The Sex Pistols are an English punk rock band formed in London in 1975. Although their initial career lasted just two and a half years, they became culturally influential in popular music. The band initiated the punk movement in the United Kingdom, with their clothes and hairstyles becoming a significant influence on the punk subculture and fashion.
The Sex Pistols' first line-up consisted of vocalist Johnny Rotten (stage name of John Lydon), guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook, and bassist Glen Matlock, with Matlock replaced by Sid Vicious in early 1977. Under the management of Malcolm McLaren, the band gained widespread attention from British press after swearing live on-air during a December 1976 television interview. Their performances at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall inspired several successful bands to form and influenced the development of England's independent music scene.
Their May 1977 single "God Save the Queen", which described the monarchy as a "fascist regime", was released to coincide with national celebrations for the Queen's Silver Jubilee. The song was promptly banned from being played by the BBC and by nearly every independent radio station in Britain, making it the most censored record in British history. Their sole studio album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols (1977) was a UK number one and is regarded as seminal in the development of punk rock. In January 1978, at the final gig of a difficult and media-hyped tour of the US, Rotten announced the band's break-up live on stage. Over the next few months, the three remaining members recorded songs for McLaren's film of the Sex Pistols' story, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Vicious died of a heroin overdose in February 1979 following his arrest for the alleged murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. Rotten, Jones, Cook and Matlock later reunited for a successful tour in 1996. Further one-off performances and short tours followed over the next decade. In 2024, Jones, Cook, and Matlock reformed the Sex Pistols, with guest vocalist Frank Carter performing in place of Rotten, and have embarked on several tours since.
The Sex Pistols have been recognised as a highly influential band. In 2006, they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame although they refused to attend the ceremony, with Rotten referring to the museum as "a piss stain".
History Formation The Sex Pistols evolved from the Strand (sometimes known as the Swankers), formed in London in 1972 by teenagers Steve Jones on vocals, Paul Cook on drums and Wally Nightingale on guitar. According to Jones, both he and Cook played on instruments he had stolen. The band regularly hung out at two clothing shops on the King's Road in Chelsea, London: John Krivine and Steph Raynor's Acme Attractions and Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die. McLaren's and Westwood's shop had opened in 1971 as Let It Rock, with a 1950s revival Teddy Boy theme. It had been renamed in 1972 to focus on another revival trend, the 1950s rocker look. The shop then became a focal point of the early London punk rock scene, and in late 1974, Jones asked McLaren to take over the Strand's management. Glen Matlock, an art student who occasionally worked at the shop, joined as bassist. McLaren and Westwood conceived a new identity for their shop: renamed Sex, it changed its focus away from retro 1950s couture to S&M-inspired "anti-fashion". After managing and promoting the New York Dolls, McLaren returned to London in May 1975 and began to take more of an interest in the Strand.
The group had been rehearsing regularly, overseen by Bernard Rhodes (who would later go on to manage the Clash) and performing live. Soon after McLaren's return, Nightingale was dismissed. Jones, Cook, and Matlock continued playing together under the name QT Jones and the Sex Pistols, with Jones taking over on guitar. With Jones becoming uncomfortable as a lead singer, the first part of the name was dropped, and McLaren began looking for a lead vocalist. He had been talking with the New York Dolls' Sylvain Sylvain about coming over to England to front the group, but those plans fell through. As described by Matlock, "Everyone had long hair back then, even the milkman, so what we used to do was if someone had short hair we would stop them in the street and ask them if they fancied themselves as a singer". For instance, Midge Ure, the later front man of Rich Kids (with Matlock) and Ultravox, claims to have been approached, but refused the offer. With the search for a lead singer proving fruitless, McLaren made several calls to Richard Hell, who also turned down the invitation.
Lydon joins
Describing the social context in which the band formed, John Lydon said that mid-seventies Britain was "a very depressing place... completely run-down, there was trash on the streets, total unemployment, just about everybody was on strike... if you came from the wrong side of the tracks... then you had no hope in hell and no career prospects at all."
In August 1975, Rhodes spotted Lydon, then 19 years old, wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words 'I Hate' handwritten above the band's name and holes scratched through the Floyd members' eyes. Soon after, either Rhodes or McLaren asked Lydon to audition. During the session, Lydon improvised to Alice Cooper's "I'm Eighteen" on the Sex jukebox. According to Jones, "he came in with green hair. I thought he had a really interesting face. I liked his look. He had the 'I Hate Pink Floyd' T-shirt on...held together with safety pins... he was a real arsehole—but smart." Jones renamed Lydon as "Johnny Rotten" as a joke, apparently because of his particularly bad teeth.
