Fiyin Olowokandi 
For better or worse, the Sex Pistols and the jubilee belong together
This week, the British people have been granted the opportunity to right what some might call a grievous historical wrong. In 1977, on the eve of the Silver Jubilee, persuasive evidence that the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen was the UK’s highest-selling single was contradicted by an official chart that placed I Don’t Want To Talk About It, by Rod Stewart, at number one. Forty-five years later, the decision to re-release the London band’s alternative national anthem offers redress to anyone who gets the feeling they’ve been cheated.
More tantalising still, some 19,000 copies of the record are being issued by A&M, the otherwise defunct imprint to which the Pistols were (very) briefly signed before being dropped for behaviour that included threatening the BBC broadcaster ‘Whispering Bob’ Harris in a nightclub and carrying on like rabid pirates at the record company’s London office. The label’s rush to be rid of their signatories was such that 25,000 copies of God Save The Queen were willingly junked.
“When we arrived at A&M Records, they all got out [of the limousine], Sid [Vicious] without any shoes, Paul [Cook] with a black eye and blood dripping down his shirt,” was how the band’s manager, Malcolm McClaren described the scene to the writer Jon Savage. “Steve [Jones] was carrying bottles in his jacket and in his inside pocket, and the same went for Sid who was now totally catatonic himself… he slumped down into the executive chair in the promotion office and passed out.”
Even without the spectre of a heretical punk rock song, you can see how this kind of thing might have been a bit strong. By the time the band signed to Virgin Records – their third major label in the space of a year – the Sex Pistols were marked men. In his book Richard Branson: The Authorised Biography, Telegraph writer Mick Brown reveals an incident that suggests a plan was afoot in the corridors of power to keep God Save The Queen from the top of the charts.
“Branson’s suspicion that the chart had been fixed was lent weight by an anonymous phone call,’ he writes, “alleging that, in the week that the Sex Pistols might have been expected to reach number one, the BPI [British Phonographic Institute] had issued an extraordinary secret directive… that all chart-return shops connected with record companies be dropped from the weekly census of best-selling records. Virgin, the store where most Sex Pistols records were being sold, was struck off the list. A week later, the decision was reversed.”
“[I was] attacked in the car park [of an East London pub] by a gang of knife-wielding yobs who were chanting, ‘We love our Queen! You bastards!,’” Rotten told Jon Savage. His assailants, he explained, “were just lads out for violence. I got some bad cuts from that. They severed two tendons, so my left hand is f_____ forever.”
Anyone wondering why any of this matters would do well to revisit the track itself. Almost half a century after its original release, at its core God Save The Queen remains at least as startling today as it did on the week of the Silver Jubilee.
In what today looks very much like culture war, in 1977 the Sex Pistols were able to shock and appal millions of people simply by releasing a song. Decades later, anyone decrying their right to cause offence anew should perhaps be thankful that there aren’t more bands like them.
No matter your feelings about the monarchy, the sheer insouciant menace with which Rotten delivers the words he wrote in the kitchen of a squat in Hampstead is, and will always be, breathtaking.
You might even say that both the song and its subject have become strangely symbiotic. Really, would the celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the Queen’s ascension to the throne be quite the same without the accompanying stink of the Sex Pistols?
God Save The Queen is available now on A&M and Virgin Records
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