There's been a lot of bollocks spoken about The Sex Pistols. Every few years the same usual suspects are wheeled out to pontificate on how they changed the world and brought down the government and destroyed Prog Rock with one discordant clang of their guitars. Bloated on hubris and 25 years of dining out on the same tired stories at least this CD goes some way to underlining the one sole indisputable truth in the whole shitestorm. The Sex Pistols were and remain a great pop group.
The inclusion of non-Pistols material on this soundtrack has been explained away as some ham-fisted attempt at highlighting just how piss-poor the rest of the music scene was at the time before Rotten and the boys rode to the rescue. Absolute nonsense. Leaving aside the obvious fact that The Who and The Creation were smashing up stages a good ten years before MacLaren's mob first cocked a sneer on teatime telly, sticking the likes of Roxy Music and Sailor alongside 'Anarchy'… and 'Pretty Vacant' merely succeeds in exploding all the post-modern situationist guff with which the impressionable like of Jon Savage have sought to mytholigise their own drab youth.
Contrapuntal then to the sleek feral growl of 'God Save the Queen' we get the Bay City Rollers miming their sweet tartan way through 'Shang-A-Lang'. Incongruous you might think until you realise that the Pistols were nothing more than an angrier, fevered stab at that whole blue-eyed pop thing. The Rollers even had their own Sid in the slack-jawed streak of gormless testosterone that was Woody. Flipside of the same shiny two-bob bit, what have here is a chemical formula for spiky pop perfection.
Add a sloppy dash of the New York Dolls; throw in a bit of dub reggae for added spice and then top the whole thing off with a liberal squirt of Bowie at his most lithe and irresistible. Voila, it's the heritage industry we've come to know as punk. Never mind The Beatles mate, here's the Sex Pistols.
Ignore if you can all the pseudo-intellectual crap that The Sex Pistols seem to attract like no other band before or since and just concentrate on the music. What you get here is most of the '…Bollocks' album with such curios as their take on Jonathan Richman's 'Road Runner' and The Who's 'Substitute' thrown in so as to sketch a wider picture. If only they'd seen fit to sneer and curse their way through 'Shang-A Lang' then we might have been saved all the lame art school manifestos that have sullied their memory.
