We Like Noise, It’s A Choice

It is deeply hilarious to me that whenever lists are trotted out of the Greatest Albums Ever, Greatest British Albums Ever, Greatest Albums With The Word Bollocks In The Title, 1,000,000 Albums To Hear Before You Die In Septic Agony etc they all drag out and praise Sex Pistols Never Mind The Bollocks as a pillar of our cultural history and times; rightly so too.

The comedy for me lies in the fact that time has sanctified such a scabrous, shocking LP, wiped the spit off it and then placed it on a plinth with some pretty flowers around the base.

Johnny Rotten would have regarded this as behaviour of morons. Never Mind The Bollocks is still a nasty, cold, hard-edged, stark album and easily discernible as such for anyone with the wit to look beyond the burnished surfaces of the singles and the quaint postcard-punk lens we view 1977 and all that palaver through.

So let me take you by the gland and lead you through the streets of London and show you something to make you change your mind.

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British punk was born of the rubble of the 60s dream and the prosperity of that decade was a vanishing fast in the rear mirror by the late 70s. Punk was forged in recession, rubbish collector’s strikes, power cuts and want. We were a drably unglamorous grey nation, violent and class-bound. Shoestring hedonism rang hollow and grim, it was time something erupted through the fissures in the concrete.

I think that today we forget the despair and boredom that punk was birthed from, seeing it as an offshoot of the rock ‘n roll fundamental minimalism that gave rise to the very different US scene. Even if you were alienated and poor in the states, even if you detested the hypocrisy and religiosity that spoke down to you, your origins were in a different, more hopeful place.

When Rotten snarled about ‘no future’ it wasn’t an empty slogan, not yet anyway, it was a statement of fact. We forget that at the cost of understanding how a bunch of ‘foul-mouthed yobs’ could ever have lit such a signal fire of rebellion.

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Whether you buy the whole McLaren’s situationist strategy origin story for the band, or not there is no doubt that by the time the LP was released and honed by Bill Price and Chris Thomas the Sex Pistols had become a frightening musical unit. As one of our great cultural commentators once wrote:

'...dear reader, they were fucking gods. Born as a conceptual joke, a vehicle for mischief and shaking up the status quo, through a completely fortuitous mix of personalities and latent talents they became such an incredible band so quickly ...it all just combined perfectly, because of Matlock’s song writing abilities, Jones and Cook’s locking together and Rotten’s feral sarcasm, instead of just being McLaren’s little dolls, his agents in the destruction of rock – they simply became ROCK and banged out one of the great rock LPs'

Glen Matlock, of course got the heave-ho 8 months before Never Mind The Bollocks was released, on the grounds that he was too nice and too tuneful and replaced by Sid Vicious, who co-wrote two tracks.

A short obscenity hearing barely a fortnight after the album was released saw the band triumphant and after all the furore and media posturing Never Mind The Bollocks was free to stand on its own merits.

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I am going to ignore the slavering stomping singles and anthems ‘Anarchy In The UK’, ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘God Save The Queen’, even though the latter is the most exciting piece of music I will EVER own, you know ’em all already, you don’t need my take on them and their history.

For reasons best known to my mate Dave’s brother in 1986 he taped me a copy of Never Mind The Bollocks second side first* and so for me it begins with ‘Seventeen’, ends with ‘Problems’ and always will; it cannot be otherwise.

Layabout anthem ‘Seventeen’ hits us between the eyes with Rotten’s jarring vocals, ‘I’m a lazy sod’ chorus and some heroic drumming from Paul Cook. Tasked by McLaren with writing a bondage song Rotten came up with the excellent weirdness of ‘Submission’**, merging water, hope/helplessness and drowning in someone’s love; not what McLaren had envisaged at all, this was much cleverer, more lasting.

The track ‘Bodies’ is proof you can fashion something lasting and influential out of pure cold disgust. The hardest and fastest shot the Pistols fired, it still sounds too much, 46 years on. The story of erstwhile mental patient Pauline who had an abortion has been seen as anti-abortion, anti-woman even. Rotten’s stance is that it was just reportage and anyone who terminates a life should understand exactly what is involved, rings true to me.

There is something so compelling about the percussive ‘fuck’s in the song^*, the nightmare opening and the chillingly mechanical riffing of the song, it still rouses shock and disgust in me today.

There is a three song burst in the middle of Never Mind The Bollocks that most people skip when they’re flying coast-to-coast on the singles, ‘No Feelings’, ‘Liar’ and ‘Problems’. Fools, come back and feel the bleakness! ‘No Feelings’ may be the most violently rock ‘n roll the Pistols ever got, ‘Liar’ is a slower horror and ‘Problems’ is a resounding slap of a song, especially when it descends into strident atonality*^.

I love the wheedling, arrogant, goading ‘EMI’ which is occasionally my favourite Sex Pistols tune, in which Steve Jones bangs out my third favourite guitar solo ever. The dense sneering ‘New York’ is another musical favourite, written at McLaren’s behest and targeted at the New York Dolls and their scene, although I skip it now because I find the homophobic language reactionary and unimaginative; it has aged very badly indeed.

Hark! Are they jackboots I hear? ‘Holidays In The Sun’ is the perfect iteration of just how damnably good the Pistols were as a band when Never Mind The Bollocks was released. The production sheen is incredible and impossibly dense, it seems like it was carved from molten anger, desperation and disgust. The line ‘a cheap holiday in other people’s misery’ gets quoted by Mrs 1537 and myself almost continuously, often on holiday.

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Quite a thing isn’t it? Never Mind The Bollocks, as well as being one of my favourite albums is one of the most important of my musical education too. I bought my cheapo reissue copy from Backstreet Records in Carmarthen when I was 17 and it changed this hippy-reared kid; I never realised how powerful negativity could really be.

Of course Never Mind The Bollocks was a gravestone as much as a wellspring. The inherent tensions within the band, their differences, their infamy, the changing times and the fact that they were, well, a bit rebellious doomed them quite perfectly from the start. How could it be otherwise?

I have a theory that even if Never Mind The Bollocks didn’t have any music on it at all, it would still have changed everything. That Jamie Reid cover, the lurid bright yellow and pink, the blackmail script … again we forget how much of a rebellion this was, is.

I have written far more than I usually do, but this wasn’t a classic to bury beneath a flippant ‘1537 vs. …’ post. I mean it man.

1176 Down.

*how very punk! I suspect he had a ‘proper’ tape copy of it and couldn’t be arsed rewinding it for his little brother’s mate.

**credited as ‘Sub-mission’, as in a mission carried out in a submarine, on the back cover.

^*from a band who did not swear as much as you might think they did.

*^my favourite flavour of atonality. I do particularly love the delivery of the line ‘eat your heart out on a plastic tray’.