Trashing the apple cart: ‘God Save the Queen’ by The Sex Pistols

What track should one choose by The Pistols: ‘Pretty Vacant’, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, ‘God Save the Queen’, ‘Holidays in the Sun?  All classic songs from the Pistols’ one and only classic album, songs that together defined the new sound and the new attitude that punk brought us in the late 1970s.

In summer 1978, I went to Tottenham Court Road to buy a stereo to take to university, carrying with me copies of my two favourite albums of the time, ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ by The Sex Pistols and ‘Heroes’ by David Bowie – as any fule kno, it was important to check your favourite music sounded great on a system before you bought it.  When I pulled out the Pistols album, the shop assistant called his mate over to check it out, so startling was the album cover and so surprised was he that a Sex Pistols fan was interested in purchasing a quality stereo system.

This moment just hints at the controversy and outrage the album caused.  The Pistols had rapidly become notorious, swearing on prime time TV, branding the UK as a ‘Fascist regime’ and being banned left right and centre.  Just as they liked it.

It’s difficult at this distance to appreciate quite what a dingy country Britain was back in the 70s and how limited were the sources of popular music.  We had just 3 TV networks, commercial radio had only been introduced in recent years and there were no such things as music videos or portable music players.  Youth culture was not an everyday part of mass culture as it is now.  In terms of music, there was on one side the ‘progressive’ rock of ‘intelligent’ music and, on the other, dumb, production line pop filling the radio waves and the charts.

The Pistols were not a spontaneous outpouring of anger and rebellion, however.   They were the brainchild of the late Malcolm McLaren, who must be regarded as one of the most significant figures in the history of contemporary music.  McLaren ran, with his girlfriend, the designer Vivienne Westwood, a store on the King’s Road called Seditionaries, which sold punk clothes and artefacts but, more importantly, expressed the punk attitude of disaffection with society, disregard for the establishment and the desire to do its own thing, preferably in a way that would ‘frighten the animals’.  He pulled together the members of the Pistols from his customers and pulled their strings through their short and explosive career.

The band’s notoriety was forged and sealed by their wonderfully disrespectful – and very funny – appearance with Bill Grundy on TV, their being fired by their record label, EMI (see the eponymous track on Never Mind the Bollocks) and the banning by the BBC of the single ‘God Save the Queen’.  The ban was unjustified and juvenile, but it eloquently expressed the nature of the society that the Punks rejected, with its reverence for authority and paranoid defence of the status quo.

Punk not only overturned the world of music, it also had an impact on fashion and design that still resonates today.  The ‘ransom note’ cut-and-paste artwork for the sleeve of Never Mind the Bollocks is genuinely iconic, infinitely imitated since but at the time completely novel.  And we owe ripped jeans and T-shirts, chains, studs, tattoos, multiple piercings and spiky, coloured hair to Punk.

In truth, very few punk fans dressed like their heroes.  Look at photos of the gigs and you will see the crowd predominantly has bad hair, tight cheesecloth shirts and flared jeans – they look just as style-free as all young people did in the UK in the late ‘70s.  But they shared the sentiments of their heroes, if not the look.  They too wanted to stick two fingers up at the establishment and say: “This is ours, and the fact that you don’t understand it makes it even better.”

The Pistols were at the spearhead of an outburst of creativity that restored Great Britain to the leading position in popular culture – music, fashion, design – that it had yielded to the States in the ‘70s.  They were just as Rock ‘n’ Roll as they should be: bad behaviour, booze, drugs… and death.  While Johnny Rotten (nee Lydon) was the band leader and spokesperson, the bassist, poor Sid Vicious, became the classic tragic rock star, dying of a heroin overdose before the New York Police could complete their investigation into the death of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen.  But not before McLaren could cast him as Frank Sinatra re-imagined as a Punk icon in an extraordinary cover of ‘My Way’, accompanied by a suitably anarchic video.

The Pistols inspired a number of ventures into film, most notably ‘The Great Rock n Roll Swindle’ by Julian Temple and ‘Dead on Arrival’ (‘DOA’).  I have a mildly amusing story about the latter.  I was in San Francisco in summer 1981 and, for reasons too dull to explain here, found myself staying in the spare room of a gay stranger.  By pure good fortune, it happened to be the weekend of the Castro Street Fair, San Francisco’s huge annual gay festival.  I went to Castro Street (seeing Sylvester perform, incidentally) with Del Gour, my kind host, and met some friends of his, amongst whom was a guy planning to catch ‘DOA’, which I was very keen to see.  We arranged to meet later at the Polk Street Cinema to watch the movie.

