The comments that the Sex Pistols gave in "Kiss This"
I spent hours typing this whole bunch of shit... hope someone will appreciate it!
THE FIRST PHASE: EARLY SONGS AND OTHER PEOPLE'S MATERIAL
Did You No Wrong
Paul Cook: "Did You No Wrong" was one of the only songs that came along before John joined. We were just learning still. We recorded it properly as Wessex for the B side of "God Save The Queen."
John Lydon: I changed the lyrics because I didn't like the niceties of the song. It's a News Of The World epic, which is a fairly good indication of where I was heading. I was completely anti-social.
Steve: One of our early songs. A bit of an old-fashioned riff, but a good one. We would open the set wit this at the first gigs.
Seventeen
John: AKA "Lazy Sod." That was around the time Steve Jones was
learning to read and write. It was originally call "Lazy Sod". There's
some Glenn Matlock input in there--but I'm quite sure how much. The song
was already set up by the others before I came along. I remember laughing at
Steve's original words. I could not read the original set of lyrics and Steve
couldn't remember them. Everything was misspelled. I'm all alone, Give a dog
a bone. That was one of the original lines.
It was about being young, having nothing to do and going through the typical
emotions that every seventeen year old goes through. You are lazy. You don't see
the future and you really don;t care. You give up before you evin begin.
Everybody goes through that period. Unfortunately most English people stay
there.
Glen: Another pretty early effort - both music and initial lyrics being down to Steve. However John got hold of it and put in in a much higher orbit. ......I always thought it funny-peculiar that despite our youth, we still felt obliged to knock a year or two off you ages in the early interviews.
Paul: John rewrote the song because he couldn't read Steve's writing.
Liar
John: Self explanatory, really--considering the manager we were working with.
Paul: We never used to believe anybody then. "Liar" was another song with Glen. It was one of the earliest songs that John and Glen worked on together. It was the friction in the band that made it work well.
Glen: At a gig inside Chelmsford Maximum Security Prison, John announced this as being about then Prime Minister Harold Wilson....I was pretty relieved as I thought he was having a poke at me.
John: I never got on with Glen, but we'd somehow work alright. We'd put the animosity aside and things would come out of that. I think it was the animosities between us that made the songs what they were. Nice guys come in second.
I Wanna Be Me
Paul: we used to work on these songs together in our rehearsal studio on Denmark Street, a famous musical area in London. It was just an old shack out the back of Tin Pan Alley. We'd be there every night rehearsing and writing songs. The rehearsal room was downstairs and there was a living dump upstairs. Steve used to stay there a lot because he didn't have anywhere to live. Glen, John and I used to stay there on and off.
John: By the beginning of June '76 we had "Did You No Wrong," "No Lip," "Seventeen," "Stepping Stone," "New York," "What You Gonna Do About It?," "Submission," "Satellite," "No Feelings," "No Fun," "Substitute," "Pretty Vacant," and "Problems." Even though we look back on ourselves at that time and think what a load of lazy sods we were, we really were proficient. That's also considering that money was so damn hard to come by. Just raising two shillings to get on the subway and travel to rehearsals was a major effort. Most of the band's money went towards maintaining the rehearsal space.
Glen: Simple music - Paperback writer lyrics ; the 'Nick Kents' of this world
Steve: Recorded in our rehearsal room in Denmark Street - our base at the time, where we'd meet. Another early tune - 'hang out and fight!'
Satellite
Paul: it's about running around London doing our earliest gigs in the satellite towns.
John: Its the story of travelling nonsense (around the satellite towns of London) and picking up enough money to survive for a day or two. We had to do it, but in a way, that's what built the Sex Pistols' crowd. They came from all those godforsaken new towns ; Milton Keynes, St Albans. As bad as it was in London for young people, they had nothing at all in the satellite towns. No social scene, nothing.
Paul: We played thiose gigs outside London - North East London Polytechnic,
St Albans Art and Design College, Welwyn Garden City -
because we thought we'd be so awful, we didn't want that many people to see us.
We were still learning to play and just be comfortable in a band. It was a
chance for us to get away from the bullshit of London.
