Don't Ever Get Near This Line Of Bootlegs

I am only reviewing this bootleg in order to warn you: don’t ever, never buy a Sex Pistol bootleg. Don’t even ask to listen to it beforehand. Keep your distance. That is all I can tell you. The guys were famous for sounding bad live, and their performances were unofficially captured in the shoddiest of ways.

This particular line of bootlegs has at least three titles and I have listened both to this one (named “She Ain’t No Human Being”) and to one named “We Have Cum For Your Children” (not to be mistaken with an “official” release of the same name, put together by sound man Dave Goodman). Not only is there a huge fidelity problem, but the track listing is wrong. That is, they got the pressings all mixed up. If this album had had what it was supposed to have, it wouldn’t have made it listenable but at least it would have given it a certain retrospective value. According to the sleeve, it was to include “Watcha Gonna Do About It”, “Did You No Wrong”, “Understanding”… Instead, I have two discs that are like replica sets of “Bollocks” songs, with minor differences here and there (disc 2 has “Good Save The Queen” and a demo of “Liar”, and even the demo sounds appalling. That very same demo is available on the Spunk/Spedding discs and it sounds way better).

To add insult to injury, the first disc has been arranged as if it were their entire final gig at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. The first and last tracks are the real item (Anarchy In The US, Bodies, Belsen Was A Gas and No Fun are genuine performances), but the one who assembled this sandwiched other takes of the remaining songs between them, in the order that they were performed that night. For example, the version of “New York” is a garage-ish demo. If you want the “true” San Francisco performance, that can be found in its entirety on another bootleg entitled “Gun Control” (Sid Vicious is on the front cover).

Just look at Johnny’s face…

No fun indeed…

The one and only value this has is in the interviews and audio clips that are featured. The best one might be the radio interview at the end of the first disc – it lasts something like 10 minutes, and it is quite funny. At least, I used to find it funny when I was younger, owing to the level of profanity on offer. The Sex Pistols were/are nothing but transgressors to a sizable part of their audience, and the chance to see their musical chaos translated into a context other than the stage is obviously appealing.

Disc 2 also has the infamous comment by London councilor Bernard Brook Patridge on punk music. The immortal lines “Most of these groups would be vastly improved by sudden death. The worst of the punk rock groups I suppose currently are the Sex Pistols. They are unbelievably nauseating. They are the antithesis of humankind. I would like to see somebody dig a very, very large, exceedingly deep hole and drop the whole bloody lot down it” are accompanied by some burlesque music on the background.

I am not even rating this two-disc set. That is besides the point. If you wanted to sample the nihilism that characterized the band live, you should have been born in 1960 and lived in England back then. I am afraid that would have been the only way. Bootlegs like this only highlight that so much chaos couldn’t be held into tape, and much less a shoddy tape. And I want to dedicate a song by Dr. Hook to the one who pressed this particular line of bootlegs. The song is “I Got Stoned And I Missed It”.  Enough.

Rotten And Vicious "Grace" The Cover

What better way to commemorate the post number 77 of MusicKO than reviewing this compilation album? As you know, the Pistols were to release only one “true” album during their turbulent career, and a soundtrack that had mostly farcical appeal. What this compilation does is to take the entire “Never Mind The Bollocks” album, add the best tracks from the “Great Rock & Roll Swindle” OST and throw in a couple of studio tracks that are found in neither album.

The sequencing of the disc is flawless – my hat off to the one who took care of that. The first 4 tracks are the singles from “Never Mind The Bollocks”, and they are followed by the studio rarities “Did You No Wrong”, “Satellite” and “No Fun”, along with some of the best tracks from the soundtrack album (“I Wanna Be Me”, “No Lip” and “Stepping Stone”). Then, you have the remaining “Bollocks” tracks in the order that they appeared on the original record if you were to take away the singles (which here are placed at the very beginning). This means that “Bodies” is followed by “No Feelings”, “Liar”, “Problems” and so on. Once this section ends, you have Vicious’ “My Way”, and the album closes with an alternate take of “Silly Thing”. This time, Steve Jones handles the lead.

No person who is keen on the Pistols could have devised a better running order. The 20 tracks are the best of the best, and ending the album with “Silly Thing” was the right thing to do. Remember, the song deals with their breakup and as such it has special poignancy and relevance.

There is a difference in sound quality between some of the “Bollocks” and “Swindle” material. That was only to be expected. The songs from “Bollocks” were recorded by Chris Thomas. And as regards the “Swindle” contingent: “I Wanna Be Me” was a demo – it could not be spruced beyond a certain point. And “No Lip” and “Stepping Stone” were recorded live on the studio. Incidentally, “Substitute” is conspicuous by its absence here. I mourn such a fact, as it was the song that made me discover The Who, and I feel it equals both covers and even surpasses them. I would have included it at the expense of “No Lip” or “Stepping Stone” without ever thinking twice. And I would also have added “Belsen Was A Gas” – after all, the song is a Pistols’ original.

