Sex Pistols, ‘Anarchy in the UK’, and the soundtrack to a revolution
The only thing that all revolutions have in common is a rallying cry. Morals change, tactics will vary, and the things people are fighting for will always be in contention. However, a call that unites and brings people together to rage against corruption will always be a constant. The year is 1976, the wealth divide in the UK is at an all-time high, England is dreaming, and Johnny Rotten has just written ‘I hate’ at the top of his Pink Floyd T-shirt.
The winter of discontent, which brought with it power outages, unemployment and strike action, officially took place between November 1978 and February 1979. However, there was a longer build-up to that period, one that saw the rich get richer and the working class be thrown to the wayside.
Whilst the ordinary person was having their voice stripped away, so too did the music they listened to no longer represent them. Rock and roll, originally supposed to act as a form of rebellion, was becoming completely inaccessible. Bands like The Rolling Stones were impossible to get tickets for, and if you were lucky enough, one thumb in front of your face would block out the entire stage because you were so far back. The people had nothing; they felt hopeless and angry, and someone needed to say it.
The Sex Pistols have been called a lot of things. The pioneers of punk, the most important band to ever exist, shit, rubbish, outstanding, whatever you want. But according to Johnny Rotten, they were quite simply “A bunch of dopey boys from Shepherds Bush who needed a singer.”
“The Sex Pistols, when they spotted me on the Kings Road with my ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’ T-shirt on, thought, ‘Oh, he’ll do.’ I don’t think they knew what they were getting hold of,” he said. “What they really wanted was a kind of upmarket pub band because pub rock was very fashionable at the time: Eddie and the Hot Rods, bands like that. They were all bands that late on in life, like Elvis Costello, claimed to be punks, but they weren’t.”
The band were thrown together haphazardly by a mixture of friends of friends and management. They were initially called The Delinquents, a fitting name given how little they knew about or would eventually like each other; however, that discontent within the group only drove the way they wrote about the discontent impacting Britain further. Their shows were a mess, their music was noisy, and the public couldn’t get enough. They were the undeniable truth that it was impossible to turn away from.
Before they released their first single, the band had already received media coverage for the racket they made at their live gigs and their inability to resist fighting members of the crowd who didn’t ‘get it.’ In the New Musical Express, the headline read, “Don’t look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming”. This doubled up as an informative article and an enlistment poster, as those who felt unrepresented throughout the country finally saw some form of representation. It was anger and chaos, which many people had been waiting for.
The article reads: “’HURRY UP, they’re having an orgy on stage,’ said the bloke on the door as he tore the tickets up. 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.”
Their on-stage antics were indeed a way that the Sex Pistols showed their anger, but the main way their mission statement reached the world, and that was met with controversial murmurs from the upper classes, was in their lyrics. Proclaiming in the first line of their first single, “I am an antichrist,” the Sex Pistols showed onlookers that they had had enough, and now it was time to shut up and listen. What were they listening to? The track went on to be a punk rallying cry: ‘Anarchy In The UK’.
“I have always thought that anarchy is mind games for the middle class,” said Rotten, “It’s a luxury. It can only be afforded in a democratic society, therefore kind of slightly fucking redundant. It also offers no answers and I hope in my songwriting I’m offering some kind of answer to a thing, rather than spitefully wanting to wreck everything for no reason at all, other than it doesn’t suit you.”
Every band suddenly wanted to be a punk band, and while some people did it for the image, others genuinely cared about the message and became much more involved with what was happening in their country. This was more to the liking of some people than others, as while a lot of music lovers saw in this new wave of sound with open arms, given his message was so clear and direct, Rotten was always reluctant to embrace the new bands if they didn’t completely align with his thought process. For many people, it was uncalculated anger, but Rotten was a scholar, and these other punk bands were offering up their own theories to the movement. As such, intentionally or not, they went against his beliefs.
Rotten put it best when he said, “Early seventies Britain was a very depressing place. It was completely run-down, there was trash on the streets, total unemployment – just about everybody was on strike. 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.”
Those who say punk isn’t dead are both right and wrong. That iteration of punk the Sex Pistols were responsible for is dead. It was of its time and, therefore, expires in the same way that headlines do. They represented the frustration of a generation and made the voices of people who previously could not speak up for themselves louder. But that time has now passed.
Now, we have fragments of that old ideology that can be added to modern-day values. In that sense, whilst people are still conscious, punk can never and will never die. People speak out and voice their frustration because of the path paved by the Sex Pistols. The underrepresented fight for something different now because times have changed, the powers that be swapped seats, and corruption contorts. But people can speak up for themselves through art, and when they do, they do so under the same rallying cry that united people in 1976 so that when people get pissed, the only thing left to do is destroy.
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