John: The only other gigs available would have been pubs or art colleges. Art colleges at that time were not the place. You would get snotty attitudes thrown at you. There was a semi-fashionable scene in London, which focused on Dr. Feelgood and at the pub rock thing--something I personally never wanted to be a part of at all. It tended to be older people who were much more proficient with their instruments playing retro R&B.
Paul: There was another reason we like playing a bit further out. There was a bit of a buzz about the band before we even played a gig. It was ridiculous. We were this band that had something to do with Malcolm and the Sex Boutique and Seditionairies. We wanted to do some gigs for ourselves, get together as a band and beat each other up on a transport van away from the motorway.
John: We didn't have Malcolm McLaren's friends turning up. At that time it was just a clothes horse display by that lot. None of the band wanted to be a part of that.
Don't Give Me No Lip, Child
Paul: "No Lip" is a Dave Berry cover version that was totally changed. It's a jumpy upright pop ditty. Berry was a crooner who fancied himself as a sex symbol. It was Glen's idea to do it.
John: I made it offensive, that's what I did. The people who write these
songs don't realize how easy it is to do. The whole idea of
"Oh don't you give me no lip child/No don't you talk back to meeee"
It's so nice that you just grab it by the fucking testicles and squeeze. You
give it an edge. Instead of being the victim in these songs, you turn yourself
into the protagonist.
Paul: That's what we tried to do with all the cover versions.
Glen: We were always looking for sharp songs to cover while we got the writing together. This almost fitted the bill, but was a bit staid, so we mucked around with it. I came up with a funky kinds bass-line ; Steve played the right guitar riff, but on the wrong strings (by accident). It sounded great and that's how it stayed.
Steve: I couldn't stand the original, so I totally changed the main riff.
(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone
John: We were actually plumbing the depths here. There wasn't a lot of songs
out there that you could connect yourself with. We just wanted straight rock
songs. A lot of these records would be picked up from a couple little stalls on
the Soho marked that sold old mod records and stuff. The Mods were the last
people--before they turned into Soul Boys and Skinheads--to do anything
musically in the U.K. After that it was all about pomposity and glitter rock.
I was interested in the Mod energy. We had to begin somewhere and that was a
good a place as any to start. We just took that as a launching pad and went on
to something else. It showed the Pistols were a hell of a lot better than the
rest.
You must bear in mind that at the time, any real music going around was from the
likes of Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. It was about fifteen trucks to carry
their equipment and elaborate keyboard nonsense. It was braindead and had no
energy. It was art college stuff, certainly nothing for young people.
Glen: .....I guess it fitted the bill because it numbered all these effete aesthetes and social climbers we got lumbered with.
SECOND PHASE: LET RIP, VOLATILE, FULL FLEDGED SONGWRITING ON OUR TOWN
No Feelings
John: This originally came from a Steve Jones riff. It would work literally that way: One night someone would have an idea and then everyone else would just build around it until it was done.
Paul: Steve would come in with the riff and John would be writing the lyrics. We'd be playing away and come up with other ideas. It evolved as simple as that.
John: I had very little to do at all with the Pistols' music. I knew nothing
about music. While they'd be fiddling about I'd be in the corner writing. I'd
just shout out if I liked certain bits and I had lyrics to fit in. It's a
haphazard way, but that is the way it is. You don't need to be technically
proficient at your so-called art to write songs. If you are musically
proficient, usually you won't be any good at writing songs because you won't be
able to express your feelings.
You'll be bogged down in the technology of note perfections, set patterns and
set ideas.
Glen: Very Rock 'n' Roll, courtesy of Steve. Knocked into the overdrive by John's blatant vocal.
Steve: This came together so easy(...I came in, going mad on guitar, John went mad on vocals and that was it....easy.
Anarchy In The UK
Paul: It was Glen's riff originally, and Steve beefed it up.
John: I kept really quiet that evening until about an hour before we left. I had written the words down while they were in the corner arguing. I used to have terrible trouble rehearsing because I was so fucking shy about it. I always want to be brilliant, excellent, loved and adored right from the start. When I finally finished the words, Glen was absolutely furious. he thought it was appalling and a silly idea for a song. I proved him right.
