A new year zero, cultural revolution, coup d’etat and night of the long knives all rolled into one. The Pistols' one and only album (let’s forget The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle shall we?) arrived at a point when the band had gone through two record labels and already announced themselves to the middlebrows as the first bona fide folk devils the UK had seen since The Stones did their Alex and The Droogs routine in ‘65.
The sound of the record was phenomenal, Bill Price perfectly capturing Cook and Matlock’s muscle and Steve Jones’ bastardised hard rock rhythm guitar, somewhere between Ronson, Townshend and Asheton. And of course, over this infernal racket, a mongrel London-Irish Richard The Turd by the name of John Lydon mangled his vowels and spat consonants like he was waging war on language itself.
‘Anarchy In The UK’ was a powerhouse act of desecration, as if Hazel Motes, the self-styled founder of the Church Without God from Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, had been reincarnated as the snot-nosed incubus brat of Alice Cooper and Iggy Stooge. Elsewhere ‘God Save The Queen’ was an amped-up Republican rebel song wearing bondage and bovver boots instead of a beard and a beergut.
Two thirds of the album bristled with the same unholy attack, and if there was a little trashy padding, well, it didn’t matter. ‘Pretty Vacant’ was McLaren’s appropriation of Richard Hell’s Blank Generation manifesto. ‘Holidays In The Sun’ a reckless black comedy too high on the thrill of its own transgression to care about the dangers of messing with Nazi paraphernalia, while ‘EMI’ was an insolent two-fingered salute to their former employers.
It was a far cry from Avril Lavigne.