Sex Pistols

  1. Pirate Utopian
    Pirate Utopian
    I gotta say that whenever people talk about the Sex Pistols they complete underrate them.

    They werent incompetent musicians, Steve Jones especially was a talented player.
    Glen Matlock came up with some great tunes.
    You cant complain about Paul Cook's drumming.
    And Johnny Rotten's vocals are great, compare the Pistols to the Professionals (a post-Pistols band formed by Jones and Cook) and you'll see that without Rotten's angry vocals the Pistols wouldnt pack the same punch. Plus the vocals also had a good sense of melody.

    Sid Vicious wasnt a great bass player but he got better, all the stories about his bass getting unplugged is never clarified if that's from his early or later Pistol days.
    Besides as Rotten said who cares about the bass in rockmusic?, it's just a sonic boom in the background.

    The Pistols were also damn clever.
    They used situationist graffiti slogans (like "cheap holidays in other people's misery" in Holidays in the Sun), Nietzsche references (the antichrist reference in the beginning of Anarchy in the UK; Antichrist being a book by Nietzsche about discarding the established christian values and morals) and playing pronounciation.
    Like they did in Anarchy in the UK, pronouncing the "enemy" in the "I use the enemy, I use anarchy"-line as NME (British music mag), how they use the media the further their influence.
    And ofcourse Pretty Vacant, vaaa-****!



    I hope this revives this group.
  2. Fawkes
    Fawkes
    Sex Pistols are fucking awesome. Sid Vicious, according to the people that actually, ya know, knew the guy, was really not that bad of a bassist, plus he was described by I believe it was Steve Jones as being someone who "learned things really fast." Malcolm McLaren also gets too much credit as the creative force behind the Pistols and Matlock gets far too little. Music aside, their cultural impact was huge in regards to their attitude and their fashion, which did not consist entirely of the SEX inventory. Each member had their own style by no means the sole work of McLaren. Their music was also great as straight-forward rock n roll with a sneering attitude that no one had yet matched. McLaren should be given credit though as someone who was incredibly talented at media-manipulation, namely the Silver Jubilee boat and the Bill Grundy swear-in and their performance on a show whose title is escaping me where McLaren told the band to go anywhere on stage except for the "X"s laid out by the crew and to not stop playing even after they had finished I believe God Save the Queen, though it may have been something else.
  3. Pirate Utopian
    Pirate Utopian
    I understood McLaren actually shat himself after the Grundy-thing, he thought they were toast untill he read the newspapers the next day.
  4. Fawkes
    Fawkes
    They all though they were fucked after it happened because the Anarchy tour was right about to happen and they were worried about getting dropped. But that's awesome about him shitting himself.
  5. Fawkes
    Fawkes
    I also heard a live version of Problems, I don't remember what album it's off of, where Paul is doing 1/8 notes with the bass drum the entire song cause there's no bass playing.
  6. NGNM85
    NGNM85
    The Sex Pistols are absolutely amazing. One of the few bands I can say actually changed my life. There's nothing else like them. Their live performances are absolutely incendiary. I will be forever grateful I had the pleasure of seeing them live in 2003.