Paul: Glen felt a little precious about it being his song. He was upset about his terrain thrown over the top. I thought the tension was working. John and Glen had suck different ideas, and Steve and I were in the middle. "Anarchy" was the classic example of everything working perfectly.
Glen: How we've got some confidence going, I had this idea for a sort of 'theme tune' and had been knocking ideas about at home, but nothing concrete. We'd had yet another ruck about who and who wasn't pulling their weight. Steve was short of ideas and snapped at me ; "You're so fucking clever, what have you got!?" - Well, not a lot, but he'd well and tryly put me on the spot, so with this vague fanfare idea in mind, I jammily came up with the whole chord sequence - there and then. John came up with these amazing lyrics half an hour later 0 the rest, history. ("The only thing that bugged me about this was the dreadful "Antichrist" / "Anarcheeest" rhyme.....)
John: When I left the room during writing and rehearsal, I used to leave the door open just a little. I'd wonder, "What the fuck is Glen on about?"
Steve: Glen came up with a clever riff. Ditto John's lyrics. I turned up the guitar and thrashed away. Cook somehow held it all together - a classic.
Submission
John: We were in Camden Town rehearsing at the Roundhouse for a small period. The arguments between Glen and I became severe by this time. We went to a small pub upstairs and sat down to work it all out. We did and put our differences aside. The result was we both got along being in a band we both liked.
Paul: "Submission" had a classic riff that's been done millions of times before. We slowed it down.
Glen: This was an early one. Malcolm had been constantly nagging me to write
a song about Bondage. "How about calling it 'Submission'?
I told John about Malcolm's idea and we both groaned about it..a couple of
minutes passed and with a wicked gleam in his eye John said "How about a
submarine mission?" - take the piss and shut Malcolm up in one fell swoop.
We set there and traded lines.
John: That was the first and last managerial musical intrusion ever
Problems
John: We had run out of ideas for songs--a major problem. The ideas was put to Steve--the guitar hero of the band, who couldn't come up with any riffs at all that particular evening--to put something together using an A, B, C, D chord sequence. As the song progressed it got better. The cynicism of the title and the chords being A, B, C, D is still there. We didn't add any bridges. We were very good at burning them though.
Glen: Real bad mood at Denmark Street - nothing happening, I played the first thing that came into my head to get things going and Paul immediately picked up on it and we had the main riff. Steve had this idea which became the chorus and John supplied the lyric - real spontaneous...
Steve: A simple chord wequence, which I still like. The same goes for the lyrics........we had plenty of problems at the time.
New York
Paul: Most people were fascinated with New York then....why!? Malcolm had this big thing about the New York Dolls. He loved New York and thought it was all so great - he'd been there once. There's still a lot of talk that New York started the punk scene and we've ripped them off, or some bullshit. People think we were influenced by it. We weren't. The track was ultimately a put-down to that scene. "New York " was originally Steve's riff and John came up with the lyrics. We thought we could do it better and we did.
John: The only thing anyone knew about this so-called New York scene was what journalists would tell us. It was hard to listen to the same old of all proportion and the mythology of it became unbearable. The song is a reaction to that. ..........Everything that came out of there was poetry based and too arty. These people were much older than us and had more old-fashioned attitudes.....they still do!
Glen: The original bass-line and chords started out as the '60's a spy/TV theme effort - a bit like 'Danger Man' or something. John mercilessly crucified the 'New York Scene' and that was the size of it.
Pretty Vacant
Paul: Glen reckons the original riff was influenced by Abba's "SOS." I can't see how he worked that out. John changed the lyrics again here.
John: Glen was a closet Abba fan, and funny enough so was Sid. We got rid of one Abba fan and got another one in its place. Sid ran up to the girls from Abba in the Stockholm airport to ask for their autograph. Sid was completely drunk and stuck his hand out. They screamed and ran away. They thought they were being attacked--or maybe they thought he wanted money or something.
Glen: Well before 'Anarchy', this was the flag we waved...............(to cut a long story short) I was still short of a riff; Abba's S.O.S. came on the jukebox and hey presto! I had it (but you've got to know where to look).
