It’s easy to forget that, in the late 1970s, there was indeed anarchy in the UK. The economic growth and broadly social democratic consensus of the post-war period had been obliterated by the 1973 oil shock, the repercussions of which were, by the end of the decade, reaching their harrowing climax in the nightmarish phenomenon of stagflation, a combination of high inflation and high unemployment. Labour militancy had become unmanageable; the working week had been reduced to three days, everybody was on strike, garbage bags lay uncollected in the streets, corpses unburied in the morgues. The government was considering rationing, while sections of the military were weighing a coup d’etat. The dystopian world foretold on early 70s albums such as Ziggy Stardust and Dark Side of the Moon seemed to have become reality. The young people of Britain were confronted not only by a bleak economic outlook, but also by the apparent victory of self-satisfied, middle-class, newly domesticated former hippies in the opinion-forming institutions of media and academia. They were, unsurprisingly, pretty pissed off about it.
It was in this grim and volatile cauldron of rage and hopelessness that Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols was born. It is surely one of the most influential albums in the history of rock. Growing up and hearing it for the first time in the late 90s, I wasn’t overly taken by it; I was already in thrall to industrial American shock rock like Nine Inch Nails or Marilyn Manson, and bright, commercial Britpop like Oasis or the Manic Street Preachers, musical traditions which, though very different, seemed to me to owe little to the Sex Pistols. But I knew nothing. Only now, having listened to much that came before them, and being familiar with much that came after them, do I fully grasp the considerable impact that the Sex Pistols had not just on the music that I listened to, but also on my character and what might charitably be described as my “value system”. Never Mind the Bollocks is arguably the first cultural manifestation of the uncompromising misanthropy, the nihilistic lack of any positive values, the basically antagonistic stance toward the world that would inform all the music that I consumed as a teenager, whether channelled through Trent Reznor’s synthesiser, Liam Gallagher’s hyena-like whine, or Richey Edward’s pen. I and everyone I grew up with is indirectly a product of the all-consuming hostility and oppositionality of the punk moment; without it, we would not be who we are.
For all that, I find the music to be remarkably bright. For the entire 40-minute duration of the album, it’s relentlessly loud and furious – which, unfortunately, can make for a rather samey, even grating listening experience. But it’s never unsettling or sinister like, say, “Riders on the Storm” or “Aladdin Sane”, and nor is it schlock-horror, Death Metal scary. In fact, it’s positively life-affirming – swaggering and upbeat from the first to the last note. But this mood is not so much cheery as it is downright maniacal; the Sex Pistols’ extreme aggression and vitriol constitutes a channelling of aggression against other people, against social institutions, against the entire human race, but rarely against the self (on “No Feelings”, for example, Rotten openly declares his narcissism). Famously, of course, Sid Vicious self-destructed, but his contribution to the Sex Pistols was purely propagandistic. Johnny Rotten, the unmistakeable lynchpin of the band, is still going strong at the tender age of 67, kept alive by amphetamines and sheer hostility to all living organisms. There’s something instructive about this, and telling in terms of what came after, as the emotionally repressed dreariness of post-punk bands such as Joy Division took the aggression unleashed by the Sex Pistols and turned it against the self.
So who did the Sex Pistols hate? Well, pretty much everybody – but particularly their former managers and record executives. Never Mind the Bollocks contains at least three diss tracks directed at other people in the music industry; “Liar” impugns some nameless suit; “New York” lambastes the New York Dolls, glammy rivals and former clients of the Pistols’ Svengali-like manager Malcolm McLaren; and the closing song “E.M.I.” comprises a blistering hate screed against their former record company, which dumped them at the first sign of controversy. There are unlikely echoes here of gangster rap, much of which was also (rather tediously) preoccupied with ripping on rival acts and perfidious moneymen in the boardrooms of major labels. Ultimately, however, I would argue that Never Mind the Bollocks is basically a political record, like The Times They are a-Changing or Sandinista. But unlike Dylan or the Clash, the specific orientation of the Sex Pistols’ politics is almost impossible to define.
