No one is spared, especially not the band’s previous label (“EMI”) or their pre-punk heroes, the New York Dolls (“New York”).Īlong with Nirvana’s masterpiece, Nevermind, thirty years later, Never Mind The Bollocks stands as one of the great ranting tracts against middle class mediocrity.
#Glen matlock on never mind the bollocks full
Far more than just an anti-everything diatribe, Bollocks is full of with and bile. Lydon’s Catholic upbringing was also brought to the fore in “Bodies”, a scouring attack on abortion. “Holidays In The Sun” with its Nazi rally opening contains a huge amount of sobering truth just in its first line: ‘A cheap holiday in other people’s misery’. The lyrics are iconoclastic and yet resonate with relevance even today. His love of prime krautrock ( Neu!, Can etc.) and the distinctly un-cool (for the times) Peter Hammill of Van Der Graaf Generator, made the band’s situationism even more potent. What’s more he was cleverer than people realised, and musically knowledgeable too. The ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ t-shirt the green hair and the sneering, almost Dickensian persona were ideal to cement the reputation of the band as the tabloid reader’s betes noires. John ‘Johnny Rotten’ Lydon had been spotted by Jones for all the right reasons. The one thing that was entirely new was, of course, the singer.
His arpeggiated chords and muscular riffing defined their sound and remains distinctively recognisable to this day. Rumour has it that session guru, Chris Spedding, was also recruited to fill out the sound, though Steve Jones has to take a vast amount of credit for the creative process here. So Matlock was redrafted for the sessions. While the most middle class member of the band, bassist Glen Matlock, had been ejected by this point, his replacement, Sid Vicious was proving to be nothing more than a figurehead for the generations of cartoon punkdom to come. But the album has a rich, deep sound that makes it far more enduring than contemporaneous releases like the Clash’s or the Jam’s debuts. After all they were staunchly anti-pose in any sense of the word. To be fair, the Pistols’ aesthetic reeked more of Gary Glitter than any art school pretentiousness. It was a stroke of genius to use producer Chris Thomas, who had helped shape one of glam’s masterpieces: For Your Pleasure by Roxy Music. This was Iggy and The Stooges’ Raw Power fed through a glam filter and served up with panache. With just about every track in place it showed that what was to come was every bit as good as we’d been led to believe. However a large proportion of the band’s fans had heard the charmingly entitled Spunk bootleg featuring demos for the album.
In fact Never Mind The Bollocks…was released in October of that year due to label wrangles that had seen the band jump from A&M to EMI and thence Virgin, as manager, Malcolm McLaren wheedled yet larger amounts of cash from the fiasco. History plays funny tricks, but for anyone who was around in the Summer of ’77 it seemed like this album was always there.