The Sex Pistols emerged in the mid-1970s as one of the most influential bands in the history of punk rock. Despite their short-lived career, lasting only a few years, the band left an indelible mark on the music industry and popular culture. Known for their raw, confrontational sound, provocative lyrics, and anarchic spirit, the Sex Pistols helped define the punk rock movement and paved the way for future generations of rebellious, anti-establishment artists. In this context, the Sex Pistols’ discography includes a plethora of iconic songs that have become timeless classics. From the nihilistic rage of “Anarchy in the U.K.” to the poignant and controversial “God Save the Queen,” the Sex Pistols’ songs remain as relevant and influential today as they were in their heyday. Each track reflects the band’s unique ethos and captures the raw energy and urgency that characterized their music. Whether you are a longtime fan or a newcomer to the punk rock scene, the Sex Pistols’ best songs are a must-listen for anyone interested in the history of rock and roll.
1. ‘I Wanna Be Me’
Rotten almost sounds quaint now, seething and chanting down the jealous, typewriter-clacking rodents of the press: “I got you in the camera/And I got you in my camera/A second of your life/Ruined for life.” A power-chord rager that leaned retro, “I Wanna Be Me” (also titled “Just Me”) was another set-list mainstay that didn’t make the Bollocks cut, turning up as the B side of the “Anarchy in the U.K.” single
2. ‘Belsen Was a Gas’
Sid’s mockery of Nazi genocide for his previous band Flowers of Romance (with, among others, Clash/PIL’s Keith Levene, Palmolive and Viv Albertine of the Slits) was a bit of clumsy, overwrought tosh. But by the Pistols’ last gig (San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, Jan. 14, 1978), “Belsen” had been transformed to a scorched-earth monster. Jones’ dour guitar steered Rotten’s spiky schoolyard taunts, which cut to a chillingly real yawp of disgust, and a mortifying death-camp j’accuse: “Be a man, be someone, kill someone, be a man, kill yourself!”
3. ‘Something Else’
With Sid singing lead, this coolly coherent cover of Eddie Cochran’s collar-popping, 1959 rockabilly leer was rushed out after the 21-year-old Pistol’s death. The single became a pop hit and the biggest seller of the group’s career. Advertised as “From Beyond the Grave,” it was recorded with Cook and Jones at their 1978 post-Rio Swindle sessions, plus the second, more raucously amped Cochran cover, “C’mon Everybody,” on which Sid nailed an exquisitely petulant “Who cares?”
4. ‘Submission’
McLaren asked the band to write a bondage and S&M song called “Submission” to apparently help move product at his fetish shop Sex. Matlock and Rotten thought the idea “naff” and instead wrote about a sexy submarine mission! Despite being a put-on, the repeatedly detonating guitar and rhythm section’s rugged undertow (with Jones also on bass) made it the heaviest, potentially funkiest song on Bollocks.
5. ‘Satellite’
Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, The Sex Pistols, De Effenaar, Eindhoven, Netherlands, 9th December 1977.
Beloved by fans and recorded with Matlock at the Bollocks sessions, this could’ve been a spray-the-suburbs, riff-lashing of punk dilettantes and tourists, which is what Rotten wants us to think it is. Sadly, his lyrics veer into a nasty vilification of a fan who organized an early Pistols show outside London and ran afoul of the singer during a brief affair. The plaintiff, Shanne Bradley, went on to found the Nipple Erectors, a.k.a. the Nips, with Pogues leader and fellow teenage Pistols acolyte Shane McGowan.
6. ‘Silly Thing’
UNITED STATES – JANUARY 10: TEXAS, The Sex Pistols posed onstage at The Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas, during their final tour on January 10 1978 L-R Paul Cook, Sid Vicious, Steve Jones, John Lydon. A Cook-Jones mini-anthem, released as the second single from The Swindle soundtrack, “Silly Thing” was not in the least bit punk rock, but it was a benignly laddish, ever-so-glammy, pub-rock shutdown. Sung by Cook on the Swindle version and Jones on the single version, it would’ve been a keeper for, say, pub lionhearts Eddie and the Hot Rods, who the Pistols opened for as lil’ enfants terribles.
7. ‘E.M.I.’
The die was cast when EMI chairman Sir John Read said of his label’s notorious darlings, “We shall do everything we can to restrain their public behavior.” Then he had to pay the Pistols to go away. Rotten sang like he was being burned at the stake. Hissing and cackling about cynical corporate bagmen, he played the people’s revolutionary: “Too many people had the suss/Too many people support us.”
8. ‘(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone’
The early Pistols never locked in more tightly than on this pillaging of the Monkees’ 1966 pop hit, a bubblegum anthemic harangue of a social-climbing fashion victim. Jones’ menacing wave of guitar crests again and again, while you can hear Rotten developing his singular style of violent enunciation — elongating, twisting, and amputating syllables to extract new meanings. When he spits, “You’re trying to make your mark in society,” it sounds as if he’s stabbing every word with his tongue. Upon hearing this cover, D.C. hardcore hurricane Minor Threat enshrined “Steppin’ Stone” as a regular encore.
