Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
There are more books written about books, and there are more stars in the heavens that we can physically ever count, but you can also be assured that only it seems Britain’s Sex Pistols can have more albums released than the band actually managed to record in their short lived, but ever-lasting, career.
Like the amount of people that will swear on their mother’s graves and pledge upon a bible in court that they attended the Manchester Free Trade Hall concert that surely by now is counted in the hundreds of thousands, these retrospective recordings have made the most of what was a colossus cut short, a cynical grab perhaps, but one that has seen the band’s enduring legacy live on.
Sex Pistols’ The Original Recordings is another look at the life and times of a band that arguably turned the nation, if not upside down between 1975 and 1978, at least inside out for a while, and whilst the era is now exploited by some as a fashion statement, a faux regard for a meaning that was ruptured by a style and arguably a manager who had his own agenda, this particular retrospective of the work is to be admired, and even if it is on the back of the upcoming six part television series, Lonely Boy, the moment is not lost at all, the feeling of disillusion, of the urge to rebel against a machine that was only to get worse, more draconian, more totalitarian as the 70s gave way to the 80s and beyond, it was all pent up rage released, and whilst there were others who could hold their own in the genre’s court, few could grab the headlines and aggravate and hurt the establishment as the Sex Pistols.
As with the free hedonism of the 60s, some will insist that if you can remember the feeling, then perhaps you weren’t there, but it is the overwhelming urgency, the drama, the never to be forgotten use of language on television, the sheer audacity to proclaim what many under the age of 20 felt at the time, that brings the songs on the album once more back to life; and if a group of musicians can have derision from figures such as the self-imposed moral guardian that was Mary Whitehouse thrown at them, then surely they are a monument to the destroyers of decay that had eroded the country as the counterfeit respect that had hung on in gloriously from the dreadful Victorian era and its all its rules and regulations.
A band that you pretty much could name all the songs they created or covered, such was the power of their debut, Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols, that tracks such as Pretty Vacant, Holidays In The Sun, their take on The Who’s Substitute, Anarchy In The U.K., itself covered by American Thrash Metal Kings Megadeth early in their own career, and God Save The Queen, still resonate, still echo with fire and ice in the veins some 40 years on.
In this compilation, The Original Recordings hold court and perhaps in judgement of what we have collectively lived through since those days when just having the guts to play was enough to start a revolution, and whilst the band never arguably saw eye to eye, the loss of one member, another ridiculously left out to dry by the former manager, there is no doubting the impression they left on those forever being told they had no future, the declaration of a civil war that never truly left us.
An album of commanding authority, of memory, and one that is utterly, and devastatingly superb.
Ian D. Hall