Product Description

'Never Mind The Bollocks..' was the first and only studio album by the Sex Pistols. It is regarded by critics as the most important album of the punk era. The singles 'Anarchy In The UK', 'Pretty Vacant' and 'God Save The Queen' are included.

Track Listing

1. Holidays In The Sun
2. Bodies
3. No Feelings
4. Liar
5. God Save The Queen
6. Problems
7. Seventeen
8. Anarchy In The UK
9. Submission
10. Pretty Vacant
11. New York
12. EMI

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1961 in Music
• Released on: 1993-05-10
• Number of discs: 1

Amazon.co.uk Review
The Sex Pistols' only proper album has become one of those records that is far more talked and written about than listened to. Only a handful of rock & roll bands can genuinely claim to have changed the world, and only one of those can claim to have done it with such a tiny discography (though any number of retrospective albums have been issued since the band met their messy end, this was the only one released while they were still a going concern).

It is impossible that any serious fan of modern music is not familiar with at least the singles collected here ("Pretty Vacant", "Anarchy In The UK", "God Save The Queen"). Jamie Reid's lurid yellow-and-pink sleeve artwork is also an enduringly influential cultural artefact. Mostly, though, what should never be forgotten about Never Mind. . . is that when all the mischief and mayhem it inspired or caused has been stripped away, it is a truly great rock & roll album: guitars as angry and adrenalised as any ever recorded, killer tunes, and Johnny Rotten's inimitable voice--the definitive articulation of disgust. Altogether perfect. Every era, and every home, should have one. --Andrew Mueller

Customer Reviews

Youthful angst and rebellious messages
With its lurid fluorescent sleeve N.M.T.B. is one of rock `n' roll's greatest debut albums. Johnny Rotten's lyrics and sneering vocals fizz with youthful angst (`Liar', `Problems' and `No Feelings) and sizzle with rebellious messages (`God Save The Queen', `Anarchy In The UK' and `EMI'). On the mordant `Bodies', the terrace-chant taunt of `Seventeen' and the exhilarating `Holidays In The Sun' the Pistols make obvious their love of the simple, primal, effective three-chord rock which Chuck Berry, The Stooges and the New York Dolls produced. These songs are all tightly structured and well-considered; they never venture far beyond 180 seconds and are sharp and snappy in sentiment and expression.

a one off
Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols
evan if you dont get this genra of music - its still a stand out album , a great album / i remember having a copy on wax many years ago [ i was i think 12 - my mum herd me playing it - dident like it . etc ec - any way one day she found out the opening lines to bodies - played it to my dad / the lp got broken - i got a big big wolopping from dad , i cried a bit - then went to my mates house to listen to his copy / this is one of the greatest english punk albums ever / my opinion - regards

Never mind the others, here's the one you need
A cursory listener to "Never Mind The Bollocks" might, just possibly might, wonder why this LP is one of the few records that truly merits the term "essential". After all, isn't Steve Jones' guitar work merely speeded-up heavy metal laced with licks lifted from Chris Spedding? Isn't Paul Cook's drumming efficient, powerful even, but essentially monotonous? Isn't Glen Matlock's bass playing submerged in the mix to the point it hardly registers? As for Johnny Rotten's vocals; well, is that really singing?

But it's unlikely that even a cursory listener could miss the rage, frustration and venom in Rotten's delivery. If that listener also took in his words, which skewer the disintegrating society that was late 1970s Britain, and if that listener considered the wider context in which The Sex Pistols operated, then "Never Mind The Bollocks" would emerge as being amongst the most important records in the history of rock music. In fact, it is arguably the most important of all for reasons that go well beyond music.

This review is not the place to catalogue the chaos The Sex Pistols' manager, Malcolm McLaren, wrought in the British music business, though his situationist ideas and the Pistols' public viciousness turned the tables on EMI and A&M, making for the first time in years a group and their manager the master of their record label and not the other way around. After the Pistols the business would never be the same again. Their scarification prepared the ground for seminal labels like Rough Trade, Stiff and Factory and the entire "indie" movement that followed, both in Britain and America.

Neither is this review the place to describe the turmoil and foment the Pistols induced in late 1970s Britain. The media, local councils and the staid British establishment had no idea how to handle a phenomenon that was by turns disgustingly rude and dangerously critical of their institutions. From the perspective of thirty years later it is clear that even if the Pistols were degenerate themselves (McLaren's introduction of Sid Vicious, who was a drug-addicted fool and later a probable murderer, starkly illustrated it) the society around them was worse. In a sense the Pistols helped consign the long 1960s of Britain to the dustbin, clearing the way for something different (that this turned out to be Margaret Thatcher was hardly their fault).

This review is the place to point out that Rotten's angry, screaming, scathing dissection of a moribund British society lifts the music on "Never Mind The Bollocks" out of the league of the likes of The Jam, The Stranglers, The Damned, The Ramones - even The Clash - and takes it somewhere else entirely. There had been protest records before but nothing as furious, nothing so nihilistic and, most importantly, nothing even as remotely dangerous as this record felt.

Nothing has come close since. Boy, you had better look at Johnny.