Tuesday 1 May 2018

Lucy Museum of Musicians - Sex Pistols

Qualification to The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians is they must have a minimum of three songs which would make me turn up the radio if they came on.

Sex Pistols
Qualifying Songs: Anarchy in the UK, Bodies, Pretty Vacant

Hard to think of a band who achieved so much in such a short time but within the year that they were around, the Sex Pistols changed everything and influenced so many others.
Cramming a whole career into 12 short months the Sex Pistols influence is still reverberating today and 'Anarchy in the UK' sums up the whole Punk thing sweetly, a pounding three and half minutes of amazingly angry noise and snarling lyrics.
If anything, 'Bodies' is an even angrier song and the fastest and heaviest song in the Sex Pistols back catalogue and based on a true story about a fan who turned up once at John Lydon's door wearing nothing but a clear plastic bag and holding an aborted foetus in a clear plastic bag. 
With it's constant swearing and subject matter it's never going to appear on the BBC's Desert Island Discs but it's pure Sex Pistols.
I always had my suspicions that 'Pretty Vacant', with Rotten's emphasis on the second syllable of Vacant, was just a way to squeeze out a swearword on the radio. The video took three days to film as the band were thrown out of the studio for throwing cans of lager at the cameramen and according to bassist Glen Matlock, the song's main riff was based on 'S.O.S.' by ABBA.
Everything the Sex Pistols did laid the foundation of generations of musicians to come and as in that infamous Bill Grundy interview, they were indeed very clever boys.

No comments: