Never Mind The Bollocks – One album, maximum noise, Virgin 1977

One album, maximum noise, Virgin 1977

Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols hit Virgin shops on 28 October 1977 as the band’s only studio album. Sessions ran at Wessex Sound in London with producers Chris Thomas and Bill Price across late 1976 into August 1977. By release the Pistols had already been dropped by EMI and A&M, sworn on live TV, and banned from stages across Britain. Advance orders topped 125,000. The LP debuted at No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart even while major retailers refused the sleeve.

Line-up chaos is part of the recording. Glen Matlock co-wrote most tracks then left in February 1977; Sid Vicious replaced him on bass but Steve Jones played bass on the bulk of the album because Vicious could not hold the parts. Johnny Rotten and Paul Cook are on every cut. The singles were already public: Anarchy in the U.K., God Save the Queen, Pretty Vacant, Holidays in the Sun. Inside sit Bodies, No Feelings, Seventeen, E.M.I., Liar, Problems, Submission. Jones later called the studio hours the best part of being in the band; the guitars are overdubbed hard, not sloppy on purpose.

Jamie Reid’s dayglo cut-and-paste cover carried Steve Jones’s working-class phrase: never mind the bollocks, meaning stop talking rubbish. Police leaned on Virgin shop windows over the word. A Nottingham manager was prosecuted; John Mortimer defended; a university English professor testified that bollocks could mean nonsense. The court found not guilty. TIME, Rolling Stone and countless punk histories later filed the album among the century’s essentials. It remains the document of a band that burned out in public while locking twelve songs that still sound loud and tight.