Punk rock, led by the Pistols, was “about frustration and wanting to change the status quo and it needed a very loud and angry voice to change it,” said Dior.
Picture on left: John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) in 1977 She wasn’t paying tax and was so privileged and we were supposed to be celebrating. “We were definitely against the jubilee at that time. But there was an awareness of people being privileged and under-privileged, that it wasn’t a fair system. Being anti-Queen was just an easy target. Steve Dior, a musician who has played with all of the band’s members except Lydon, told Channel 4 News: “They were politically naive. “I like the flags, the pageantry of it all.” Nowadays, Matlock seems relaxed about the monarchy.
John (Lydon) told me he didn’t realise it was the jubilee and was disinterested in the jubilee.” And the song’s message? “Don’t be taken like a bloody idiot.” “Originally, the song wasn’t called God Save The Queen, it was called No Future. “We were so far up our own backsides, we just wanted to do what we wanted to do,” he said. But Glen Matlock told Channel 4 News that a song created by four 19-year-olds should not be over-analysed. Reid has called it “probably the last public protest against the monarchy”. The Sex Pistols reunited in 1996 Glen Matlock is on the far right Or did they? ‘We love our Queen.’ The last sentence is taken from the song’s lyrics. Everyone loved her, everyone except the Sex Pistols. A working-class boy, he has always been angered by Britain’s class system, criticising private schools for encouraging snobbery and cultivating a sense of superiority, and damning the upper classes for their tendency to “parasite off the population as their friends help them along”.Īs the Pistols’ own website puts it: “The Pistols were inspired by anger and poverty, not art and poetry.”Īnd the song: “The nation was gripped by Royal fever. Lydon has explained that the song was written to stop the English people from being “mistreated”. John Lydon certainly wants nothing to do with the re-release, saying it “totally undermines what the Sex Pistols stood for”, before adding in a statement: “I am pleased that the Sex Pistols recordings are being put out there for a new generation, however, I wish for no part in the circus that is being built up around it.” ‘Mistreated’ It may have been a clever marketing ploy to have the single ready for the jubilee (the original plan was for it to be released earlier, although events conspired against this), but what were the band saying? Did they really want to see the back of the monarchy? We were so far up our own backsides, we just wanted to do what we wanted to do. The design of the sleeve, the work of artist Jamie Reid, led to it being named the greatest record cover of all time in 2001 by Q magazine, which a year later ranked it first in a list of the 50 most exciting tunes ever. But it still made it to number two in the official charts, although it has been frequently and convincingly claimed that there was a fix to stop it making the number one spot.
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The song was banned on the airwaves: the BBC and commercial TV and radio refused to play it and many record shops and high street chains Woolworths and WH Smith were unwilling to stock it.
Unlike some other Pistols’ songs, there was no swearing, but queen was made to rhyme with “fascist regime” and we were told that “she ain’t no human being” and “there’s no future in England’s dreaming”.
It could have been worse: one of the other designs included placing swastikas over the Queen’s eyes and, in true punk style, a safety pin through her lips. The sleeve showed the monarch’s eyes and mouth obscured by the title and name of the band, with the words looking as though they had been taken from newspaper cuttings in the style of a ransom note. Thirty-five years ago, the Sex Pistols’ second single was controversial for two reasons: its cover and lyrics. What seems inevitable is that God Save The Queen will not have the chart success it enjoyed in 1977 during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, despite a Facebook campaign to win it the number one spot. Like Pistols frontman John Lydon (previously known as Johnny Rotten), Matlock does not agree with the decision by Universal Music to release a 2012 version of the classic punk track.