The greatest album of all time, according to Liam Gallagher: “No one has ever touched that record”
Feel free to say what you like about Liam Gallagher, but have a look around your shoulder and make sure he hasn’t said it himself first.
His older brother, Noel Gallagher, famously described as “a man with a fork in a world of soup”, hinting at the fact that he has never been shy of an irate opinion. However, despite how it may seem on the surface, the iconic rock vocalist very rarely ventures towards the depths of love and hate. He largely keeps things at the quipping level.
In fact, he even resisted the temptation to criticise Coldplay, acknowledging that they’re “not for [him]”, but emphasising that he doesn’t harbour any animosity toward the Chris Martin-led group because he doesn’t really know them. Liam later joked that they also lived nearby, so he didn’t want to be too harsh in case they paid him an unexpected visit and gave him a nasty “papercut”.
Nevertheless, there is one record that the acerbic frontman reserves special praise for and holds nothing but appreciation towards. “The most powerful song I’ve ever heard from a band?” the singer who grows sideburns on a whim mused, “It’s got to be the Sex Pistols. Anything off Never Mind the Bollocks will do me.”
It’s a record that he continues to view as unreachable.” I think that still hasn’t been touche,” he continued. “You consider the day and age with all this technology going on, but they were doing it pretty simple, man, and still the aggression and the passion. No one has ever touched that record.”
That notion of simplicity and merely having something to say was powerful in itself. It revived the old tenets of swaggering, working-class, knees-up rock ‘n’ roll before pretentious virtuosos got their grubby mitts on it and started rattling off 13-minute viola solos and rambling about acid epiphanies.
This revival was announced in earnest on February 21st, 1976, when a piece written by Neil Spencer ran with the headline: “Don’t look over your shoulder, but the Sex Pistols are coming.” As John Cooper Clarke famously remarked, it was accompanied by a picture of a band who looked like a “mugshot”. Adding, “fancy looking like that!”
Therein, the story documented tales of band members cavorting with half-dressed members of the public on stage, chairs and tables being utterly Chernobyled in a seeming mutiny against anything perceived as banal, and a Frenchman shouting to Steve Jones, “you can’t play!” to which the sordid guitarist flippantly replied, “So what?” Can you argue with that? Can you fuck!
Perhaps most importantly, the article contained another small snapshot of a band who looked like they were on day release from an asylum in the dystopian future. A gaunt-looking villainous character with nothing in his eyes barring a clear determination to bedevil everything before him in an angry besiegement of his own sui generis and unfathomable design formed the manic centrepiece, and that mad, angry wasp-looking bastard went by the barmy name of Johnny Rotten, no less! A generation of stilted British music fans was sold in an instant.
Among them were two young Gallagher brothers who soon started spotting people walking around Manchester with haircuts that were seemingly crafted at the Tasmanian Devil’s new barber shop. The brothers had their minds walloped by a bright new future.
For poor Mrs Gallagher, the tearaway troubles started soon after, but look where it’s got them now: proof, if proof be need be, that punk really was a great artistic zenith that made the arts the greatest engine of social mobility in this injustice society of ours. You could now learn four chords, practice your scowl, and soon find yourself falling out of a private helicopter.
So, Liam will forever love the daring intent of the Pistols that helped to bring this dream to fuition. As he once declared: “I would have loved to have been in the Pistols. I’d have kicked out Johnny Rotten – he’d have gone. Get out, Gooner. Paul Cook’s fucking mega. Steve Jones is the man. Sid Vicious, turn his bass down, but he still fucking killed. But Rotten would have gone, I’m sorry. I can do Johnny Rotten in my sleep.”
Even now that the two Gallaghers are back on touring terms, common ground still largely remains an alien concept. But one firm agreement is that both their lives were altered by the “power” of the Sex Pistols.
They may sing from a different hymn sheet in every other aspect of life, but Noel feels equally strongly about the Sex Pistols. For his money, no act has ever produced a more important album than Never Mind The Bollocks, which he believes had a stronger cultural impact than any other body of work.
“I was ten when it came out, so I was just a little bit too young,” Noel once remembered to BBC Radio 2’s Johnnie Walker. “But one of the older kids on our estate had a copy of it, and it was known that somebody had an album with swearing on it. I remember hearing ‘Bodies’ with a heroic amount of bad language in that song and thinking, ‘Wow!'”.
Noel continued: “For that band to have only been going for two and a half years and to change music. Not many bands get to change the way that people dress, talk, and feel in a culture. If push comes to shove, it’s probably the greatest album of all time. If it wasn’t for that, you wouldn’t have Definitely Maybe. No way.”
While Never Mind The Bollocks was a product of its times and was created as an act of resistance to the corporate rock that was prominent in the 1970s, it still manages to sound as exciting as winning the lottery on a rollercoaster today. Furthermore, the impact of the Sex Pistols still resonates on the radio even when punk seems largely silenced.
Although they only released one studio album, their cultural footprint is indisputable. Oasis would never have happened without them.
