How could you guys forget Green Day and The Offspring?
For the record and sarcasm aside, I would class both bands as punk/pop, which is a bit of an oxymoron.
Also, I never realised until recently the Sex Pistols were a manufactured band. Amusing!
I just had to comment on this. The Sex Pistols probably win the award for 'the most **** written about them ever'. So many lies and fictional stories surround them.
Common Sex Pistols Myths:
1) 'The Sex Pistols are punk' - No, the Sex Pistols are not, and never will be a punk band. The Sex Pistols were a rock n roll band, but nevertheless a unique one. Ask any member of the Pistols and they will all tell you they considered themselves to be 'just' a rock n roll band. They started out playing old Chuck Berry and Who covers at gigs and if you have actually heard them live or demos from when Matlock was in the band (which you should do before you make some ignorant statement about them) you would have heard how many million miles away they were from being 'punk'.
Maybe their attitude is 'punk' but I even doubt that with what is considered punk these days. None of them cared about politics, only Lydon was percieved to be and even he has stated on countless occasions that songs like Anarchy in the UK or God Save the Queen were written as sarcastic jokes and he didn't expect them to be taken as a declaration of civil war on the UK. I will quote Steve Jones directly when he says 'I didn't even know who was the prime minister at the time, all I cared about was making money and getting my **** sucked, like any good teenager did back then'. There is no doubt however that their attitude did convey the general feeling of the working class, or the average football match attending youth back then (which is basically what they were). The closest band to the Sex Pistols since then has probably been Oasis.
This doesn't take away anything from them though. The Sex Pistols are one of the greatest bands ever, and it's a toss up between them and the Beatles for who is the most important band in British music. You can see the influences from the Sex Pistols in just about every band after them. Even artists like Tupac have talked about taking inspiration from the Sex Pistols.
2) 'The Sex Pistols couldn't play' - Yes they could. Once again if you've heard any demos or live performances before that idiot Sid Vicious joined you will know this.
Steve Jones is one of the greatest guitarists of all time. I have no fear in saying this. Just because his songs aren't technically hard to play doesn't mean he is a bad guitarist - and Pistols songs are far from being all power chords anyway. Never Mind the ******** would not have been half as good if it wasn't for his ability. I will quote from Chris Thomas and Bill Price who produced NVMB:
"Steve Jones was, and still is just about the tightest lead guitarist I have ever heard in my life.... We did quite a lot of guitar overdubs with Steve, several of which were intended to be brought to the fore at one particular point in the song before being completely switched out or just taken to the bottom of the heap, so to speak. And this was made very easy by Steve, because everything he did was almost like it was on MIDI — it was always so perfectly in time, you could do what you liked with it. For example, if you said something like 'Oh, just play that on the bottom strings,' or 'Give us the same sort of riff but in double time,' Steve might play the whole song doing just that and we could then introduce it at a particular point to drive the number on.... He was very good"
That's before we get to the countless amount of bands who have tried to cover the Sex Pistols and completely got it wrong. Noel Gallagher said something about this last year:
If a band's going to cover a Sex Pistols song, they should forget about announcing it and just get it over and done with... the moment I hear a band announce that they're going to do a Sex Pistols tune, that's the time I know to go straight to the bar... You can't sing those songs unless you're actually Johnny Rotten, you can't play those songs unless you're Steve Jones, you just can't do those songs unless you're as good as the Sex Pistols...
Even more, after the Pistols ended both Steve Jones and John Lydon have worked/played with musicians such as Steve Vai. Oh and there's quite a high chance that Jones has played on some Guns n Roses or Velvet Revolver records down the line (I know for a fact he has played with them live and had Axl Rose singing on his solo albums)
3) 'The Sex Pistols were a manufactured band' - If you believe this you've obviously fallen for Malcom McLaren's ability to ********. If you believe his side of the story he will have you believe from talking in perfect hindsight that everything that happened was planned by him. It wasn't, ask any member of the band this, all McLaren did was seek to destroy anything that made the Sex Pistols good. Forcing Matlock out of the band, bringing Sid in, deliberately preventing the band from having soundchecks, circulating ******** rumours about the band not being able to play. He wanted the band to be more of a circus than a musical force. He is even on record in saying that he thinks the band would have been better if they had never released an album - yeah right. He also consistently stole money from the band. In 1986 the four of them won a court case for lost earnings that McLaren had stolen from them during the Pistols. Jones was so poor during the early days of the Pistols that he was literally living on the street.
