|
|
| Ten Thousand Motels |
SEX PISTOLS SELL OUT
Legendary punk band THE SEX PISTOLS have turned their backs on their anti-establishment roots by signing away their back catalogue to Universal Music Publishing Group. Thirty years after the band challenged capitalist culture with ANARCHY IN THE UK, the JOHN LYDON-fronted group will cash in on multi-million dollar (pound) deals with blue chip companies such as British Airways and Range Rover. And the tracks will be used for anything from mobile phone ringtones to movie soundtracks. Universal president PAUL CONNOLLY says, "We are delighted to conclude this deal to represent the Sex Pistols back catalogue, one of the most influential in rock. "The band members must approve every opportunity put to them but we believe they will want to maximise the income we can generate."
04/03/2006 14:55
contact music
Old rebels don't die, they play Monopoly
(Filed: 02/03/2006)
Arts Telegraph
It was in February 1976, scanning the ink-sodden pages of the review section of the New Musical Express in the winded aftermath of mock O-levels, that I came upon the famous headline: "Don't look over your shoulder but the Sex Pistols are coming".
The piece described a visit by the reporter Neil Spencer to an early Sex Pistols gig at the Marquee in Wardour Street that degenerated into a free-for-all between audience and band. "We're not into music," one of the latter enticingly revealed. "We're into chaos."
In those days, the NME had a circulation of nearly a quarter of a million copies. Over the next few weeks, plenty of hip young people were galvanised into action by this clarion call. Gradually, in a musical landscape dominated by dreary manifestations of what had been known as "progressive rock", a movement was kicking into gear.
Punk has been so regularly mythologised and theorised over in the 30 years since its fashioning that one or two of the realities of English musical life circa 1976 tend to be overlooked.
The first is that, at least until the autumn of that year, 95 per cent of the potential audience could only read about this new world of ripped trousers and safety-pin chic. There were only a handful of punk gigs, and until the Damned's first single, New Rose, erupted on to the John Peel programme some time in October, no records.
The second is that these stirrings of a pop sensation that trumpeted its affiliations to sex, anarchy and violence were greeted with an almost blanket hostility. Ominously, this contempt extended not only to the music industry and other groups but to most of the record-buying public.
I can still remember the moment, late in November 1976, when somebody first placed a copy of the Sex Pistols' debut single, Anarchy in the UK, on the sixth-form club record player, and the whinny of horror it produced among the shoals of Morlock-haired 16-year-olds quietly trading their copies of Yes's Tales From Topographic Oceans.
As a deeply Right-wing teenager, who once founded a group called Woolwich West in celebration of a Tory by-election victory, I hated the Sex Pistols, tut-tutted over their expletive-laden appearance on the Bill Grundy show and, six months later, warmly approved the decision of Her Majesty's Constabulary to intercept the Thames steamer hired for the band's Jubilee night concert.
I was much keener on the Jam, on the grounds that they wore suits, played songs that were recognisably derived from Sixties forebears such as the Who, and whose remark that they intended to vote for Mrs Thatcher at the next election (designed to provoke "political" outfits such as the Clash) this Young Conservative took at face value.
As for the music, this seemed to follow the classic youth-movement trajectory sketched out in George Melly's Revolt Into Style (1971), by which something fresh, spontaneous and sui generis is rapidly converted into a marketing exercise. The initial punk wave was almost over before it began.
The very first Buzzcocks record, the self-financed EP Spiral Scratch, contained, in the two minutes and 52 seconds of Boredom, a song that not only embraces the punk spirit but neatly pastiches it. "I'm living in this movie," Howard Devoto whines, "but it does not move me... I just came from nowhere, and I'm going straight back there."
Three decades on, all this comes wrapped up in the inevitable top-coat of middle-aged nostalgia. "Ah yes," I murmur to my 13-year-old son, when doubtful modern propositions - the Arctic Monkeys, the Kaiser Chiefs - come gambolling across the airwaves, "but back then we had proper music." And Devoto, the breathless lyricist of Orgasm Addict, Breakdown and much else besides, is actually a chum of mine - a blameless fifty-something who on his last visit to the house meekly consented to play Monopoly with the children.
"Punk was slightly, wonderfully, but nevertheless impossibly negative," he now declares. "And also impossibly contradictory." Yes indeed. I haven't yet dared tell him that the record I really remember playing to death in 1976 was Status Quo's Blue for You.
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
|
|
| mac_daddy |
the sex pistols suck. they have got to be the most overrated band in the history of music. manufactured by lydon and malcolm to sell malcolms clothes, etc. coppin' all the image and none of the substance from richard hell, tom v., patti, the dolls et al., who were actually trying to do/say something...
and that press release - that was manufactured, too (poor grammar and all). i love ya fpm, but the whole dealio is just lame. but i bet a few more folks have picked up the "bullocks" album this past week. malcolm is laughing all the way to the bank - how many hits do you think his website got this week...
f*ckin' wankers, the whole lot of them... |
|
|
| the good |
quote:
mac_daddy wrote:
the sex pistols suck. they have got to be the most overrated band in the history of music. manufactured by lydon and malcolm to sell malcolms clothes, etc. coppin' all the image and none of the substance from richard hell, tom v., patti, the dolls et al., who were actually trying to do/say something...
and that press release - that was manufactured, too (poor grammar and all). i love ya fpm, but the whole dealio is just lame. but i bet a few more folks have picked up the "bullocks" album this past week. malcolm is laughing all the way to the bank - how many hits do you think his website got this week...
f*ckin' wankers, the whole lot of them...