We made rendezvous at the appointed time, only to find the film was starting an hour later and we had some time to kill.  So, as you do, Del’s friend took me to a porn shop.  As we walked in he announced, “Well Graham, on the left is the gay stuff, in the middle the lesbian stuff and, on the right, the straight stuff”.  I made a bee-line to the right and ostentatiously thumbed through the magazines, lest Del’s friend be in any doubt about my orientation prior to our spending 1 ½ hours in close proximity to one another in a darkened room.  Needless to say, I needn’t have worried – he proved to be a perfect gent.

Of course, the Pistols couldn’t last.  I think ‘DOA’ documents the ill-fated US tour on which Sid died.  With Sid gone, the band ran out of road.  The other band members disappeared into the anonymity from which they came, but Lydon established Public Image Limited (PiL), recording a great eponymous single and one ‘interesting’ album. He went on to dabble here than there, adding his unique vocal style – Liam Gallagher amongst many others owe their slurry vocal styling to Lydon –  to great effect with Africa Bambaataa and Soulsonic Force on ‘World Destruction’ and with Leftfield on ‘Open Up’, before slowly descending into sad self parody… advertising butter.  Oh, how the mighty are fallen.

So: ‘God Save the Queen’ gets the nod.  Why?  Well, it’s a fairly random choice – ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’ is simply stuffed with outstanding tracks and I could have happily selected any of the singles.  However, maybe God Save the Queen best epitomises the attitude bomb the Pistols detonated in British culture.  It’s the song that caused the greatest outrage and resulted in their media ban – how terribly naughty, dissing the Queen, isn’t that just the dizzy limit (I told you things were a bit different back then)?  But it also just sounds great.  Try to put aside the fact that Sid on base sounds like he’s struggling to keep up – on most of the album’s tracks, the momentum really comes from Lydon’s vocals and the guitar track, rather than the stumbling rhythm section – and listen to the cacophony and the melodramatic anger.

“No future”: the emblematic statement of the Punk perspective.  “No future for you, no future for me.”  This was widely viewed as the attitude of British youth at this time.  In truth, I’m not sure this really bears scrutiny.  To what extent did British youth feel any different to how it had since teenagers were “invented” in the 1950s?  Pretty much from the start, Rock ’n’ Roll captured the notion that ‘teenage’ was a misunderstood and disenfranchised lifestage; were the Pistols expressing any more than had been articulated by their predecessors in the 50s and 60s, who were also seen as a threat by the establishment?  How much more scary were their studs and Mohicans than the drape coats of the Rockers and the long hair and flared jeans of the hippies, in their own different ways?  Punk certainly sounded and looked more aggressive, but maybe it needed to be for this generation of disaffected youth to be noticed above and beyond their forebears.  In truth, they were largely pussycats.  When Lydon sang “Get pissed, de-stroy” I don’t think he really wanted to tear society to pieces, but I do think he wanted to get pissed!  There is a wry smile behind the smirk in many of the tracks on Never Mind the Bollocks, a degree of self awareness, a spoonful of irony to be swallowed with the stage-anger.

The question is certainly pertinent when you consider the role played by the Svengali like figure of McLaren.  A genius media manipulator and musical magpie, McLaren arguably pulled the strings and knew exactly – albeit perhaps intuitively rather than consciously – what he was doing.  For me, Lydon was never an entirely convincing misfit; he was in the right place at the right time, knew how to play the game and was a genuinely innovative vocal stylist rather than the deprived street punk of his image.  What made the attitude stick was the context: a society genuinely in decline and in which it wasn’t just ‘the kids’ who felt they had ‘no future’ but pretty much all the working classes and, as we headed into ‘The Winter of Discontent’, most of middle class Britain too.  Our nation’s colonial confidence was destroyed, the collective values that had held us together since the Second World War were being brought into question and our industry was being brought to its knees.  Never mind “no future” for the youth, there was no clear future for Britain.

Regardless of whether the Pistols’ lyrics were heart felt or not, in one respect they had it spot on, with a line that is as relevant now as it was then: “There is no future in England’s dreaming”.