Bugger the Queen: The letter William S. Burroughs sent to the Sex Pistols
William S. Burroughs and his cohort of countercultural pop writers, including the likes of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy and Herbert Huncke, formed a literary alliance of sorts in post-war America, known as the Beat Generation. Their semi-fictional output of poetry and long-form musings served as a stark reflection of the western socio-political climate and is widely understood to have set the wheels in motion for the creative explosion in popular music over the 1960s and beyond.
Burroughs’ famed cut-up technique was famously used by the likes of David Bowie, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, and Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain. Outside of such direct influences, Burroughs and the Beat Generation can be held in part responsible for the subsequent punk era of the 1970s.
At Far Out, there are few things we enjoy more than a cultural criss-cross, and thanks to a song shared by Burroughs in response to the Sex Pistols and their second single, ‘God Save the Queen’, we have a fine specimen.
In October 1977, Burroughs sent his friend and collaborator Brion Gysin a Rolling Stone article on the Sex Pistols along with the words “Bugger the Queen”, which served as the title for a new song he was looking to record with Patti Smith.
Read the note below with Burroughs’ original and, in part, erroneous spelling:
“Enclose article from the Rolling Stone on the Sex Pistols and punk rock, in case you didnt see it. This explains the action in Paris. I guess we are classified with Mick Jaeger. I am writing some songs and may do a record with Patti Smith. Here’s one:
My husband and I
The old school tie
Hyphonated names
Tired old games
It belongs in the bog
With the restofthe sog
Pull the chain onBuckingham
The drain calls you MAM.
BUGGER THE QUEEN
Whole skit goes withit illustratting everything I dont like about England.”
The “skit” Burroughs mentions in the above letter to Gysin expands upon his image of a British uprising against the monarchy and served as part of his essay collection, The Adding Machine. In the skit, Burroughs introduces the lyrics to ‘Bugger the Queen’, which you can read below:
“I guess you read about the trouble the Sex Pistols had in England over their song ‘God Save the Queen (It’s a Fascist Regime)’. Johnny Rotten got hit with an iron bar wielded by HER Loyal Subjects. It’s almost treason in England to say anything against what they call ‘OUR Queen’. I don’t think of Reagan as OUR President, do you? He’s just the one we happen to be stuck with at the moment. So in memory of the years I spent in England—and in this connection I am reminded of a silly old Dwight Fisk song: ‘Thank you a lot, Mrs. Lousberry Goodberry, for an infinite weekend with you . . . (five years that weekend lasted) . . . For your cocktails that were hot and your baths that were not . . .’ – so in fond memory of those five years, I have composed this lyric which I hope someday someone will sing in England. It’s entitled: ‘Bugger the Queen’.”
It seems the Sex Pistols made a profound mark on Burroughs, and although he allegedly wrote the words of ‘Bugger the Queen’ before he had caught wind of ‘God Save the Queen’, the punk movement inspired him to resurface the passage and back the movement. A year after his letter to Gysin, Burroughs told a writer for the San Francisco punk magazine Search & Destroy about his dabblings in the punk world and a letter he had sent to the Sex Pistols in support of their second single.
“I am not a punk, and I don’t know why anybody would consider me the Godfather of Punk,” Burroughs said. “How do you define punk? The only definition of the word is that it might refer to a young person who is simply called a punk because he is young or some kind of petty criminal. In this sense, some of my characters may be considered punks, but the word simply did not exist in the fifties”.
Adding: “I suppose you could say James Dean epitomised it in Rebel Without a Cause, but still, what is it? I think the so-called punk movement is indeed a media creation. I did, however, send a letter of support to the Sex Pistols when they released ‘God Save the Queen’ in England because I’ve always said that the country doesn’t stand a chance until you have 20,000 people saying BUGGER THE QUEEN! And I support the Sex Pistols because this is constructive, necessary criticism of a country which is bankrupt.”
