100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Holidays in the Sun

02 Liar

03 No Feelings

04 God Save the Queen

05 Problems

06 Seventeen

07 Anarchy in the U.K.

08 Bodies

09 Pretty Vacant

10 New York

11 EMI

It’s not possible to disengage this record from the controversy it caused. You probably know a bit about the Sex Pistols: artist, troublemaker and would-be Svengali Malcolm McLaren finds four workingclass yoofs and makes them into a band. They, being young and mostly drunk, go along with his stunts to offend polite English sensibilities (easier in the mid-’70s than nowadays). The fact that the boys can’t play their instruments is not a problem for McLaren (ironically they are much better musicians than he is a manager). Anyway, they get people hot under the collar, they make punk rock into a phenomenon and the second bass player may or may not kill his girlfriend before dying himself. And then suddenly it’s all over. Somewhere they find enough time to make just one album.

None of the stunts would have worked were Never Mind the Bollocks less than brilliant. Bass player Glen Matlock had a rudimentary sense of his instrument and an abiding love for the Beatles, so almost all of the music came from him. Singer Johnny Rotten had an incredible talent for lyrics, and drummer Paul Cook held it together. But the real find was guitarist Steve Jones. His previous experience was in stealing guitars but he proved to have a natural gift for playing them.

Despite their image, there was nothing amateurish about the Pistols’ time in the studio. Chris Thomas was one of the most experienced producers in the UK. He created for them their own wall of sound. Jones’ guitar is particularly strong – aggressive, violent, monumental – but perfectly judged, always economical, always driving the band.

‘“Anarchy” has something like a dozen guitars on it,’ Thomas explained. ‘I orchestrated it, double-tracking some bits and separating the parts and adding them … It was quite laboured. The vocals were laboured, as well.’

‘Steve and Paul had nothing to do, so they’d go out in the studio and run through the set from beginning to end, and they’d have it down perfectly,’ Thomas recalled. ‘One afternoon, we did “EMI”, “Pretty Vacant”, “God Save the Queen” and the B-side of “God Save the Queen”, all in about thirty minutes.’

McLaren’s talent was capturing the zeitgeist. ‘God Save the Queen’ arrived coincidentally with celebrations for the Queen’s silver jubilee. The single was banned from the charts but was a hit anyway. Its follow-up, ‘Pretty Vacant’, perfectly captured the attitude of disaffected British youth. All their singles were tightly wound productions relying on Jones’ massive guitar sound.

The album consisted of every song the band had written to date: ‘EMI’ was about the label that had first signed them and then dropped them in a matter of weeks; ‘Holidays in the Sun’ was a rant about taking holidays in the Third World; and ‘Bodies’, the best of the album tracks, seems to be about abortion, sex and some girl that Lydon knew. The other songs are generally railing against … everything. Although often dashed-off, Lydon’s lyrics captured an attitude and combined brilliantly with Chris Thomas’ wall of sound.

Jamie Reid was an artist McLaren cultivated to do the band’s graphics. He chose garish colours for the album cover, using cut-up newspaper headlines for type, in the style of urban terrorists sending letters of demand. Reid’s style was as startling as the music and he gave punk an iconography. The liner notes thanked ‘no one’. Everything was blunt. ‘We upset a lot of people at the start,’ recalls drummer Paul Cook.