Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols
	production credits unknown
	Released on November 1977
	UK CHART POSITION #1 . . . US CHART POSITION #106
	Find it at GEMM
M5 3147 cover

S uch is the state of the revolution that The Sex Pistols are viewed today as the cuddly progenitors of punk, cranky avuncular figures who lucked into history. At the time, however, they struck genuine fear into the establishment. The Pistols were the first wave of the disenfranchised youth who threatened to bypass the traditional channels to power; they didn’t want to earn it, they wanted it now. (Well, not the first wave, since that’s pretty much a constant dynamic between any generation’s ascendancy into adulthood.) And that’s where the concept of chaos comes in, which The Pistols fed from, since society is founded on a long, traditional dance of abdication, a slow striptease in which the regnant generation hands the younger generation its human rights one veil at a time. (Independence, dance around a little, responsibility, shuffle to the left, industry, change partners, marriage, bow to your partner, family.) When The Sex Pistols released “Anarchy In The U.K.,” they weren’t threatening to overthrow the establishment, they were threatening to ignore it. That’s what terrified adults: the idea that the younger generation might fail to honor the old gods and let everything their parents (and grandparents) worked so hard for (wealth, higher social position, comfortable stability) die like an unwatered plant. Yes, there was violence in the punk movement, but it was mostly about passive resistance, about rejecting the old values and the old authority figures (the Queen, record labels, your parents). And I realize I haven’t talked about the music on Never Mind The Bollocks, but no one ever speaks of Lenin as a writer either. The Sex Pistols were not musicians, they were incendiary idealists, shameless opportunists, the ugliest part of the body politic displayed for everyone to see. “Anarchy” was the smokebomb that started the riot, Bollocks sort of the soundtrack to the film of the riot, and there hasn’t been anything like it since.

TRACK LISTING

1. HOLIDAYS IN THE SUN
2. BODIES
3. NO FEELINGS
4. LIAR
5. PROBLEMS
6. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN
7. SEVENTEEN
8. ANARCHY IN THE U.K.
9. SUB-MISSION
10. PRETTY VACANT
11. NEW YORK
12. EMI

CREDITS

PAUL COOK --
STEVE JONES --
JOHNNY ROTTEN --
SID VICIOUS --
Glen Matlock --

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