The Bollocks track Sid actually played
In August 1977, at Wessex Sound Studios in London, Chris Thomas is producing and Bill Price is engineering. The Sex Pistols are finishing Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, the album Virgin will release in Britain on 28 October. Most of the bass on that record is Steve Jones. Glen Matlock has been pushed out, Sid Vicious cannot carry a full album, and Thomas has Jones play the parts. Bodies is the exception they leave audible. Jones later says they let Sid do it, then dubbed another bass and kept Sid’s low in the mix. Vicious is in hospital with hepatitis before the song is finished. The credit still reads Rotten, Jones, Vicious, Cook.
The lyric is not a position paper. John Lydon has said it is about one person, a fan from Birmingham named Pauline who had been in a mental institution, talked about living in a tree, and turned up with an aborted foetus in a clear plastic bag. “She was a girl from Birmingham” is the start of that account. He tells Melody Maker in October 1978 that people had filed the song as anti-woman, which he calls wrong: there was no social statement, it was one person, and what offended him was the bragging. Years later he adds that the song is about the value of a life and also about bringing someone into the world and not caring for them, and that his mother’s miscarriages were part of what he already knew. The word lands hard, six times. It is the ugliest vocal on the album, and it is specific.
Musically it is the Pistols’ studio method at full pressure. Jones’s guitar is a thick wall of overdubs, Paul Cook’s drums are dry and forward, and the two basses make the low end thicker than on Pretty Vacant or God Save the Queen. Thomas and Price keep the vocal up front and ugly rather than polished. Matlock did not co-write this one. It is one of two songs on the album he is not on as a writer. The other pieces of the record had been built earlier in 1977. Bodies arrives in August, late, and it is the track that sounds like the band refusing to tidy the subject.
Bodies was about a girl who actually carried her abortion in a plastic bag. There was no social statement in it or anything, it was just about one person.
(John Lydon, Melody Maker, 28 October 1978)
The album that carries it goes to number one in Britain even with Boots, WH Smith and Woolworths refusing to stock a record whose title contains “bollocks” and whose lyric sheet contains this song. Jamie Reid’s ransom-note sleeve does not soften Bodies. Warner Bros. issues the LP in the United States on 11 November 1977. There is no careful single to explain the track. It stays an album cut, which is why people often meet it after Anarchy in the U.K. and God Save the Queen and find it harder. On 14 January 1978, at Winterland in San Francisco, the last show of the American tour, they still play it. The night ends with Lydon asking if the crowd ever felt cheated.
Play it after those two singles if you want the sequence the year actually had: the anthems first, then the song that does not ask to be chanted. Sid’s bass is the low one. Jones’s is the one that holds. Lydon’s vocal is the point. A 2012 remaster did not write any of that. The session did, at Wessex, in August 1977.