Steve: A Great intro with lots of layered guitars and great chorus, which I really beefed up - I liked to beef up Glen's tunes.
John: Steve toughened it up because the original guitar line was very sissy. Glen wanted it to be very nice. My accent would have been on 'Vacant'. Glen's would have been on 'Pretty'. 'Va-cunt' is me all over. I love to play with words and throw them into different arenas. They didn't mind it on the radio because they didn't know.... This song is a dedication.........
THIRD PHASE: FINAL GROUP OF SONGS WRITTEN CLOSE TOGETHER. MORE MUSICAL. NO LONGER CONFUSED ABOUT WHERE WE STOOD
God Save The Queen
Paul: It started with Glenn's bass riff. Then Steve
got hold of it, then I started playing. Suddenly John came up with "God
Save The Queen." We thought, "What's this?"
We didn't work on songs like for ages. They came about quickly. I would slow the
band down. Relax, let's not go too mad. Our songs aren't fast. Most people might
think about Punk songs being three minute thrashers. Our songs were slow in
tempo compared to those sort of songs. I would hold everyone back a bit,
especially Steve. He liked to go full steam ahead without thinking too much
about it. It was hard sometimes because everyone was so pumped up. The songs
could get much faster than the way we recorded them in the studio.
John: The whole thing was written in one go. I had the
lyrics ready. I wrote them a while back, but never used them. The words didn't
fit in with any of the other tunes. I didn't think it would ever fit to
anything. It was more like a big tirade. It was excellent that it did fit in
with the pattern that Glen had.
Paul swiftly made sense of it with the drums. Steve fell into it very quickly.
Glen: The main riff was something I found piddling around on the piano, while we recorded the aborted version of 'Anarchy'. I had a pretty fixed idea of how the tune should go, but John had other plans. Originally called 'No Future'.
Steve: One of my favourites. I liked the chaos surrounding this record! Recorded after just two takes, with guitar and drums - like most of the other tracks.
John: There were so many arguments with Glen and Steve. Where's the chorus? You can't write a song like that. It's not musical. My flippant answer was: What is musical? The "No Future" part was an end refrain, an outro.
Paul: It wasn't written specifically for the Queen's Anniversary Jubilee. We weren't aware of it at the time. It wasn't a contrived effort to go out and shock everyone. No way. It didn't even click there was a Jubilee coming up.
Holidays In The Sun
Paul: We had to get out of London. Malcolm wanted us to leave for a while because we were causing too much trouble at the time. We were fed up with not having any money and the pressure of London. All the publicity and the fights were going on. Malcolm was trying to put a deal together and we didn't want to be around. We went down to Jersey, then had quite a good time in Berlin for a couple of weeks holiday.
John: We tried our Holiday In The Sun in the isle of
Jersey and that didn't work. They threw us out. Being in London at the time made
us feel like we were trapped in a prison camp environment. We didn't have enough
money to escape from the infamy of it all. There was hatred and constant threat
of violence. The best thing we could do was to go set up in a prison camp
somewhere else. Berlin and its decadence was a good idea. The song came about
from that.
I loved Berlin. I love that wall and the insanity of the place. Twenty four
hours of chaotic fun. It was geared up to annoy the Russians. West Berlin at the
time was inside the communist state. It was a fairground with only one airport
and one motorway leading into it--surrounded by downtrodden, dull, grey,
military-minded bastards who live thoroughly miserable lives. They looked in on
this circus atmosphere of West Berlin--which never went to sleep--and that would
be their impression of the West. I loved it.
Steve: Inspired by our trip to Berlin, by the wall, where it was raining and depressing. We had to escape from London at the time....the song pretty well sums up the trip.
John: I had this feeling of Berlin being this wall all around me. It was a ridiculously small wall and the whole thing seem absolutely absurd. You'd get that marching vibe when you'd look over the wall at them. All you'd see would be soldiers. I'd be up on one of those stands at the wall giving two fingers up to the soldiers. The West Germans told me that they would shoot me and maybe cause an international incident. I would say, "That's what I'm here for! To me that's a holiday!"
