Sex Pistols

If someone wanted to know what punk actually is, there are a few records they absolutely have to hear, and "Never Mind The Bollocks… Here's The Sex Pistols" should top that list. The main achievement of the Sex Pistols with their one and only real LP was, in fact, capturing an entire era with perfect precision — the era of "1977 punk" — representing with startling clarity (remarkable for a bunch of street kids assembled by a scheming, ambitious manager) a precise turning point in rock history and becoming its very fulcrum: the moment when what had by then become a colossus of clay was definitively torn down, to be replaced with either nothing or everything, depending on your point of view. "Never Mind The Bollocks", even with its long and turbulent gestation, made it plain and undeniable that nothing would ever be the same again. This record can be criticized for being played in the most basic way, for being disgustingly nihilistic and reckless, or conversely for representing (though not only that) the commercial face of a movement that wanted to be anti-everything par excellence — but either way, it cannot be ignored. There's no denying that it pushed everything punk wanted to say and do to a point of no return. Whoever hates "Never Mind The Bollocks" plays right into its hands, exactly like whoever loves it: there's no escaping it, this is a record you simply have to go through.

The Sex Pistols did everything, including letting themselves be manipulated by McLaren, with the recklessness of twenty-year-olds, with the blind fury of people who had nothing to lose — just like the young people of a Britain mired in economic and moral crisis in the second half of the '70s. The rock conventions that had taken shape since the late '60s no longer had anything to say to someone who was unemployed, with no prospects, no money, no guidance, and therefore no more illusory myths either. It was 1976, and musically there had been a calcification of styles that had set in with startling speed: in progressive rock, by then in its death throes save for rare exceptions, made up of instrumental self-indulgence and a dramatic shortage of ideas endlessly recycled; in hard rock, grown pompous; in folk-rock, gone grey with age; in psychedelia, by then fully absorbed into the mainstream too; in pop, defanged into soundtrack music for Saturday-night poseurs. The instrumental and lyrical refinements sounded as hollow and irritating to that drifting youth as acid splashed in the eyes — so what was there to do? Toppling the idols, or rather rejecting them outright, refusing to recognize oneself in them because they now felt light years away, was the most natural response imaginable. But what to put in their place? The answer was nothing: pure and simple rejection, disgust, revulsion and contempt for everything the "greats" — the former young rebels now thoroughly bourgeois, just like the people they themselves had once railed against — listened to and worshipped. The perfect soundtrack to that disgust was the new sound coming from across the Atlantic: distorted, angular and fast, as direct as a punch, as opposed to music that had by now become hollow and worn out.

Rejection and disgust, then — that was what punk was all about, and in a situation like that, this was the only natural outcome. The hippies of "flower power" had spectacularly failed in their attempt to change the system, so all that was left was to tear it down, at least in words and music. Who could offer any prospect of immediate rebellion, however naive, to kids living in neighborhoods ravaged by neglect and unemployment? Rockstars rolling in millions, showing off instrumental virtuosity that none of those kids could ever hope to replicate without decades of study, singing about elves and fantasy worlds? Certainly not. The urgency to scream out reality and tear down the status quo was terribly immediate. So punk did what needed to be done: reject the recent past entirely, return to the bare essentials of rhythm, chords, and the raw "release" of rock and roll. Something anyone with even the bare minimum of ability could use to howl out their own rage.

"Never Mind the Bollocks" sums up the very essence of that "release": fundamentally an end in itself, senseless yet alive and vibrant. A childish, anarchic scream born of the realization that there was no future left to speak of, summed up perfectly in its rallying cries: No future! No feelings! Anarchy!

Johnny Rotten's voice itself is hysterical, childish and mocking, a genuine caricature. The powerful guitar riffs are basic, to the disgust of those who instead admired instrumental sophistication; the drums are pounded rather than played, and the bass is purely rhythmic.

Yes, you might say, but they weren't exactly the first! True, they weren't the first and certainly not the only ones — others had played, and were playing, in an equally basic way, but with tons of ideas and things to say. Not only that, but a strain of rawer, more direct rock had always survived more or less under the radar: to name a few well-known examples, certain Rolling Stones, the Stooges, the Kinks. So what? So "Never Mind The Bollocks" is the paradigm of all this, it's the very synthesis of what punk was not-preaching at the moment of its greatest explosion, both musically and lyrically: "I am an Antichrist, I am an anarchist/ Don't know what I want but I know how to get it".

And there it is — everything's already been said. That's the snapshot. A rare gift for synthesis in declaring one's intentions, which were, in fact, the intentions of all of punk in that revolutionary year of 1977. Not only musically, but socially too, as mentioned: people were genuinely afraid of these incomprehensible, crazed anarchists. "Never Mind The Bollocks", from its very first two words — "I don't" — screams its refusal and repeats it across all 12 tracks, making itself the standard-bearer of a movement with no more standards left to bear. The Sex Pistols slam their "no" to everything right in the world's face, their basic and vulgar nature, their being "the great rock and roll swindle", their "not knowing how to play" — and above all, they couldn't care less about any of it.

