The death of Queen Elizabeth II puts the Sex Pistols in a suddenly distant past. Twinned in life, twinned in death. Elizabeth’s silver jubilee of 1977 was, like her state funeral on Sept. 19, one of those great British ceremonials that, punctuating public life and the bubbles of contemporary distraction, announce the end of one era and the opening of another. The soundtrack of 1977, by popular demand if not royal assent, was the Sex Pistols’s God Save the Queen.
It is increasingly hard to imagine how offensive the Sex Pistols were in mid-1970s England. There were still standards of public decency then. Almost all of our handful of radio and television channels were run by the BBC. The queen was truly sacred, rather than merely admired. Her image was sacrosanct, and her name could not be taken in vain. Not since the 1790s, when Gillray lampooned the future George IV as an obese playboy, the “Prince of Whales,” had anyone dared to mock the royals as Jamie Reid did when he took an official portrait of the queen, put a safety pin through her right nostril, and added the first line of the national anthem in blackmail lettering.
That was just the cover art. John Lydon, who was then Johnny Rotten, says he wrote the lyrics to “God Save the Queen” “in one go” while eating baked beans on toast. The BBC banned the song’s transmission and left a blank space in its printed charts: a deliberate act of suppression by the state broadcaster. Major retail chains refused to stock it. The single hit No. 1 in the New Musical Express charts in the week of the jubilee celebrations, but the BBC put it at No. 2.
In 1998, the Independent newspaper reported that the charts had been fixed. For one week only, the chart excluded sales from shops that sold their own records. The Sex Pistols were on Richard Branson’s Virgin Records, so that meant sales from his Virgin Megastores, where the Sex Pistols had massively outsold Rod Stewart’s “I Don’t Want To Talk About It,” didn’t count.
On Jubilee Day, June 7, the Sex Pistols rented a boat called Elizabeth, sailed up the Thames, and played “God Save the Queen” outside the Houses of Parliament. The police stopped them and tried to arrest them. But Capital Radio, the new London commercial station, played it, and that was how I first heard it.
“God save the Queen
She ain’t no human being
There is no future
In England’s dreaming”
The queen was no mere human being. She was an icon, too, and in 1977, the system she symbolized really did have no future: “Our figurehead is not what she seems.” Rotten’s defiance of decline and a failing order now seems oddly concordant with that of the opposition’s then-new leader, Margaret Thatcher. She too told us that there was “no future” in the old system. She too preached individualism against conformity and the class system: “Don’t be told what you want to do / And don’t be told what you want to need.”
“You don’t write a song like ‘God Save the Queen’ because you hate the English race,” Lydon said in Julien Temple’s 2000 documentary, The Filth and the Fury. “You write a song like that because you love them and you’re fed up of seeing them mistreated.” It was a cry of outrage and an appeal to justice, like those medieval marches that petitioned the monarch as the last intercessor.
You also write a song like that because you love American rock ‘n’ roll. The chords to “God Save the Queen” were written by the bassist, Glen Matlock. Steve Jones, the guitarist, has said that Matlock’s original idea sounded like The Beatles’s “Love Me Do.” Jones had learned to play guitar by playing along to Stooges records. His distorted riffing sounds not unrelated to the Stooges’s “No Fun.” The rest is Paul Cook’s loud and, to ears accustomed to machine beats, surprisingly swinging drums. The only British music from 1977 that still sounds as good is, funnily enough, Rod Stewart’s.
The Sex Pistols put out one album and broke up in January 1978. Matlock, the songwriter, had been fired by the time “God Save the Queen” came out. His replacement, Lydon’s friend Sid Vicious, was a junkie who couldn’t play a note. Their manager, Malcolm McLaren, understood them as a Situationist art project and preferred to destroy his creation before it escaped his control. He did them a favor musically — as the subsequent history of rock shows, the genre really did have no future — but the survivors had to live with the fallout.
Cook, Jones, and Matlock have written autobiographies, and Rotten has written two. Danny Boyle, the director of Trainspotting and the crass theatricals that opened the 2012 London Olympics, has adapted Jones’s Lonely Boy into a six-part series, Pistol. As usual, none of the actors have an ounce of their characters’ smarts and charisma. But it’s worth watching, not least because it shows the icons as much as the human beings.
The Sex Pistols were a great racket, in both senses. McLaren, who was Jewish despite his adoptive father’s surname, fancied himself as pop’s Fagin, leading a gang of juvenile criminals and skimming the profits. The case that Lydon brought to court against McLaren’s management company, Glitterbest, in 1986 showed that McLaren had stuck to Fagin’s script and fleeced his proteges. Lydon is the Oliver Twist of the story, sensitive and self-educated. Jones is the Artful Dodger, the career criminal who achieves immortality through Dickensian art, part-streetwise, part-sentimental.
Jones was a petty thief when he wandered into Sex, McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop at the cheap end of the King’s Road in 1975. Matlock, always the conscientious one, was the shop’s Saturday boy. Cook came in as Jones’s sidekick. McLaren at first conceived of the band as Cutie Jones & the Sex Pistols, but Jones was too shy to sing. Lydon answered an audition call in the New Musical Express. He cannot be replicated on screen because he is unique.
If the Sex Pistols were the last word in rock music as the teenager’s shock tactics, it is because Lydon wrote their words. His lyrics elevated the thud and blunder of a pretty conventional rhythm section into a work of art. These days, he insists he never had anything personal against the queen and that he was “never pro or anti” monarchy: It was the failure of the British state that angered him. The queen was a convenient target, and so was he. After “God Save the Queen” came out, he suffered a Clockwork Orange-style razor attack in the street.
Like the queen, the Sex Pistols had two aspects, one human, the other iconic. The band members insist that they were the real thing, the sound of young London. McLaren, who died in 2010, insisted that he invented them. The truth, of course, is a mixture of these fictions. The Sex Pistols were a genuine product of a Dickensian London working class that no longer exists, but they were also a high-concept art performance. McLaren applied the blissful ideals of Paris in 1968 to the grim and shabby England of 1976. It was one of the first repackagings of politics as commercial entertainment.
As Pistol shows, McLaren was a father figure to Jones. Jones’s own father, a bare-knuckle boxer, had absconded, and his stepfather had sexually abused him. He loved McLaren, and he allowed McLaren to destroy the thing he loved, the band, by ditching Matlock for Vicious. McLaren’s 21st birthday gift to Jones was a bag of heroin and a prostitute. It really was criminal.
“God Save the Queen” is a snapshot of 70s’ England, but like all the best art, it is eternal. Timing, as Paul Cook knows, is everything. On Oct. 10, a month after Elizabeth’s death, Sotheby’s London will auction a collection of Sex Pistols memorabilia: hand-printed handbills for gigs, Jamie Reid posters, lyric sheets. The designs still look great, but they would mean little in a new era without the music’s unending resonance.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. “The Sex Pistols: The Stolper-Wilson Collection” will be auctioned at Sotheby’s London on Oct. 10. Danny Boyle’s Pistol can be streamed on FX on Hulu.
