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In the summer of 1977, the Sex Pistols’ establishment-baiting single God Save The Queen was famously kept off the top of the singles chart by Rod Stewart’s I Don’t Want To Talk About It. Along with The Who’s My Generation and the Beatles’ double A-side of Penny Lane/ Strawberry Fields Forever, it remains one of pop music’s most renowned "it peaked at number two" singles.

But this could soon change. God Save The Queen, which was originally released to coincide with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, will be re-released later this month to mark the monarch’s Platinum Jubilee. On May 27, precisely 45 years after its initial release, the song will be made available on limited edition vinyl (in two formats) and also as a digital single, giving it a very real chance of completing the feat it failed at almost half a century ago.

Back then, the song caused widespread moral panic. A thrilling three-minute-19-second blast of disillusionment, the Pistols’ alternative national anthem rocked the establishment, was banned by the BBC (it was rumoured that the song was deliberately prevented from topping the charts), and led to singer John Lydon becoming the poster boy for the nation’s outrage. He was routinely attacked in the street by disgusted members of the public, enduring machetes in the kneecaps and bottles in the face. 

The 2022 re-release comes amid more benign circumstances: God Save The Queen will be reissued days before the release of a multimillion pound six-part Sex Pistols biopic directed by Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle, co-written by the man who wrote Strictly Ballroom (Craig Pearce), and funded by a Disney-owned American TV company. So much has the world changed that what sparked palpable fear in the Seventies counts as a marketing campaign today.

But this takes nothing away from God Save The Queen’s importance as a piece of art. The song announced the mainstream arrival of punk, arguably this country’s most famous and recognisable youth movement. Furthermore, a Thames boat trip by the band past the Houses of Parliament to promote the single has become one of music’s most infamous publicity stunts. If the Pistols and punk in its purest form didn’t last very much beyond that heady summer of 1977, then God Save The Queen – even before this reissue ­– has certainly endured.

The band were magnets for trouble, which thrilled record companies looking to cash in on this new youth trend. They were signed by EMI in October 1976 on a £40,000, two-year contract. But if God Save The Queen was to prove controversial the following summer, then events in the intervening months were no less dramatic.

On December 1 1976, Queen — the rock group, and the Pistols’ EMI labelmates — pulled out of an appearance on Today, a live TV show presented by Bill Grundy, because singer Freddie Mercury had toothache. Desperate, EMI convinced the Pistols, who’d just released their first single Anarchy in the UK, to fill Queen’s place.

Live on air and goaded by Grundy himself, guitarist Jones — drunk on green room wine — called the presenter a “dirty f—–” and a “f—— rotter”. There was a national outcry. “TV fury at rock cult filth”, raged the splash of the Daily Mirror the next day, as viewers jammed phones. “The filth and the fury!” screamed other editions. Punk had screamed its arrival, live on national television.

It was against this febrile backdrop that the Pistols had started recording what was to become their album Never Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols. The album was recorded piecemeal between late 1976 and summer 1977 at Wessex Sound Studios, a converted Victorian church hall in Highbury, London.

One of the songs was God Save The Queen, a rant about the monarchy. “God Save The Queen, she’s not a human being, and there’s no future, and England’s dreaming”, Rotten sang. The song was set to a propulsive beat and a monster three-chord guitar riff written by Glen Matlock, who was soon to be replaced on bass by the doomed Sid Vicious. Matlock has said the riff was influenced by the 1950s rockabilly of Eddie Cochran, and you can hear C’mon Everybody’s rhythm in the opening chords. Lead guitar player Jones gave the song almighty welly, its bassline mimicking the main riff.

On March 10 1977 the Pistols signed a new contract with A&M Records, the US label founded by easy listening trumpeter Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss. The signing took place at 8am outside Buckingham Palace, a two-fingered salute to the establishment. A&M’s plan was to release God Save The Queen imminently, and they pressed 25,000 copies.

However after the signing of the contract, the band went to the label’s offices to celebrate. Alcohol flowed and things quickly got out of hand. The party turned into “total bedlam”, according to the band. Sid Vicious walked blood all over the office due to a foot injury, there was a punch-up and – according to some reports – an amorous Steve Jones took the boss’s secretary into the top man’s private bathroom, where the sink was ripped from the wall.

The band went straight from A&M’s offices to Wessex Studios, which happened to be next to a school. When the kids started climbing the playground fence to see the band spill out of a Bentley with bottles of vodka cascading behind them, the headmistress called the police.

A&M’s top brass got wind of the situation and dropped the Pistols just days later. Most of the 25,000 copies of God Save The Queen were destroyed (the few remaining copies are among the most valuable records in the world today).

The band were once again label-less. But on May 18, they signed with Virgin, who’s boss Richard Branson decided to rush release God Save The Queen two weeks later to coincide with the Queen’s jubilee celebrations. Lydon claims that he was wasn’t even aware that it was the jubilee that summer. Either way, God Save The Queen was released on 27 May as the nation prepared its bunting and its street parties. The single sold 150,000 copies in one day, rising to 200,000 in its first week.

However, due to the content and the cover, the BBC refused to play it. The song was held off the number one spot in the following weekend’s chart by Rod Stewart’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It. The band and McLaren sensed skulduggery, believing that the record industry had colluded to keep the song off the top spot.

The papers, rather predictably, went bonkers at the blatant disrespect. “Punk Rock Jubilee Shocker”, read one headline. “Jubipunk Sex Pistols ‘Pin Up’ Shocks Palace”, said another.

On June 7, the band played a gig on a boat as it floated past the House of Commons, two days before the Queen did the same as part of her official celebrations. The police arrested members of the party when the boat docked, despite Branson’s protestations.

The event delighted fans but, once again, shocked the nation. But McLaren, it seems, knew exactly what he was doing. By that point the Pistols had become a circus. The whole thing was a brilliantly calculated publicity stunt. “It was a fantastic thing,” McLaren said. “You couldn’t buy the record, you couldn’t hear the record, you couldn’t see the group play, yet it was unquestionably outselling Rod Stewart.”

Lydon has said that the public outrage was palpable: “If they’d have hung us at Traitors’ Gate, it would have been applauded by 56 million people… We declared war on England without meaning to.”

Britain was a very different place then. Society was unpermissive and subversion still wasn’t broadly tolerated. With God Save The Queen, the Sex Pistols turned a national celebration on its head and changed pop culture forever. Will they now ­– finally – get the number one slot so many people think they deserve?