It’s hard to believe that it’s been 50 years since The Sex Pistols exploded into the public limelight with their ripped shirts, held together with safety pins and fronting confrontational slogans like “Destroy”, their often violent gigs and pogo jumping and gobbing fans, and their petulant anti-social behaviour which reached peak notoriety with their infamous profanity-laden interview with Bill Grundy on national television. It says a lot that the designer of those infamous t-shirts, the late Vivian Westwood, became a Dame, and those frightening teenagers are now many of us.
The Sex Pistols came into my orbit in the summer of ’77 when on a family holiday to the UK from Canada. I saw what was for me, the single most transformational musical moment of my life: Pretty Vacant being performed on Top of the Pops. In one two-minute moment I graduated from Top 40 pop radio to something much more exciting: a shot of instant adrenaline from an explosion of loudness, aggression, and often anger, that only the newly discovered music could provide.
I was very excited when the Rye Arts Festival announced Never Mind the Scallops with The Pistols. This was not going to be a great rock ‘n’ roll swindle while flogging a dead horse, but it was going to be something else, an evening where I get to be 17 again.
The Pistols proved not to be a mere substitute. From the opening familiar sound of the drums and bass of Holidays in the Sun you knew that they were going to do you no wrong. Johnny truly looked like he meant I wanna be me and watcha gonna do about it, with that infamous stare and Richard III hunch. That silly thing, Sid, looked pretty vacant while the engine room, Steve and Paul, were clearly out to show that there was not a chance of no fun being had in the evening.
There certainly weren’t going to be problems with the audience having no feelings for what was about to unfold. Bodies jumped about as all areas of The Sex Pistols’ smallish repertoire was covered from their first single Anarchy in the UK to their BBC banned number one single God Save The Queen to their final single I’m Not Your Stepping Stone.
The evening closed with their homage to Scallop Week – a bawdy rendition of Friggin in the Riggin.
I doubt anyone left feeling that they had been cheated.
Image Credits: Tony Ham .