80. The Sex Pistols, "Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols"
This might not have been the very first punk album, but it was the first Punk Album. I'll explain. Before the Sex Pistols, there were proto-punk bands like the Stooges and the New York Dolls, but in May of 1976 Malcolm McLaren returned to London and started hanging out at a boutique called Sex and managing a band called the Strand. He happened upon a young non-vocalist named John Lydon, later rechristened Johnny Rotten, and brought him into the band, which was quickly renamed the Sex Pistols. They began writing songs together played their first show in November 1975, a gig that ended, predictably, with them fighting with the headlining band.
This album, the band's debut, was largely recorded in early 1977, although "Anarchy in the UK" was released in November 1976 and was an immediate success and it's not hard to see why. Not only is it provocative and, for the time, extremely controversial, it's also just a great fucking song, I am not kidding, one of the best songs in the history of rock. There's Rotten's snarling "Right... nowww" at the beginning, and then the now-iconic lyrics:
I am an anarchist
Don't know what I want but I know how to get it
I wanna destroy the passersby
No dogsbody!
I give a wrong time, stop a traffic line
Your future dream is a shopping scheme
[Side note, I bought this album as a young impressionable child and obviously misunderstood lots of the lyrics and I thought it was "Your future dream is a sharp-edged scream" which is maybe better than the real lyric? Get at me, Rotten.] But it's not just the lyrics! The guitar sound, basically just Steve Jones playing a stock Les Paul through a cranked up Fender Twin with tons of overdubs, is so big and slashing and angry and wants you to break things. But it's not just that either! There's an actual melody, a vocal riff that gets stuck in your head, and that's what sets the Sex Pistols apart from so many other early punk bands. They had a musicality, a sense of how to put a song together and stick it.
This album debuted at number one on the UK albums chart, despite not being sold by major retailers. Not very punk! But "selling out" wasn't a thing yet. So that's what I mean by this being the first Punk Album. Not only did it formalize the idea of punk music, it also set the tone for punk albums that would follow. You had to be crass, and angry, and transgressive, but you also had to have songs and not just sounds.
The songs are good. They're very good. Not just "Anarchy," but "God Save the Queen" and "Holidays in the Sun" and "Sub-Mission" and "Pretty Vacant." You can't really begin to grapple with how influential this band and this record were. The Pistols played a gig in Manchester in June 1976 and in the audience were people who went on to start the Buzzcocks, the Smiths, Joy Division, and the Fall. ONE GIG. And it just goes on from there. Nirvana doesn't exist without this album. All of pop-punk.
Like I said, I bought this album when I was maybe 13, 14, I'm not sure, and totally loved it. Listening to it again for the first time in a long time, I was struck by how clean and well-produced it is. I mean, you think "punk," you think quick and dirty recording, but that is not what's going on here. Everything is crisp and the album is well-mixed and even Rotten's voice sounds good. It's just a great-sounding record.
The Pistols would, of course, gloriously self-combust in San Francisco at their final gig in 1978. Rotten would revert to John Lydon and start Public Image Ltd. and later become a weird reactionary. The other band members (except Sid Vicious, of course, who died of a heroin overdose at 21 years old) all stayed in music in one form or another, and the band has sporadically played reunion shows, but man, never again will anything feel as wild and original as this did.
Is this album in my personal Top 500? Absolutely no doubt.
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