Never mind the Buzzcocks (Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols - Sex Pistols)

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Product:	Never Mind The Bollocks Here's The Sex Pistols - Sex Pistols
Date:	17/12/00 (28 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great music

Disadvantages: The singing

An era defining collection of lurching Small Faces-via-The New York Dolls guitar bluster, galloping glam-rock drums and John Lydon's primal scream/primary school sneer, Never Mind The Bollocks still lunges wildly from the speakers nearly a quarter of a century after its release. Steve Jones' multi-layered Gibson Les Pauls have been inherited by Noel Gallagher, and bassist Glen Matlock's melodic contributions belie manager Malcolm McClaren's risible, self-aggrandising claim that the band couldn't play.

Released a good two years after the band's initial Blitzkreig on the nation's moral high ground and after singles Anarchy In The UK, God Save The Queen and Pretty Vacant had done their evangelical work, NMTB was actually thought by October '77s more Stalinist observers to be a tad recherche- The Clash and The Damned having already dispatched their LPs the previous spring. The Sex Pistols were otherwise engaged in joining and leaving record companies at the Machiavellian whim of McClaren or being back-balled by provincial Britain's worshipful mayors. Even the nowadays innocuous-sounding title caused a delay.

Still, tardy or not, few could deny the LPs unrelating punch nor tis litany of spine-tingling moments:from the magisterial intro of Holidys In The Sun to the gleefully spiteful chorus of EMI. Producer Chris Thomas laboured hard to capture the band's visceral live incarnation. He was also charged with keeping volatile egos from erupting. Rotten's sand-paper larynx from packing up and Sid Vicious away from an instrument. He deserves a medal.

Despite its partly American-derived sound, the album is imbued with a quintessentially London ambience, palpable as much as Rotten's dropped aitches as in God Save The Queen's jubilee-dissing. At times you can practically smell the stewed tea and HP sauce aroma of pre-Thatcher Britain.

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