Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
The phrase, so well-known, repeated, and misused by some who find ways to sneer at the moment in time that the Sex Pistols managed to install themselves briefly at the very centre of the storm that rightfully gave Britain the kick it needed to finally start pulling away from the Victorian straitjacket that had bound tightly to the sensibilities and rigid indoctrination of the public, somehow frames the three cd release of the band’s tumultuous time in the United States with a kind of consummate ease.
“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”, scorned John Lydon as the final night of the tour at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco came to an end and in which the moment itself would be lost for almost two decades; the answer itself would be yes, but not in the way some might perceive. In that moment when John Lydon understood that he was no long part of something authentic, we lost something special, something that was able to tap into the renegade spirit and the wrath of injustice that the ordinary person, the members of the working class and those with empathy from elsewhere were able to see just how different life could be.
Yes, we were cheated, told that to be punk as an expression was wrong, and just as the genre and the life had shaken the roots of Progressive Rock to its foundation, and all of a sudden, we were inundated with the suits of similarity, the look of the perpetually staid which alluded to the romantics and the makeup driven.
Cheated in life perhaps, but never in the music and whilst the U.S.A tour of 1978 would be the catalyst of break up and other stories, the filth and the never mind the outrage of the band flew directly into the cyclone that was on the verge of tearing the political map of the country apart; a deeply conservative republican system of values were being drawn up by the future President, a new form of government on the other side of the Atlantic was to bring its own storm, and as the three gigs highlighted in Atlanta’s South East Music Hall, Dallas’ Longhorn Ballroom, and aforementioned final gig in San Francisco show, the tide of belief that radical change was possible was slowly disappearing.
Punk today seems almost respectable, although graced by fantastic bands, there seems to be none of the true anarchic fervour that took four “nice lads” from London’s almost poverty driven future to the brink of taking on the grit and virtue of the outraged bible thumping cousins across the pond.
Memory is though of a moment to be cherished and in Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols: Live In The U.S.A. 1978 that anarchy drawn is not an illusion it is a graphic memento mori of what could have been, and as tracks such as God Save The Queen, Holidays In The Sun, Problems, Pretty Vacant, and Anarchy In The U.K. are framed in the respective bear pits for posterity, so their power increases exponentially.
A remembrance of what was in this triple cd package, the final kick against the doors of conservativism in a country now dogged by rampant dishonour.
Ian D. Hall