Wessex, autumn 1976, before EMI lost its nerve
In October 1976 the Sex Pistols were back at Wessex Sound Studios in London, trying to cut a debut single that would not fall apart in the rush. Their live engineer, Dave Goodman, had already had a go. EMI paid for those sessions. Bassist Glen Matlock later said Malcolm McLaren stood in the room pushing the tempo up until the groove disappeared, and the band more or less went on strike.
Chris Thomas took over, with Bill Price engineering. Thomas had produced Roxy Music and sat in the chair for Dark Side of the Moon. Price’s tape log puts their first pass at Anarchy in the UK on 6 and 7 November, after Goodman’s October attempt, and he remembered nineteen takes on one of the runs. The single that reached the shops on 26 November 1976 is the Thomas production: Johnny Rotten singing, Steve Jones building a wall of guitars, Matlock on bass, Paul Cook on drums. Sid Vicious was not in the band yet.
Jones’s chord hits first. Rotten enters on the line everyone can quote, and the band sits in a stomp rather than a blur. Matlock has said the track under the vocal was built from early takes, the first half from take three and the second from take five, while they waited for Rotten, who was in no hurry and still sure they could not play. Jones loaded extra guitars over the next days. The B-side, I Wanna Be Me, stayed a Goodman recording. EMI put the 7-inch out in a plain black sleeve. Early copies even credited Thomas, wrongly, for the B-side.
It made number 38 in the UK. That was enough to show a punk single could sell, and not enough to calm the label. On 1 December the band swore through a teatime interview with Bill Grundy on Thames Television. EMI dropped them on 6 January 1977. Matlock was already on the way out. The song stayed in the set, and in October 1977 it sat on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, again with Thomas and Price at Wessex, now on Virgin.
We were waiting for Rotten to turn up and do the vocals, and he didn’t rush down because he was like, ‘You’re useless, you can’t play. You’ve been in there for weeks.’ And we said, ‘No. We’ve done it.’
(Glen Matlock, Songfacts interview)
What you hear on that EMI 7-inch is the original single, not the story of a later remaster. The album uses the same performance the band had fought to keep at a tempo a body can feel. Later covers, from Megadeth to Mötley Crüe, usually play it faster and lose the swing Cook gives the original. The Pistols’ cut still sounds like four people in a big room with a producer who trusted an early take.
Put it on and the first thing that lands is Jones’s guitar, then Rotten sitting in the pocket instead of racing it. A black sleeve, a number 38, and the last recording of the lineup that wrote the song: that is the debut, before the tabloids decided the plot.
