Everybody was brought up with an education system that told you point-blank that if you came from the wrong side of the tracks. It was completely run-down with trash on the streets, and total unemployment-just about everybody was on strike. As John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) described it as follows:Įarly Seventies Britain was a very depressing place. (and Americans do tend to exaggerate how bad things are), the scene in the U.
#Slapdash pistol Patch
The Sex Pistols can only be understood within their historical and cultural context, so let’s time-travel back to the mid-1970’s when the Western economies were going through a rough patch due to a combination of poor economic planning and the OPEC oil shock of 1973-4. The world’s leading economy was in the midst of the post-Watergate, post-Vietnam malaise and saddled with a new phenomenon called stagflation. In the dozens of discussion groups I visited while researching this review, I always found intense disagreement about the value of their work: half thought The Sex Pistols were absolute shite, a racist, homophobic group with limited talent who had nothing to offer but shock value the other half argued that they were highly influential pioneers, courageous artists who had the balls to call bullshit on bullshit. To this day it remains a provocative and highly controversial work, and I can’t think of a band more polarizing than The Sex Pistols. I also love challenges, and there are few records that present as many challenges as Never Mind the Bollocks. I can now approach the seminal album of punkdom in a much better mood due to a consistent diet of great sex, good wine and cigarettes, and a powerful desire to complete the book so I can move on to whatever’s next. The review was more about my mood than what I thought and how I felt about the music, and whatever I was feeling, I took it all out on the Sex Pistols. I don’t know who wrote that review, but my guess is that it was a grumpy bitch on the rag suffering from food poisoning or the accumulated toxicity of a hundred bad days at the office.
I didn’t even remember writing it, and when I read it, I understood why: I probably didn’t want to remember it. One of those early attempts at criticism was a review of Never Mind the Bollocks. So, challenge number one in compiling my reviews into book form was to slog through the muck of those early efforts, scrap those that were unsalvageable and rewrite those that were worth the energy. In going back through all the reviews I’d written over the three-year life of the blog (over 300!), I noticed that most of the reviews in my first year and a half were fucking awful. Originally written in March 2013, completely revised in May 2016.
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