Workers in revolt: When Sex Pistols caused a strike at EMI
Now, decades after the emergence of punk in the UK, it can be easy to forget quite how groundbreaking that new sound really was. It was utterly scandalous. In a way we can barely even imagine now, new acts were breaking out and taking a hammer to societal norms, smashing conventions and rules, and redefining what was and wasn’t OK to say. At the forefront of it all, with the biggest hammer of them all, were the Sex Pistols, sending out a message so taboo for the time that it genuinely caused workers to revolt.
Perhaps the initial thought would be that punk was so powerful that the working man would lay down his tools and throw a middle finger up to the authorities. That’s likely more what the band had in mind, hoping that their music would be so impactful that it would wake up the sleeping ears of common folk and make them see the injustices they were singing about.
At its core, punk is supposed to be music for change. Similar, in a way, to protest music, it’s the more militant, rage-fuelled form. If political folk were the non-violent suffragettes sitting down with politicians and asking for change, punk was the suffragettes found smashing things, attacking the status quo and putting themselves in harm’s way to force change.
From their very first release, Sex Pistols were on that raging path. “I get pissed, destroy,” Johnny Rotten snarls at the end of their debut, ‘Anarchy In The UK’ as if it’s their manifesto. Get drunk, get rowdy, and shatter social norms and conventions, all in a day’s work for the new wild kids of the music scene. At their gigs, audiences seemed on board with it, given that there are countless anecdotes of the scenes found in their early crowds. But when it came to packaging the song for the masses, the revolt they caused was a different kind.
In October 1976, recognising New York’s punk wave that was hitting the UK, Leslie Hill, EMI’s managing director, signed the Sex Pistols. Their deal offered them £40,000, a hefty sum in those days, for a two-year contract. But instantly, it was a hellish affair as the band seemed to make it their mission to enact as much misery on their label team as possible, courting controversy wherever they went, including swearing on live TV and going after Bill Grundy, the famed presenter.
But even when the band weren’t present to cause problems, their music did it for them. When it came to pressing and packaging ‘Anarchy in the UK’, their first song on EMI, workers at the label went on strike, refusing to work on the release. Staff at the label’s plant refused to handle the track due to the band’s explicit name, profanity in the lyrics as well as the sentiments on the song, calling for total anarchy as a call to riotous arms.
“There were ladies at the factory who said: We aren’t going to handle the records,” EMI’s Hill recalled in Sex Pistols: The Inside Story, “Now that was why the records weren’t available for some time. The shops didn’t have it.” Causing delays on the song’s release, it’s further proof that the band’s connection to the label was forever doomed. They were too non-commercial for such a commercial enterprise. They threatened the establishment within a setting where workers relied on the establishment for their pay packets.
Eventually, the song was released. However, only a few months later, EMI dropped the band, buying them out of their major contract due to the cloud of controversy and outrage. Really though, it only benefitted the band. Not only did they get another wild story to add to their history, they got a song out of it too, singing about upsetting their label and their staff as “a day they wished that we had died” on ‘EMI’.