Cook had a full-time job and was threatening to quit the band. New Musical Express journalist Nick Kent occasionally played second guitar with the band before Lydon joined.O'Hagan, Sean. "Nick Kent: 'I was in the right place at the right time, on the wrong drugs' ". The Guardian, 9 January 2021 Retrieved 8 November 2023 An advertisement was placed in Melody Maker looking for a "whizz kid guitarist ... not older than 20 ... not worse looking than Johnny Thunders." As Steve New was the most talented guitarist to audition, he was asked to join. However, Jones' playing had greatly improved, and New left a month after joining the band.
After considering band name options such as Le Bomb, Subterraneans, the Damned, Beyond, Teenage Novel, Kid Gladlove, and Crème de la Crème, they decided on Sex Pistols. Matlock said the band decided on the name while McLaren was in the United States before Rotten joined. Jon Savage says the name was not firmly settled on until just before their first show in November 1975. McLaren later said the name derived "from the idea of a pistol, a pin-up, a young thing, a better-looking assassin". Not given to modesty, false or otherwise, he added: "[I] launched the idea in the form of a band of kids who could be perceived as being bad." The group began writing original material: Rotten was the lyricist and Matlock the primary melody writer (though their first collaboration, "Pretty Vacant", had all lyrics by Matlock, which Rotten tweaked a bit); official credit was shared equally among the four.
Their first gig was arranged by Matlock, then studying at Saint Martin's School of Art. The band played at the school on 6 November 1975, supporting the pub rock group Bazooka Joe. They performed several covers including the Who's "Substitute", the Small Faces' "Whatcha Gonna Do About It", and the Monkees' "(I'm Not Your) Steppin' Stone".
Early following and Anarchy in the U.K. single The Saint Martins gig was followed by performances at colleges around London. The band's core early followers—including Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin and Billy Idol, Jordan, and Soo Catwoman—came to be known as the Bromley Contingent, after the suburban south-east London borough that several of them were from. Their cutting-edge fashion, much of it supplied by Sex, ignited a trend that was adopted by the new fans the band attracted. McLaren and Westwood saw the incipient London punk movement as a vehicle for more than just couture. They were influenced by the May 1968 radical uprising in Paris, particularly by the ideology and agitations of the Situationists. These interests were shared with Jamie Reid, a friend of McLaren who took over the design of the band's visual imagery in the spring of 1976. His cut-up lettering—based on notes left by kidnappers or terrorists—were used to create the classic Sex Pistols logo and many subsequent designs for the band, although they were actually introduced by McLaren's friend Helen Wellington-Lloyd. Reid has said that he used "to talk to John [Lydon] a lot about the Situationists... the Sex Pistols seemed the perfect vehicle to communicate ideas directly to people who weren't getting the message from left-wing politics". McLaren was also arranging for the band's first photo sessions. According to the writer Jon Savage, Lydon "with his green hair, hunched stance and ragged look...[Lydon] looked like a cross between Uriah Heep and Richard Hell".
Their first gig to attract attention was as a supporting act for Eddie and the Hot Rods, a leading pub rock group, at the Marquee in February 1976. The band's first review appeared in the NME, accompanied by a brief interview in which Jones declared, "Actually we're not into music. We're into chaos." Among those who read the article were two students at the Bolton Institute of Technology, Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, who headed down to London in search of the Sex Pistols. After chatting with McLaren at Sex, they saw the band at a couple of late February gigs. The two friends immediately began organising their own Pistols-style group, Buzzcocks. As Devoto later put it, "My life changed the moment that I saw the Sex Pistols."
The Pistols soon played other important venues, notably playing at Oxford Street's 100 Club for the first time on 30 March. On 3 April, they played for the first time at the Nashville, supporting the 101ers. The pub rock group's lead singer, Joe Strummer, saw the Pistols for the first time that night—and recognised punk rock as the future. A return gig at the Nashville on 23 April highlighted the band's growing musical competence. However Westwood started a fight with another audience member which also dragged in McLaren and Rotten. Cook later said, the "fight at the Nashville: that's when all the publicity got hold of it and the violence started creeping in... I think everybody was ready to go and we were the catalyst."
On 11 May, the Pistols began a four-week Tuesday night residency at the 100 Club. They devoted the rest of the month to touring small cities and towns in the north of England and recording demos in London with producer and recording artist Chris Spedding. The following month they played their first gig in Manchester, arranged by Devoto and Shelley. The Sex Pistols' 4 June performance at the Lesser Free Trade Hall set off a punk rock boom in the city.