I must mention the artwork, as thorough track-by-track analysis is provided by the Pistols, and if you unfold the whole booklet you will have a poster to show your allegiance and rile your parents in the process. Again, kudos to the ones who took care of the overall presentation of the album.

You would think that assembling a retrospective of a band that was to release just two albums was to be a piece of cake, but endless compilations later (like “Jubilee” and the boxed set that surfaced in 2002) we all know better. I feel this is a truly harmless way of getting the most notable tracks from the Pistols’ short career, without ever losing sight of how the band evolved, fissured itself and cracked when it moved just a millimeter from the eye of the storm. I do recommend purchasing it – casual listeners get every single significant track, while fans get a sort of entire career overview with a rarity thrown in for good measure.

Would I recommend purchase of this compilation: Yes

Do I feel like digging deeper into their catalog after listening to it: Yes (even when there is little left to listen to!) ; )

No Wonder Johnny Rotten Badmouths McLaren At Every Turn

When I bought this album I was in the middle of my punk heydays, and I don’t recall feeling as enraged ever in my life as when I first played it. I didn’t really get it. And any person who goes into it thinking only in terms of “Never Mind The Bollocks” will be but disappointed.

You see, this was the soundtrack to a widely-banned movie that manager Malcolm McLaren assembled after Johnny Rotten had left. Many were approached by McLaren with a view of becoming the Pistols’ new lead singer, including Ten Pole Tudor and the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs (one of the most celebrated criminals in history). In the end, everybody (including the original Pistols) handled vocals, and some early recordings featuring Johnny Rotten were thrown into the mix.

The movie (released in 1980) was basically a put down of the whole punk movement, and the soundtrack had an immensely farcical value to it. As long as you know you are buying that, you won’t feel cheated.

The album has some instrumentals passages that back McLaren’s monologues about punk music and the role he played in the movement. One such track opens the album, and there are also songs which are Pistols’ covers. The most bizarre is the accordion-led French rendition of “Anarchy In The UK”, which is actually counterbalanced by a fiery demo. This is sung by Rotten , who also handles the covers of “Substitute”, “I’m Not Your Stepping Stone”, “Road Runner” and the Pistols’ original “I Wanna Be Me”. There is likewise a live take of “Belsen Was A Gas”, recorded at their final show at San Francisco.

For its part, Cook sings “Silly Thing”(about Johnny leaving the band), and Steve Jones handles “Lonely Boy”, with the vulgarity stakes set quite high… until their rearrangement of the traditional tune “Friggin’ In The Riggin’” comes as the disc is climaxing. There, every Pistol sings something (except for Rotten, obviously), and I recall how much the song would make my brother and I laugh. We would make random quotations from it at all times of day.

Sid Vicious has many leads too, and some did quite well on the charts – even better than some singles from “Nevermind The Bollocks”, actually (and surprisingly). These include his version of “My Way”, and the rock and roll classics “C’Mon Everybody” and “Something Else”.

The result of all of the above thrown into the same disc? Musical chaos. A space where you can not tell what ends up being honest from a put on. Hey, wait a second… isn’t that what happened to punk music once the initial rush died? Isn’t that what contemporary punk bands are known for?

Ultimately, the album has little to no replay value. It resembles a movie like “Titanic” – something to sit through once, twice at best. Only it is not that engaging the first time around. The “surprises” it has are more disconcerting than surprising, and the album echoes the confusion during the Pistols’ disintegration – a band with no leader that was to bear a flag that it never really intended to carry but rather burn to the last cinder.

Rating: 6/10

A Classic Cover For A Classic Record

I mentioned in the general introduction that I published yesterday that no band encapsulated the punk movement like The Sex Pistols. As an obvious result, no album stands as a better snapshot of the era than their one and only “true” release, “Never Mind The Bollocks – Here’s The Sex Pistols”. It was released at the height of the movement, in 1977. The singles up to that point were included along with songs like “No Feelings” that had acted as b-sides.

The album has a depth that is quite surprising. If you think they were just a pack of imbeciles that were good for nothing but raising havoc, you have obviously not listened to it. The album is the crowning point of irreverence in the history of music for me: they trash music companies one by one on “EMI”, the New York music scene on “New York” (which was particularly aimed at The New York Dolls, a band some accused them of having ripped off) and they ridicule their own manager on “Submission”. McLaren had requested they wrote a song about submission, and they came up with a song dealing with… a submarine mission. “Kiss this” indeed!

They also cover the whirlwinding lunacy of the local scene on songs like “Problems” and “Bodies”. The former was inspired by the endless bans and even aggressions they suffered on the streets by royalists that greeted them as enthusiastically as the four horsemen on speed. The situation became so terse that they had to perform secret tours in order to play in England, and even take a trip abroad so that everything could cool a little. That trip was documented in the song “Holidays In The Sun”, which opens the album in full throttle, and which was issued as a single some weeks ahead of the record’s release.