9. ‘Did You No Wrong’
Despite being a mere B side, “Did You No Wrong” and its colossal, descending guitar hook have riled up Pistols gigs from their first show at Saint Martins College in 1975 to their 2008 reunion closer in Spain. And it might’ve made Never Mind the Bollocks if the music hadn’t been written by guitarist Wally Nightingale, who founded early-’70s group the Strand with high school mates Steve Jones and Paul Cook, later adding an art student named Glen Matlock. McLaren, fresh off his Dolls fiasco, saw that Nightingale was a muso fussbudget who worked everybody’s nerves; after a few whispers, Wally got the boot. Jones moved from vocals to guitar, John Lydon signed on, was rechristened Rotten, and failed to punch up this song’s moronic lyrics. Still rips, though.
10. ‘Liar’
A panic attack arranged into a song, with Rotten and Jones artfully ricocheting off each other, sprinting beside Cook’s clubbing drums, or hurtling off in different directions with ferocious panache. The accusatory theme could’ve been inspired by Prime Minister Harold Wilson or the false rumors that McLaren contrived about Rotten and Matlock to edge out the latter, even though he’d been primary writer on nine of Bollocks‘ 11 songs. (Of course, the lyrics also could’ve been in response to any of the countless lies that McLaren told between lunch and dinner every day). Regardless, none of that matters when Rotten hurls his hectoring yowl into previously unknown shapes and registers like a virtuoso of pique. As with “Submission,” the dense, multitracked gravity bestowed by Bollocks producer Chris Thomas and engineer Bill Price is of great benefit.
11. ‘No Fun’
The Stooges were maybe the deepest influence on the Pistols, and Rotten intros this cover with an impish decree: “Rrrright! Here we go nowww. A sociology lectuuure, with a bit of psychology. A bit of neurology. A bit of fuck-ologyyyy, no fun!” Then he gnashes down on the spare, numb, rote lyrics and shreds his voice like never before or since. As Jones’ cacophonous guitar fades down three minutes in, Rotten seems to howl and retch in your face at the same time: “No fun … I’m alone! No fun … I’m alone! No fun … I’m alive! No fun … I’m alive!” Later, more devastated: “Oh, my God, I’m alive!” And finally, squirming: “No fun, it’s not funny, I’m by myself, I’m aliiiiive.”
12. ‘Seventeen’
Rotten hated overt generational anthems. But he admitted that “Seventeen,” a two-minute, Ramones-ish dash with a gang-vocal chorus, was meant to demarcate punks from hippies who toiled in the straight world but cherished their precious long hair and flares. With its declarative slogans of refusal — “We like noise, it’s our choice”; “I don’t work, I just speed, that’s all I need”; “I’m a lazy sod” — the song echoed the Situationist International, a Paris-based group favored by McLaren and Reid, whose mission was to disrupt the stagecraft of consumer capitalism.
13. ‘Problems’
One of the most breathtaking aspects of the Sex Pistols, particularly for the late 1970s, was the unhesitating willingness of the group to direct crackling contempt at their audiences, current or potential. Here, with the Pistols at peak locomotive power, Rotten gets tricky. The track gains momentum, as if it’s rumbling downhill, and he abruptly frames his disdain as self-care. “Eat your heart out on a plastic tray,” he brays, “You won’t find me working 9 to 5/It’s too much fun being alive.” Too much fun being alive! This motherfucker will literally say anything to destabilize your reality. It’s hilarious! It’s useful! “The problem is you!” OK!
14. ‘No Feelings’
Steve Jones is refreshed, loopy, and ready to pogo, while Rotten’s breakneck, rat-a-tat verse is a version of the Greek myth of Narcissus, ending with the singer gleefully, psychotically, announcing: “You better understand I’m in love with myself/Myself … my beautiful self!” OK, here we go, it’s the other side of “too much fun being alive” — giddy self-obsession, breezy self-righteousness, etc. Jones’ solo is a silly, buzzing tilt-a-whirl, and Rotten finishes off the headfuck: “Well, I’m so happy, I’m feeling so fine…/I look around your house and you got nothing to steal/I kick you in the brains when you get down to kneel.” That’s why they call it punk rock, kids.
15. ‘Pretty Vacant’
Sex Pistols news press conference at EMI Offices in Manchester, in response to growing criticism over their recent television interview on yesterday’s “Today” programme. Manager Malcolm McLaren 29 defended the group and claimed that they were ‘set up’ by interviewer Bill Grundy.
