Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)
THE SEX PISTOLS – Anarchy In The UK b/w I Wanna Be Me (EMI, 1976)
“It happens. you feel alien. You are other. Nothing in your culture, in your experience gets near what you feel. You want to be elsewhere. If you can’t be elsewhere, you want to see everything brought down. These thoughts explode in your head. You can’t sleep, you grind your teeth. You get migraines. You shake.
Then you walk into a room. You see or hear four people making a noise, playing the limits of electricity and the room’s ambient space: like a switch tripping, your life is changed forever. Out of nowhere, the terrain is cleared and the possibilities stretch before you.
This will happen only once, with that certainty”.
These lines are part of the sleeve notes by Jon Savage to Lipstick Traces, a compilation CD designed to be played alongside the book of the same name by Greil Marcus.
The four people in the room making the racket almost certain refers to The Sex Pistols. No other band, not even The Clash, had that effect
Without the single Anarchy In The UK, Marcus’ secret history of the 20th century would not have been written.
Without this record, and Johnny Rotten in particular, countless bands would have remained unformed and postwar popular culture might have continued on a downward spiral.
I might still be listening to albums like Tales From Topographic Oceans or Brain Salad Surgery.
It is hard to imagine, and as the years pass, it gets harder and harder to convince other people what an impact this record had.
Marcus notes Rotten’s demonic laugh and insolent way he not so much sang as hurled the lines into the world and writes of “a voice that denied all social facts, and in that denial affirmed that everything was possible”.
Of course, the record doesn’t sound revolutionary now – this only happens once. But, at the time it made everything else sound ‘pre’ and was the sound of something happening.
I cannot claim to have been at The Sex Pistols first gig; the nearest I got to seeing them was to arrive at Derby Assembly Rooms clutching my ticket only to be told that the post-Grundy scandal had prompted local councillors to ban the concert.
My introduction to them, other than reading about them in the NME, was their first TV appearance on So It Goes – 28th August 1976, presented by the late Tony Wilson. You can watch this now and You Tube and wonder what all the fuss was about. I watched it at the time (aged 18) with my elder brother who wondered what the fuss was about even then. i was rivetted and should have gone out and formed a band immediately. Instead, I did the next best thing and bought the single on the EMI label when it was released two months later.
This turned out to be a limited supply as EMI ran scared after the media scandal and passed the baton to Virgin.
