An SOS riff, then a number six they were allowed to have
Glen Matlock wrote Pretty Vacant before he was pushed out of the Sex Pistols, and the hook arrived in a bar. He has traced the descending riff to ABBA’s SOS, heard on the jukebox at Moonies on Charing Cross Road while he was spending dole money. The lyric started from a Richard Hell poster Malcolm McLaren brought back from New York, the one listing Blank Generation. Matlock misread the mood on purpose. He wanted a vacant, blank feeling that still moved.
He wrote the words, then Rotten rewrote a couple of lines in the second verse. Matlock’s draft shrugged toward the pub. Rotten’s line, “Stop your cheap comments, we know we’re for real,” is the one that stuck. The chorus chords, Matlock says, came straight from the Small Faces’ Wham Bam, Thank You Ma’am, the same London R&B the Pistols had been kicking around since 1975. A Denmark Street demo from July 1976 later leaked on the Spunk bootleg as Lots of Fun.
By the time Virgin issued the single, on 1 July 1977, Matlock was gone. The master cut at Wessex in March, again with Chris Thomas and Bill Price, has Rotten singing, Paul Cook on drums, and Steve Jones on both guitar and bass. Sid Vicious was the bassist the public saw. He is not the bass on this record. The B-side was a rough cover of the Stooges’ No Fun, taken from the old Goodman demos.
The single entered the UK chart at 45 on 9 July and peaked at number 6 on 30 July, catalogue VS 184. It was the first Pistols record that radio would actually play, mostly because it sounded less like a direct insult than Anarchy in the UK or God Save the Queen. Rotten’s trick was in the vowel. He leans on the last syllable of “vacant” until it lands as something else. Enough programmers missed it.
Pretty Vacant is a primal scream kind of thing: we don’t know what we’re gonna do, but we’re gonna do it anyway.
(Glen Matlock, Uncut, June 2022)
On 11 July 1977 the band filmed a promo at ITN’s studios on Wells Street, directed by Mike Mansfield. They threw lager at a cameraman and got thrown out. They came back on the 12th and finished it. On 14 July, Top of the Pops played the clip, against the band’s wishes and against the show’s own earlier ban. It was their first appearance on the programme, and they were not in the building.
The record is the one to play, not the 2012 remaster’s label copy. Jones’s bass follows the guitar figure instead of sitting under it, Cook keeps the snare dry, and Rotten sounds amused rather than heroic. Number 6, eight weeks on the chart, and a riff borrowed from ABBA in a Charing Cross bar: that is how the Pistols got a hit the BBC would show.