EMI (Unlimited Edition)
John: I recommended a lousy record company everytime you run out of songs. The material is glorious. It's one of my fave of the lot. Again, it's not done in the way a song technically should be. These songs break so many traditions of songwriting. Isn't it funny? After sacking the Pistols, EMI ends up with them again fifteen years later.
Paul: We weren't trying to be clever. Just blatant. EMI. You know what this is about. Direct.
Glen: Steve's baby, but the original bass-line was cool.... "Goodnight Glen - mornin' Sid"
Bodies
Paul: You had to keep your distance from Pauline.
She was a mad fan who used to turn up everywhere. She turned up at my door too.
She was dangerous and very crazy--someone you really had to worry about. She was
a pretty girl but she had these really mad eyes.
Steve: Everything -- tune and lyrics inspired by the infamous Pauline from Birmingham. The girl with the crazy look who would follow us around. The mad opening of the song still reminds me of her.
John: Pauline was a girl who used to send these
letters to me from some nuthouse up North in Birmingham. She was in mental
asylum. She turned up at my door once wearing a see-through plastic bag.
She did the rounds in London and ended up at everybody's door. She had a very
curious way of finding out where everybody lived. Like most insane people, she
was very promiscuous. The fetus thing is what got me. She'd tell me about
getting pregnant with the male nurses at the asylum or whatever. There's a line
in the song about Pauline living in a tree. She actually had a threehouse on the
estate of this nuthouse. The nurses couldn't get her down and she'd be up there
for days. Apparently, Punk rock pulled her out of her cocoon.
She didn't seem to have a problem either. She might have had wealthy parents who
buggered up her life--probably like Nancy Spungeon really. She was one of many
lunatics that used to attach themselves to us.
My Way
Steve: No fun for me. I was with Sid in Paris with his girlfriend Spunger. I had to make him sing this crooner's song with French session players; what a nightmare! We put on an orchestra an plenty of guitars to make it sound OK.
Paul: Sid doing "My Way" was for the film Rock N Roll Swindle. Eventually they recorded it in Paris. I wasn't on the song. Steve came over and played guitar on the track. John had left the band by this time. I was sort of out it by that time too. I didn't have much to do with Malcolm. He was off on his own trip making the film. Steve was involved in the film much more than me. Sid was in the band when we wrote "Bodies" and "Holidays In The Sun," but he wasn't really involved in the songwriting during the Pistols.
John: Didn't he have hepititis in the hospital at the
time? We credited the band with songwriting. We weren't mean about that shit.
Once you start separating people when it comes to copyright on publishing,
you're not a band anymore. It becomes egos and you get nothing but trouble. We'd
see that with a lot of the other bands around at the time. Falling apart over
nothing.
I was beginning litigation. The name Sex Pistols continued without me for the
film. I'm not going to be prissy here and insist that "My Way" not be
included. It should be because the name just went on. If you notice a drop in
quality, that's neither here nor there.
Paul: A lot of stuff came out under the Sex Pistols' name after John left because Malcolm was trying to get the film together. He was desperate and Virgin was giving him money to finish it. Using the name Sex Pistols was the only way to raise cash.
Silly Thing
Paul: "Silly Thing" was a thing Steve and I put together for the film. It was originally called "Silly Cunt." It was about Sid or it could have been about Malcolm. Everyone. It dealt with the stupidity of the whole Pistols fracas after we had all broken up. Steve's singing on this track.
Steve: Classic Pistols' riff; too bad John didn't sing on it.... I sometimes wonder what we would have sounded like had it carried on..
John: I liked it when I first heard it because it was
really funny. It was deeply cynical and showed that the boys had learned
something over the years. It was an affectionate dig. When it all fell apart we
really were stupid with each other. "Silly Thing" was an ominous not
to end with. It's absolutely right.
The fanatics out there take things far too seriously. They'd probably be
appalled at the way we view our own material because they see it quite
different. They want us to have their visions and represent their attitudes
about our work. Audiences are far too fucking demanding on the people they like
and dislike. The truth always lets them down because it destroys their
fantasies. One thing I always wanted with the Sex Pistols was that it wasn't
about fantasy. That was clear right from the start. We never hid anything.