the best punk record, or even necessarily the first. But it was the first one to tantalize, to terrorize, and eventually galvanize a large part of the rock-speaking world. And it remains an essential document for understanding the music's cyclical upheavals: When the Sex Pistols exploded, rock was mostly Foreigner. Safe stuff, with few aspirations toward rattling the status quo.

The Sex Pistols charged into the ring with an unruly sound, and an us-against-them ideology that disaffected kids everywhere understood immediately. These four musicians, barely competent on their instruments, took up the cause of England's unemployed and downtrodden, the legions of young people trampled by bad economics. As John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) said years later: "If we had an aim, it was to force our own working-class opinions into the mainstream, which was unheard of in pop music at the time."

Force them they did, with help from a rampaging guitar-as-blunt-instrument attack and manager Malcom McLaren's formidable hype machine. Early gigs were newsworthy for rowdy behavior (the band was known to spit on and taunt its audiences) that led to, in several instances, near-riots. McLaren seized upon the notoriety, using television appearances and outrageous altercations with media to fan the flames, and by the time this album arrived, a sense of full-on revolt was in the air.

Never Mind the Bollocks doesn't really need any hype. Its snarled refrains and bellicose chants—"No future for you!" Rotten sneers throughout "God Save the Queen"—signal that this is a profoundly different rock and roll enterprise. The songwriting's minimal. There's, like, zero finesse in the playing. And yet when the band lunges into "Pretty Vacant" or "Anarchy in the U.K.," it unleashes an undeniable force, leading to explosions of awesome magnitude that proved key to the then-developing ethos of punk. Fans loved the Sex Pistols because the band's music mirrored and magnified the decay they saw all around them. People who loathed the band considered its music (and its tactics) fresh evidence of society's decline. Both sides, at least, agreed on the existence of a downward spiral.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1977, Warner Bros.
Key Tracks: "Holidays in the Sun," "No Feelings," "Pretty Vacant," "Anarchy in the U.K.," "God Save the Queen."
Catalog Choice: Public Image Ltd (Lydon's next band): Second Edition.
Next Stop: Ramones: Ramones
After That: The Damned: Damned Damned Damned.
Book Page: 690