I couldn't agree more. |
|
|
| corgi37 |
Wasnt there already a thread on this "band"? |
|
|
| lotsajizz |
quote:
mac_daddy wrote:
the sex pistols suck. they have got to be the most overrated band in the history of music. manufactured by lydon and malcolm to sell malcolms clothes, etc. coppin' all the image and none of the substance from richard hell, tom v., patti, the dolls et al., who were actually trying to do/say something...
f*ckin' wankers, the whole lot of them...
Bollocks!! Clearly you've seen the 'Swindle' and accepted it as fact. Malcom's the wanker....I suggest an immediate viewing of "The Filth and the Fury" to straighten out your misconceptions....
|
|
|
| oldkr |
the pistols had nothing to sell out to in the first place, theyre a manufactored band pandering to a teenage cultural whim , they made fucking fantastic music but lets not over romanticize it
OLDKR
[Edited by oldkr] |
|
|
| Taptrick |
manufactured boy band with an alternative image...if that hadn't worked that might have tried something along the lines of bow wow wow pop.....
|
|
|
| MrPleasant |
They were boring, like Sinatra. Want some punk? Try Picasso, Buņuel or Marx. Fuck their lame asses. |
|
|
| Break The Spell |
The same sorts of things still go on today, the way Good Charlotte, Simple Plan and My Chemical Romance are called "punk". Really its just boy bands with bad guitarists. |
|
|
| FPM C10 |
quote:
mac_daddy wrote:
i love ya fpm, but the whole dealio is just lame.
Hey, I love you too!
I'm quite honored that people think of me when they're bitching about the Pistols - hope I also pop into your mind when considering the good points/bad points of Tom Waits, the Clash, Hubert Sumlin, the Pogues and the NY Dolls, all of whom I also champion every chance I get. And I really couldn't care less what anyone thinks of the Pistols - the fact that people still get their noses out of joint when thinking about them is validation enough.
Heartily agree that "The Filth and the Fury" shows what I believe to be a more even-handed view of the band - having seen them onstage I know that McClaren's self-serving fairytale is about as valid as giving Andrew Loog Oldham credit for The Stones' entire career. It's cool not to like them, but it's stupid to use "they can't play their instruments" as a reason. It was true of Sid, ands Sid only, and he's dead. If you can honestly listen to "God Save The Queen" and "Anarchy" and say those AREN'T crucial slabs of Rock and Roll history that still sound ferocious today, then you are most certainly entitled to your own tone-deafness.
As for the "selling out" angle, that's been part of their image since day one too. From "Hello EMI, goodbye A&M" to "The Filthy Lucre" tour, they've never denied it. And unlike some OTHER bands I can name, they are not multi-millionaires who don't need the money. I celebrate every time I hear "Lust For Life" selling luxury cruises, because Iggy needs the cash, and whatever products they decide to sell with the Pistols will be okay with me. Hope it's pimple cream! In fact, they recorded a great version of "Rt.66" that they used for car commercials in '96 - anyone know where I can find a copy of it? |
|
|
| nanatod |
"when considering the good points/bad points of Tom Waits, the Clash, Hubert Sumlin, the Pogues and the NY Dolls,"
Let me know when you find some "bad points" of Hubert Sumlin. |
|
|
| Joey |
" .... Fuck their lame asses. "
|
|
|
| FPM C10 |
quote:
nanatod wrote:
Let me know when you find some "bad points" of Hubert Sumlin.
Um...let's see. The first time I saw him he didn't play much.
In his defense, he had a heart attack not long afterwards.
The first time I saw him he played a strat. In his defense, some bastard had stolen his gold-top les paul.
He was often not perfectly in tune on his classic Howlin' Wolf stuff. In his defence, he made it work!
|
|
|
| Joey |
quote:
FPM C10 wrote:
Um...let's see. The first time I saw him he didn't play much.
In his defense, he had a heart attack not long afterwards.
The first time I saw him he played a strat. In his defense, some bastard had stolen his gold-top les paul.
He was often not perfectly in tune on his classic Howlin' Wolf stuff. In his defence, he made it work!
I would like to nuzzle you |
|
|
| nanatod |
quote:
FPM C10 wrote:
Um...let's see. The first time I saw him he didn't play much.
In his defense, he had a heart attack not long afterwards.
The first time I saw him he played a strat. In his defense, some bastard had stolen his gold-top les paul.
He was often not perfectly in tune on his classic Howlin' Wolf stuff. In his defence, he made it work!
From 1998:
"Later in the evening, Ron Wood joined Howlin' Wolf's guitarist Hubert Sumlin for a string of Wolf classics. After performing with Sumlin, Wood proclaimed that "If clothes were never invented you wouldn't have models, if Hubert Sumlin wasn't invented you wouldn't have Rock & Roll"."
|
|