Impatient, boiling over, and monumentally triumphant, “Pretty Vacant” (the Pistols’ first original song) is what happens when pop music is taken hostage, time is suspended, and a new group of kids refuses to compromise. Those kids have two sacrosanct demands: 1) The freedom to do absolutely fucking nothing, whenever they want, no bullshit questions; and 2) the freedom to make songs about doing absolutely fucking nothing, whenever they want, which will inevitably scare you (Jones’ air-raid guitar intro) or bewilder you (the gang chant, “Oh, we’re so pretty/Oh, so pretty/We’re vacant”). Agree to their demands or they leave you alone to cry. No, they don’t care.
16. ‘Holidays in the Sun’
Steve Jones of Sex Pistols at the pool of photographer Brad Elterman circa 1978 in Los Angeles, California. By 1977, the Pistols were on their third label, and their music had been banned from stores and radio; touring was a logistical lost cause; police and press harassed them; their new bass player, Sid Vicious, was a junkie who couldn’t play the bass. That chaos and stress had to filter into Rotten’s feral performance of these lyrics, which he’d written after recently visiting a besieged West Berlin. Haunted by the surveillance and paranoia, Communist military presence, and violence ignited by the Baader-Meinhof Gang’s imprisonment, Rotten started off fiery and trilling — “historrry” — but his words grew more frantic, descending into hysterical babble about scaling the Berlin Wall. The sound of jackbooted soldiers added to Paul Cook’s opening drum rhythm was tragic kitsch by comparison.
17. ‘Bodies’
The opening discordant guitar miasma with its muffled inhuman roar and reverberating drums is just a feint. As a stray chord starts to fade, BOOM! Rotten explodes: “She was a girl from Birmingham / She just had an abortion.” He calls the girl a disgrace, an animal, then bellows, “I’m not an animal!” Later, there’s another false stop, where plunges in: “Fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat!” All of “Bodies” is messed-up — soupy reverb, gang vocals that blare and then drift around, Jones’ guitar gets woozy, another too-loud, staticky guitar crops up later. But it should be messed-up. Rotten is attempting to embody the awful mental and physical anguish that can come with a decision to have an abortion. He claims the song’s neither pro-life nor pro-choice. But as Paul Nelson wrote in Rolling Stone‘s Never Mind the Bollocks review: “[Rotten] doesn’t know whether he’s against an abortion [“Screaming bloody fucking mess!”] or whether he is one.”
18. ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’
Johnny Rotten (John Lydon) singing with British punk band The Sex Pistols at the Electric Circus, Manchester, 9th December 1976. It’s hard to top “I am an Antichrist/I am an anarchist” for a memorably provocative opening line, but the brash fearlessness with which Rotten sneered it certainly inspired millions of kids to try. And this was on a debut single in 1976 that reached the U.K. Top 40 before the band’s label went into code-red lockdown. Glen Matlock, who wrote the riff that Jones turned into a fire-breathing beast, found the couplet corny and offensive, perhaps sealing his fate as the bitter, forgotten Pistol.
19. ‘My Way’
Johnny Rotten sang about characters killing each other or themselves, but Sid Vicious was killing himself, in public, virtually every day, lurching through a series of harrowing, even charismatic fits and starts. It was a black joke but not, like punk. For the best scene in The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, Sid does his version of the ballad first owned by Paul Anka and then Frank Sinatra. When the curtains open in a Parisian theater and Sid descends some onstage stairs leading to the spotlight, a tremulous, out-of-focus backing track (from Penguin Café Orchestra’s Simon Jefffes) swirls and wobbles into place. Adopting a ridiculous donkey warble, Sid staggers, mugs compulsively, and contributes his personal version of stage business. He commits to the bit, though, and when a punked-up symphonic track whiplashes in, it all starts to make sense. Snarling for real this time, Sid rediscovers his true voice, still comic but less so, and remarkably, he begins to own the goddamn thing. He belongs up there and he knows it! Playing the doomed snotty hipster, he goes to his knees, springs up, and wrings every bit of sincere, undamaged emotion that he can out of the chorus. The crowd throws flowers. And that’s it. Well, except for the part where Sid pulls out a gun and murders a bunch of the audience members. Nobody but Sid.
20. ‘God Save the Queen’
“God Save the Queen” is a punk rock anthem by the British band Sex Pistols, released in 1977 during Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee. The song was a scathing critique of British society and the monarchy, and its provocative lyrics and anti-establishment message made it a lightning rod for controversy. The song’s opening line, “God Save the Queen, the fascist regime,” caused outrage and resulted in the band being banned from performing in many venues. Despite the backlash, the song became a symbol of rebellion and counterculture, and its enduring popularity has cemented its status as one of the most iconic punk rock songs of all time.
Jared Parker is a frequent contributor to Singers Room. Since 2005, Singersroom has been the voice of R&B around the world. Connect with us via social media below.
