“Far from fun”: Why John Lydon hated working on ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’
It’s hard to describe the music that the Sex Pistols made. It was a sound drenched with rage, personifying how the country felt at the time. As people were growing increasingly frustrated with the wealth divide throughout Britain and music becoming less and less accessible and relatable, the Sex Pistols came through to provide a style of music that brought this shared frustration to life.
John Lydon attests to this. He stands by the fact that their music was made as a form of protest over anything else. “Early 1970s Britain was a very depressing place,” he said, “It was completely run-down, there was trash on the streets, total unemployment – just about everybody was on strike.”
Lydon continued: “Everybody was brought up with an education system that told you point blank that if you came from the wrong side of the tracks… then you had no hope in hell and no career prospects at all. Out of all that came pretentious moi, and the Sex Pistols, and then a whole bunch of copycat wankers after us.”
There is undoubtedly anger at the heart of what the Sex Pistols do. It was considered such a controversial genre of music because it was aggressive and confrontational. However, that wasn’t the only facet of it. There were a lot of elements that went into their sound, and one of them was pure and simple: fun.
The Sex Pistols’ music was packed with energy. Their gigs were known for being rowdy and laced with movement, dancing, and mosh pits. The way they acted might have seemed unhinged, but people also saw it as a laugh, a complete release from all the frustration they had built up.
In one of the band’s first-ever gigs, the New Musical Express wrote a review that tried to highlight the haphazard chaos that ensued. “’Hurry up, they’re having an orgy on stage’, said the bloke on the door as he tore the tickets up,” it read, “I waded to the front and straightaway sighted a chair arcing gracefully through the air, skidding across the stage and thudding contentedly into the PA system, to the obvious nonchalance of the bass drums and guitar. Well, I didn’t think they sounded that bad on first earful – then I saw it was the singer who’d done the throwing.”
While the band’s gigs and music straddled the line between anger and fun, when it came to actually recording their debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, it was a miserable experience for Lydon. It wasn’t that they weren’t happy with the music, but too many people were going behind each other’s backs throughout the recording process.
“Unfortunately, the making of a Sex Pistols record was very far from fun,” he said, “There were too many in-house cliques going on. And I was always made to feel like an outsider in that band. So it was a very difficult time, although it launched me musically into Public Image.”