As mentioned, although it was essentially ready long before its release, the album had an extremely troubled gestation. The Pistols, already massively famous in England, signed to EMI, who, after the first few singles — which nonetheless shot to the top of the charts — preferred to break the freshly signed contract, paying the band (and their manager) a hefty sum in damages for nothing, rather than deal with their increasingly gratuitously provocative output. A&M did exactly the same thing shortly after, without even releasing anything by them. The band kept churning out singles that outraged British institutions and every self-righteous moralist, which regularly wrecked the charts despite every boycott and censorship attempt; in the year of the Jubilee they mocked the Queen (and doubled down: "She ain't no human being"), walked through London's Jewish quarter wearing swastika T-shirts, insulted TV hosts live on air, got themselves arrested and got themselves hated — and all of this was like water poured in torrents onto an English underclass youth thirsty for anything that was "anti". They were, in effect, unmanageable.

Probably, whatever McLaren might say, they even slipped out of the grasp of their own creator, who tried desperately to rein them back in; it's no coincidence that Rotten dedicated the disgusted "Liar" to him. The album seemed destined never to see the light of day, and instead it was Virgin who bravely took on those madmen and finally released what by that point was little more than a collection of the blistering, blistered singles the Pistols had fired off up to then, plus a few extra "gems" like the sarcastic "E.M.I. Unlimited Edition", dedicated of course to the label that thoroughly deserved their (and our) disgust.

The album, though perhaps cleaned up a bit too much in the mixing stage, is musically hard and cutting, impeccably produced — so much so that, despite having virtually the same sound throughout, it manages to feel incredibly alive from start to finish. The great, ignorant riffs come one after another like slaps in a brawl, and it feels as if Rotten is right in front of us, firing his satanic laugh in our faces at the start of "Anarchy In The Uk", sneering at us, or, wide-eyed and looking like he's just stepped out of an electroshock session, playing the part of a kid stamping his feet. The guitar solos are kept to an absolute minimum, as befits an early punk record, though the distorted guitar, played with simple chords, sweeps constantly across everything; the drum rolls are angry, brief bursts of warning fire; the angry "singing" shows no mercy even for the rules of language. That said, it isn't entirely true that the Sex Pistols couldn't play at all — that's a legend spread by their enemies on the "refined" side of the fence and by Malcolm McLaren, as well as one born from the disastrous hiring of Sid Vicious. The band is perfectly tight, and the rhythm section clearly knows what it's doing; Rotten locks in perfectly with the whole thing, his harsh voice, mangled by slang and mispronunciation, is perfect for the occasion. Sure, compared to the delicate arpeggios of the rock dinosaurs of the time, all this seemed horrendous but... "We like noise it's our choice/ If's what we wanna do/ We don't care about long hair".

There's rancor, furious hysteria, but also a magnificent clarity in the lyrics as they pillory Britain's arthritic old relics, and not only that, with no respect for anything or anyone. Starting with the deadly military march that opens "Holidays In The Sun", there's not a single moment's pause in this breathless sprint toward nothing. Amid a delirium of material built for pogoing to the last drop of blood (titles that have since become anthems like "No Feelings", "God Save The Queen", "Problems", "Anarchy In The Uk", "Submission"), the Pistols even allow themselves a hint of reggae-rock and Keith Richards-style guitar on "New York", produce sick, out-of-tune choruses on "Bodies", and even mock rampant unemployment on "Pretty Vacant": "We're so pretty, oh so pretty!/ Vacant/ But now.../ And we don't care!" or abortion — unexpectedly taking a stance against it, though — on that same "Bodies": "Body screaming, fucking bloody mess/ It's not an animal, it's an abortion". Then, of course, there's the famous "No Future", which has practically become synonymous with "punk" itself. And heaps of similar delights. This is the least predictable, most anti-rhetorical album in the history of rock.

What's left of "Never Mind The Bollocks" and all the singles that preceded it and make it up? An enormous amount, considering that this album — certainly alongside others, and even less innovative than some of them — was one of the things that made the punk phenomenon definitively explode worldwide, and was therefore one of the main forces behind the clean sweep that in 1977 overturned the universally accepted standards of what rock was supposed to be, thereby throwing open the door to a thousand ferments that soon after gave rise to what came to be called new wave. And again, if we consider that it was perhaps the main influence behind the birth of hardcore, which in turn kept the punk spirit and attitude alive and yielded masterpieces that would otherwise be hard to imagine. But beyond that, the outrageousness of the Sex Pistols and the sheer essentialism of this album would remain crucial reference points for the rebirth of punk-infused rock starting in the second half of the 1980s. Its influence is still felt today.

Beyond this record, the band produced practically nothing else, swept away by infighting, by the foolish replacement of the inspired Glen Matlock with the deranged Sid Vicious (who does appear on a few tracks here), and by their own recklessness. This album, therefore, is the Sex Pistols. They burned out fast, just like their songs, just like punk itself in that hard-and-pure year of 1977, and in this too they were exemplary of the phenomenon.

Frank Zappa once said: "Punks say: OK, we play distorted and fast, so what? Well, I like that: so what?". "Never Mind The Bollocks" is precisely one giant "So what?".

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09/11/2006