I’ve read some reviews which rather hopefully try to pigeonhole Never Mind the Bollocks into a broadly left-wing tradition of social justice politics – an anti-establishment band at a time when the establishment was still identifiably right-wing and shrouded in the musty old-school conservatism of church, king, and Oxbridge. Some songs on the album do provide a reasonable basis for this classification. The opener, “Holidays in the Sun,” likens divided Berlin to Belsen, and hints at wanting to jump over the Berlin Wall because, presumably, the Eastern Bloc can’t be worse than Britain in the late 70s. And certainly, the German Democratic Republic wasn’t presided over by the “fascist regime” that Rotten likens the British monarchy to on “God Save the Queen”, an unmistakeably anti-monarchist song which apparently got them blacklisted by the National Front. Taken at face value, too, the raging denunciation of contemporary British society delivered on “Anarchy in the UK” would surely appeal to the average undergraduate Trotskyist (the arcane doctrinal distinctions between Trotskyism and Anarcho-Syndicalism notwithstanding).
And yet these songs sit uneasily alongside other moments on the album which, in 2023, would almost certainly result in a stern No Platforming from the impeccably progressive student unions of Britain’s universities. “Bodies” is basically a rollicking pro-life punk song; its exceedingly graphic lyrics tell of a deranged groupie, apparently known personally to Johnny Rotten, who repeatedly and rather nonchalantly had abortions as a way of eluding the consequences of her myriad one-night stands. It’s not exactly a denunciation of Roe vs Wade, but it’s definitely not pro-choice – a Republican could like it, a Democrat probably couldn’t. Similarly suspect is the second verse of “Seventeen”, which launches a broadside at the complacent hippies of the (by this point, well established) counterculture. Most damningly of all, the ostensible apoliticism of the New York Dolls diss track “New York” is belied by its jarringly homophobic lyrics, which dismiss the Dolls as “faggots” and “gay boys.” At the very least, such talk would surely have generated an avalanche of outraged letters to the Guardian even in 1976.
Moreover, the apparently left-leaning and anti-establishment songs on the album are themselves highly ambivalent. After toying with the idea of defecting to the Soviets, “Holidays in the Sun” ultimately derides the tackiness of the Berlin Wall, and acknowledges the precariousness and basic unattractiveness of Communist rule, which had ceased to exist within 15 years of the release of this album. And the “anarchy” that Rotten swears fealty to on “Anarchy in the UK” is definitely not the anarcho-syndicalism of Mikhail Bakunin, who advocated for an abolition of authority in favour of a network of self-sufficient agricultural communes. In fact, the anarchy invoked in this song seems to stand for sheer bloody-minded destructiveness and hostility toward everything.
Subtly, however, “Anarchy in the UK” does perhaps contain some clues as to the Sex Pistols’ real, and perhaps even unconscious, political proclivities: the importance of getting what you want. We hear this too in the narcissistic materialism of “No Feelings”, in which Rotten expresses interest in his girlfriend only when she can provide him with cash. Translated into a political program, such sentiments are nothing less than the greed-is-good, I’m alright Jack, Thatcherite neo-liberalism which, over the course of the 1980s, would crush the unions, deregulate the economy, and bring untold wealth to a society of atomised and selfish individuals. This “new rich”, graduates of the upper-working and lower-middle classes, scorned the conservative establishment as surely as it despised the unions and the lumpen proletariat. Like punk, the untrammelled anarcho-capitalism of the 1980s had no respect for established institutions or authorities; like punk, it placed the emphasis on individuals “getting what they want”; and like punk, it preached competitive hostility toward, rather than cooperation with, one’s fellow man. On “God Save the Queen”, Rotten declared punks to be the future, “your future” – and how right he was, though perhaps not in the way that he intended.
Yet the clues were there from the beginning. The Sex Pistols attacked the institution of the monarchy, the Holy Cow of the Right, while making scurrilous and nonchalant reference to Belsen, homosexuals, and abortion, which was guaranteed to offend the Left. We see this in the band’s very style; they wore swastikas as well as Soviet stars and images of Karl Marx – primarily, of course, in order to shock. But by doing so, they also implicitly treated the dogmas of right and left with ironic contempt. Lydon, as ever, pointed to the truth, often appearing on stage wearing a dishevelled shirt and tie, an unwitting signposting of the fact that, in the coming decade, the obnoxious, nihilistic, narcissistic scourges of authority would not be punks; they would be bankers.
6/10
Highlights: “Holidays in the Sun”, “God Save the Queen”, “Anarchy in the UK”