The “disgusting” Sex Pistols song Dave Grohl fell in love with
Most of us can remember the first time the rosy innocence of our childhood hue was tainted by something we shouldn’t have seen, like a screening of Edgar Wright’s Hot Fuzz at the age of eight, or the diabolical lambastations of Ronnie Radke’s sour punk at age nine. For Dave Grohl, at the tender age of seven, this façade-shattering media would come in the form of the Sex Pistols.
Not their sound, no, not quite yet, but simply images from their chaotic American tour of 1978, which was plagued by hostile audiences, band friction, and avoidable admin errors. None of that adult stuff reached a wide-eyed Grohl, who, in all his innocence, found photographs of “these vicious-looking guys in ripped clothes, Sid Vicious covered in blood”.
From there, Grohl threw himself with innocuous aplomb into the UK punk scene, citing The Buzzcocks, The Banshees, and Stiff Little Fingers as key inspirations on his young mind, with the frenetic sonic terrain seeping down from his brain into his fingers, sealing his fate the moment he picked up the drumsticks.
All things considered, his alternative career could have gone in a very different direction if he had listened and replicated the squeaky-clean sounds that were gaining popularity in America. With distaste, Grohl has cited the likes of “Boston and Bad Company”, bands who were “trained professionals who sounded slick and polished”.
Instead, the popularity of that snoozy predictability meant that the Pistols blew his head square off. “Can you imagine what it was like to hear the Pistols?” he gushed, “A band who couldn’t play and what’s more couldn’t care less. What made them special? It was that guitar sound, the way Johnny Rotten said his Rs, it was a moment in time.”
If there was one song to pedal the punk agenda right down the home straight, it was the most outlandish of all: ‘Bodies’, released on their 1977 album, Never Mind the Bollocks. With a gaudy smile, Grohl gushed, “I went around all day singing ‘Bodies’, what a disgusting subject for a song, abortion, and how fantastic it was we could sing about it.”
Rotten, real name John Lydon, wrote the song inspired by a real fan, indeed named Pauline from Birmingham. He claimed that the song’s central figure had once shown up at his door, with nothing to show for herself but an aborted fetus in a clear plastic bag. “She was a girl from Birmingham, she just had an abortion, she was a case of insanity, her name was Pauline, she lived in a tree,” he opens terrifyingly, yet succinctly, at the beginning of the track.
Today, we might hope for more from an abortion track, as Lydon explained previously that it was neither pro-life nor pro-choice, but a neutral exploration of the fracturing physical, emotional, and sociological confusion and suffering surrounding the taboo topic.
Should Grohl still be interested today, he might try the 2024 track ‘Abortion’ by queer-punk London trio The Menstrual Cramps: “I’ve had an abortion! I’ve had an abortion. No, I’ve had two; if you don’t like it, then fuck you. My body, my choice”. That’s more like it.
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