McLaren only managed the band because Jones asked him to, and he only said yes because it meant Jones would stop stealing from his store. He had almost nothing to do with creating the band. The only audition they held was when looking for a singer, and it only took one before they found John Lydon - if you can call it an audition - more like a few drinks in a pub followed by a karoke.
It was a complete accident that the four of them gelled so well together musically.
4) 'The Sex Pistols hired session musicians to record Never Mind the ********' - No, see above. This rumour probably comes from the famous session musician Chris Spedding letting them record demos using his studio after he saw them play live:
"A lot of people were putting the Sex Pistols down because as being not very talented, and not very good, and I've heard them and they were good. I thought, if I produced a demo for them then people would be able to hear them. So that's what I did. I think it got them the deal - it certainly got them the producer Chris Thomas because I sent him the demos. That got him in interested in the group"
McLaren on the other hand will have you believe that he got Chris Thomas to produce NVMB...
Another quote from Chris Spedding:
"I'm quite proud of the Sex Pistols demos, especially when compared to their other later recordings. On my demos you can hear everything quite clearly - the bass and drums are really audible plus you can actually hear what the rhythm and lead guitars are doing. Part of why McLaren didn't like my demo was that because I like R&B, I highlighted their rhythm tracks with a big bass drum and bass aound, particularly because Matlock had some intensely played bass runs. He wanted a guitar soup. I think that whenever you've got an interesting rhythm section like that, a band sounds like they can actually play, and since that was the whole point of my demo - to prove they could play - that's what I pushed. When you have a guitar soup, which is what the demo they recorded later sounds like, you have to face the fact that someone's trying to cover up the fact that they can't play. And that's what McLaren wanted people to think that they couldn't play, that was just an idea, a way of making all this anarchy stuff happen."
5) 'The Sex Pistols spat, threw up, urinated, cut themselves open and beat eachother up on stage' - No. Only Sid Vicious did any of this, and we can safely say that it is mainly because of his antics and drug addiction that the band broke up. Before he joined the band had a 'bad boy' image built up on swearing on the Bill Grundy show (you must remember that back then swearing on TV just did not happen) and from ending up in fights with the audience of other bands at gigs.
6) 'The Sex Pistols made more than one album' - No. The Sex Pistols made just one album: 'Never Mind the ********'. Before this they recorded various demos and there are several live bootlegs available. Anything else is NOT the Sex Pistols. Songs such as 'Schools are Prisons' were NOT written or recorded by the Sex Pistols. The Great Rock n Roll Swindle had largely nothing to do with the original band (that is: Lydon, Jones, Cook and Matlock). Much of the material released after the Pistols broke up was McLaren trying to make as much money through manipulating Sid Vicious while still using the Sex Pistols' name, and I'm sure you'll agree it is all awful. Obviously demos and live bootlegs became available later on, but essentially the Pistols ended on 14th January 1978 after the awful gig at Winterland. As Lydon put it:
"The Sex Pistols ended at the right time, for all the wrong reasons. But the wrong reasons were continued and people continued to tell lies about the reality"
This was basically McLaren trying to rewrite the history books to make it sound as if he designed everything and had it all planned out in his 'masterplan'.
I suggest you all watch the documentary 'The Filth and the Fury', the classic album episode on Nevermind the ********, and go out and get some of the early Pistols recordings (they aren't hard to find) - just make sure you stay clear of anything with Sid involved. The Sex Pistols Box Set and 'Raw' should give you most of them. Do this before making ignorant comments.
Infact I managed to find a low quality one on Youtube:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=2B5VHPe4OP4
As you can hear, is that really what you define 'punk' as?