“Bodies” is the one and only song that features a bass part by Sid Vicious, but Jones overdubbed other bass on top of it. As I also mentioned in the introduction, who played what is intensely debated, and some claim that the Pistols were actually not very involved on the recording of their own album. I will not join that discussion for the mere reason that it is impossible to get to the bottom of it, or even scratch its surface. The fact is: the songs were theirs, and they still transmit the urgency and unsettling atmosphere of the music scene (and the social scene by extension) of those days. In this particular song, the story of a fan named Pauline is detailed. It is a gross composition, dealing with her stay at a mental asylum, and how she was raped there and subjected to an abortion. It is all the more startling because every word of it is true. If anything, it showcased the abandonment associated with punk music, and how people who had nothing to lose latched onto bands like the Pistols not because they gave them solace but because they were glad to realize more deranged people existed.

For its part, “Liar” is one of the lesser songs, and it always worked better on stage, where Johnny routinely screamed his head out.

I intentionally left the other singles for last .You know them: “Anarchy In The UK”, “God Save The Queen” and “Pretty Vacant”. Nothing can or could be said about the first two: they are not songs, they are incantations of hatred begotten by a society punks loathed and which loathed them in return. “Pretty Vacant”, on the other hand, was one of their most accessible songs, and the one that received the most unanimously positive reviews – for the first time, the musicianship was discussed instead of the shock value.

This album receives a 9 out of 10 from me. This album will receive no less than that from any person who experiences music intensely, as in little less than an hour every single incident and motivation within the punk scene is exposed and articulated through screams of defiant agony. And the silence when the record stops spinning is not silence, in the same way that the knowledge one acquires from it is more than knowledge. It is something more sinister and truer than anything. Just like the original punk movement.

Rating: 9/10

I know no single band that encapsulated so much what a musical movement was all about than The Sex Pistols, England’s most remarkable punk rock outfit. Every characteristic feature was palpable in them: the musical abrasiveness, the rampant political stance, the self-destructiveness, and the instrumental lack of prowess. I thought the last part of the previous statement over and over. I did not want to use an expression like “musical ineptitude”, but the fact remains that the true identity of those who played on their one and only album (“Never Mind The Bollocks – Here’s The Sex Pistols”, released in 1977) remains unknown.

The band was fronted by Johnny Rotten (real name: John Lydon). The instrumentalists were guitar player Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook and bassist Glen Matlock, an art student who didn’t really fit in, and who left the band early on due to the edgy relationship with Rotten. He was replaced by the infamous Sid Vicious (real name: Simon John Ritchie), one of the Pistols’ deadliest followers and a former drummer for Siouxsie & The Banshees. It is unclear whether or not he could play the instrument – I have read accounts of a second bass player behind the stage playing his parts live, while he was for sure not featured on “Never Mind The Bollocks”.

A figure that must also be mentioned since it played a major role is manager Malcolm Mc Laren – the band members met at the clothing shop he ran, and he was one of the main provocateurs all along, helping it define its image along with his girlfriend Vivienne Westwood and publicist Jamie Reid. He had an egocentric role that would prove to be impossible to handle, yet he was a vital part of it all, and as conflictive as any other Pistol. He was on the papers as much as them, spouting punks philosophies and ethos to all and sundry.

The Pistols were together for about two years and a half. They released four singles and their genre-defining album amidst chaos and censorship, and imploded during their first American tour. There was only one steady friendship (Cook and Jones – they had known each other for quite a couple of years, they were the first members of the band to play together), and they worked for a while afterwards under the moniker of “The Professionals”. Rotten started a band called “Public Image Limited” that arose some interest (specially early on), whereas Vicious died at 21 of an overdose after one of the most tumultuous lives you could imagine, partly owing to his girlfriend Nancy (she was stabbed to death shortly before his demise, under circumstances that were unclear. Vicious was arrested and charged, and he overdosed while on parole. Evidence now points to a drug dealer). Original member Glen Matlock also released some solo records and a biography. In 1996 the four of them reunited again, and they are still performing nowadays.

I think a band with all the characteristics of The Pistols could only emerge in a setting as conservative as England. Keith Moon’s biographer Tony Fletcher describes the impact their infamous Bill Grundy interview had brilliantly, comparing it to the opening of a seismic fault between the older and younger generations, the latter thrilled by someone who finally dared not only challenge but actually spit on the status quo.

Ultimately, their one album is a mandatory listen for every person who is interested in the history of music. “Never Mind The Bollocks” is comparable to the works of poets like Rimbaud and Verlaine in the sense that it represented the most radical response possible to a sanitized form of entertainment, wholly disconnected from the public’s innermost feelings. You might like “Nevermind The Bollocks” or not, you might find it too loud, too vulgar, too decadent… But it is a milestone in the history of music. Having it is not a matter of “being hip” or not. It is a matter of understanding how the rebellious spirit spurring musicians since Elvis took the stage never died, and how it manifested itself time after time. And how and why it will continue calling through the years.