Sex Pistols, Nevermind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols
Featured Album
An angry, snarling classic that only gets nastier with age
Despite the various members’ attempts to tarnish its memory with everything from half-assed reunion tours, professions of love for American AOR bands and appearances in commercials for British butter companies, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols continues to conjure the heady days of a genre-defining zeitgeist that was sonically corrosive and improbably influential. While the Sex Pistols’ role in the cultural landscape that was late ’70s Britain under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has been well documented (especially in director Julien Temple’s documentary, The Filth and the Fury), the band’s only true long-form musical document still remains resonant three decades after its release.
Remember how the Rolling Stones and the Beatles began their careers revamping American R&B and reselling it to the colonies over here? The Sex Pistols’ aural synergy was derived from such American antecedents as ’50s-styled gutter glam (cf. New York Dolls, the outfit that Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren represented for a brief time); the stripped-down musicianship of the New York scene (cf. the Ramones); and crass controversy (cf. Alice Cooper), all imbued with the subtlety of a caged wolverine being poked with a stick. Armed with limited singing ability and caustic lyrics, John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon articulated fearless contempt as the rest of the band — guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook and bassist Glen Matlock (who would be replaced by John “Sid Vicious” Beverley) — shored him up with a rock noise that was cocky, rough-hewn, and at times shambolic.
By virtue of being uncompromising in its attack (sonically, lyrically), “God Save The Queen” might be the most effective protest song ever written about inefficient governments. “Bodies,” the harrowing song centered around a girl who had an abortion is still chilling years later, with Rotten dropping such quaint bon mots as “bloody fucking mess” and “I’m not an animal,” while the band churns urgently behind him. Equal parts timeless and time-lapsed, Never Mind The Bollocks remains a blueprint for disenfranchised rockers whose heart and souls identify more with Johnny Thunders and the protagonist character Howard Beale from the 1976 film Network (“I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”) than whoever is playing the Quaker Oats stage at this summer’s Warped Tour.
Listeners over the age of 40 like to mewl about the dearth of “real punk rock,” decades after the Pistols’ heyday. Listen to Bollocks now, and you’ll clearly witness how prescient (accidentally or otherwise) the band were when it came to their own demise. Consider “Seventeen” with its “I’m a lazy sod” refrain; the “we don’t care” nihilist battle cry of “Pretty Vacant”; and the entirety of “No Feelings” (“For nobody else, except for myself”). Factor in how culture has turned on itself with the internet delivering everything at your fingertips — if you only knew what you actually wanted — and voila! Welcome to the entitlement generation! Of course, said gen’s parents probably weren’t hip to the Pistols’ burn-the-village m.o., choosing to replace their mangled copies of Eagles Greatest Hits instead. (Bollocks was certified gold in America a decade after its release.) But you don’t need a barge of unsold copies of Good Charlotte’s last record dumped on your front porch to remind you that history belongs to those who dare.
