Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols

Certain Songs #2190: Sex Pistols – “E.M.I.”

September 22, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
Year: 1977

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It’s always fun when an artist goes on a rant against their label, and the late 1970s featured quite a few of those, as the punks and punk-adjacent found reasons to be pissed at the suits. And so Graham Parker ranted about having “Mercury Poisoning,” Stiff Little Fingers complained about “Rough Trade,” and the Clash turned the whole genre into high art with perhaps their greatest song, “Complete Control”

Certain Songs #2189: Sex Pistols – “No Feelings”

September 21, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
Year: 1977

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When it first came out, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols was slagged in the English press for — heaven fofend! — containing the previously-released singles. This despite the fact that “Anarchy in the U.K.” was already out of print (luckily getting dropped by E.M.I. meant they still had the rights to the recording) and “Holidays in the Sun” had just been released.

And lets face it, the songwriting well kinda dried up after Glen Matlock left, and anyways, despite all of the bollocks, the Sex Pistols clearly had their eye on the future, where would be insane not to put their best 12 songs on a record for all posterity. (Though I would substitute the ace b-side “Satellite” for the goes-nowhere “Seventeen.”)

Certain Songs #2188: Sex Pistols – “Holidays in the Sun”

September 20, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
Year: 1977

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This is the first Sex Pistols song I ever heard. I’d of course, been reading about them in Creem and Rolling Stone and Trouser Press for a couple of years, but they’d long since broken up before I bought the Ramones, Television, Jam and (especially) Clash records that rearranged my brain, so maybe I wanted to check out bands that were actually funct instead of defunct.

Plus, the whole cult of Sid Vicious kinda bumped me, too. Somehow, he’d become a face of punk rock — addiction, murder and overdosing will always equal notoriety — but self-destructiveness wasn’t why I loved punk rock, so it never made any sense to me. (That said, I did love Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy, so . . .)

Certain Songs #2187: Sex Pistols – “Pretty Vacant”

September 17, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
Year: 1977

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While “Pretty Vacant” was the third Sex Pistols single, it was actually written before either “Anarchy in the U.K.” or “God Save The Queen” And, at least according to his highly entertaining I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol, it was almost entirely written by Glen Matlock.

Certain Songs #2186: Sex Pistols – “God Save The Queen”

September 16, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
Year: 1977

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While people might prefer “Anarchy in the U.K.,” because it was first, I think that the Sex Pistols’s finest rabble-rousing achievement is their second single, the incandescent “God Save The Queen,” which took the stakes set by “Anarchy” and raised them tremendously.

For one thing, it proved that “Anarchy in the U.K.” wasn’t a one-off, even if co-writer Glen Matlock had left the band, and it was one of the few recordings they let his replacement, the hapless Sid Vicious, actually play bass on. For another thing, while “Anarchy in the U.K.” was pretty self-aggrandizing, “God Save The Queen” both went after a specific target — and lord knows I would have loved to see an episode of The Crown about the royal reaction to this song — while somehow also telling an entire generation that they had, well, no future.

Certain Songs #2185: Sex Pistols – “Anarchy in The U.K.”

September 15, 2021 by Jim Connelly

Album: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
Year: 1976

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Look, we’re 45 years down the line here, so it’s probably gonna be hard for me to make the case that the Sex Pistols were the band that changed everything, because everything is always changing anyways, and they weren’t even the first punk-identified band to release music.

And yet, and yet. “Anarchy in the U.K.” was definitely a line drawn that people had to cross. Or at least grapple with. It was too powerful, too dangerous to ignore, even if we kinda initially did here in the U.S. Shit, I didn’t even hear it until 1979, because I wanted to make damn sure I was ready to understand it. But that time, the Clash had changed me before changing themselves, of course, and I was ready. Hoo boy, was I ready.