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Meant to offend
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From brand promotion to a milestone it’s a short hop
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Unabashedly crude, intensely emotional, calculated either to exhilarate or to offend, the Sex Pistols’ music and stance were in direct opposition to the star trappings and complacency that, by the mid-seventies had rendered rock and roll irrele
vant to the commoner. Over the course of their short, turbulent existence, the group released a single studio album that changed, if not the history of rock, at least its course. While the Sex Pistols were not the first punk rockers, they were the most widely known and at least, to appearances, the most threatening. “Never Mind the Bollocks”, “Here’s the sex pistols” unquestionably ranks as one of the most important rock & roll records ever, its sounds a raw, snarling, yet mesmerising rejection of and challenge to not only rock & roll music and culture but the modern world that offered, as a Rotten sang in “God save the Queen”, “no future”.
Whether the Pistols were simply a sophisticated hype run amok or the true voice of their generation has been widely debated, yet, oddly, that neither matters nor explains how they came to spark and personify one of the few truly critical moments in pop culture – the rise of punk.
The Sex Pistols was the brainchild of young entrepreneur Malcolm McLaren, the owner of a London clothes boutique called ‘Sex’, which specialised in “anti-fashion”. McLaren had conceived the idea of a Rock and Roll act that would challenge every established notion of propriety when, in 1975, he found himself managing the New York Dolls in their final months as a group. McLaren carefully cultivated word-of-mouth about the Sex Pistols and made the band the leader of the nascent punk movement.
The press and the record industry ignored the Sex Pistols, but by the end of the summer the uproar-both acclamatory and denunciatory- was too loud to be ignored. When no British hall would book the Pistols, the group went abroad to the continent in July and to the US in December. In America the band found itself the object of a little adulation, considerable hostility, but mostly uncomprehending curiosity, which turned to scoffing when the group made only half hearted attempts to live up to its reputation of savagery.
Rotten was characteristically critical of the sensationalism and opportunism that had been attached to the Pistols and on January 14, 1978, immediately after a concert in San Francisco, he announced the break up of the group. In 1996 all four original members reunited to embark on a world tour including Europe, North and South America, Japan and Australia dubbed the “Filthy Lucre Tour”.
A. GEORGE ANTONY
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