13. Sex PistolsNever Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols

This was inevitable, really, wasn’t it? I mean, I was there when it came out, and I just thought it was incredible. The whole brouhaha about the Sex Pistols in the newspapers took over the whole culture before we’d even heard a note, so it was hard to grasp their musical identity, other than the fact that everyone said that they were terrible, they couldn’t play, all that stuff. Finally, Virgin signed them, and they brought this out, and it’s just stunning.

When those chords of ‘Anarchy In The UK’ begin, it tears you into the whole song. And John Lydon’s voice was so absolutely unique at that time, and so unignorable. I’d heard about the songs, and there were versions of them knocking around, but when you heard these fully formed, complete things that went from A to Z and had this blistering kind of power to them, it really made you feel you could achieve something like that, too. The idea that you could make such powerful music so simply was so exciting, especially after there’d been such a dominance of musical sophistication with Yes and Genesis and the supergroups, which all demanded a kind of musical bravado and technical skill that was way beyond the limit of any of us. The fact that this was available to us, and driven by a kind of youthful anger, was so exciting. It still is!