Sex Pistols

Since 1975 · United Kingdom

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Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977)

Never Mind the Bollocks compresses two years of tabloid outrage into twelve songs that still sound genuinely dangerous rather than merely historic. "God Save the Queen" pairs Johnny Rotten's sneering, half-spoken vendetta against the monarchy with Steve Jones's thick, overdubbed guitar wall, released to coincide with the Queen's Silver Jubilee and promptly banned by the BBC. Producer Chris Thomas gave the band's chaos a hard, compact clarity most of their peers never bothered chasing. It remains the rare punk record whose reputation for danger the songs themselves still earn.

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Sex Pistols

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols · 1977

Sex Pistols formed in London in 1975 around a handful of young men who spent their afternoons at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's Kings Road boutique, SEX, McLaren shaping them into a calculated provocation as much as a band. Johnny Rotten's sneering vocal and Steve Jones's blunt, buzzsaw guitar gave the band a sound as confrontational as its lyrics, built to alarm a British public already primed to be scandalised by anything wearing a safety pin.

A June 1976 gig at Manchester's near-empty Lesser Free Trade Hall, organised by the fledgling Buzzcocks, became rock's most consequential forty-person audience: Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook left determined to start a band of their own, soon Joy Division. Sole studio album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols followed in 1977, its shockwaves reaching a young Joe Strummer, who abandoned the 101ers days after his band opened for them, and reaching Bad Brains singer H.R. through a friend's record collection in Washington DC. The band collapsed on its first American tour in January 1978, barely three years after it began.