Sex Pistols: Kiss This / Sid & Nancy: Soundtrack

KISS THIS—THE PISTOLS TRACK BY TRACK

FIRST PHASE: EARLY SONGS AND OTHER PEOPLE’S MATERIAL

“DID YOU NO WRONG”

PAUL COOK:

“Did You No Wrong” was one of the only songs that came along before John joined. We

were just learning still. We finally recorded it properly at Wessex for the B side of “God Save the Queen.”

JOHN LYDON: I changed the lyrics because I didn’t like the niceties of the song. It’s a News of the World epic, which is a fairly good indication of where I was heading, completely antisocial.

“SEVENTEEN”

COOK: John rewrote the song because he couldn’t read Steve’s writing.

LYDON: AKA “Lazy Sod.” This was around the time Steve Jones was learning to read and write. It was originally called “Lazy Sod.” There’s some Glen Matlock input in there—but I’m not quite sure how much. The song was already set up by the others before I came along. I remember laughing at Steve’s original words. I could not read the original set of lyrics, and Steve couldn’t remember them. Everything was misspelled. “I’m all alone, Give a dog a bone.” That was one of

the original lines. It was about being young, having nothing to do, and going through the typical emotions that every seventeen-year-old goes through. You’re lazy, you don’t see any future, and you really don’t care. You give up before you even begin. Everybody goes through that period. Unfortunately,

most English people stay there.

“LIAR”

LYDON: Self-explanatory, really—considering…

COOK: We never used to believe anybody then. “Liar” was another song with Glen. It was one of the earliest songs that John and Glen worked on together. It was the friction in the band that made itwork well.

LYDON: I never got on with Glen, but we’d somehow work together all right. We’d put the animosity aside, and good things would come out of that. I think it was the animosities between us that made the songs what they were. Nice guys come in second.

“I WANNA BE ME”

COOK: We used to work on these songs together in our rehearsal studio on Denmark Street, a famous musical area in London. It was just an old shack out the back of Tin Pan Alley. We’d be there every night rehearsing and writing songs. The rehearsal room was downstairs, and there was a living dump upstairs. Steve used to stay there a lot because he didn’t have anywhere to live. Glen,

John, and I used to stay there on and off.

LYDON: By the beginning of June 1976 we had “Did You No Wrong,” “No Lip,” “Seventeen,”

“Stepping Stone,” “New York,” “What You Gonna Do About It?” “Submission,” “Satellite,” “No Feelings,” “No Fun,” “Substitute,” “Pretty Vacant,” and “Problems.” Even though we look back on ourselves at the time and think what a load of lazy sods we were, we really were quite proficient. That’s also considering that money was so damn hard to come by. Just raising two shillings to get on the subway and travel to rehearsals was a major effort. Most of the band’s money went toward maintaining the rehearsal space.

“NO FUN”

LYDON:

“No Fun” is a song I love. We made up our version on the spot. I always wanted to do it. I

asked Steve to learn the riff, which he did very quickly. Paul filled in, and it went on from there. I hummed and hawed around the words because I didn’t quite know them. That’s fairly typical of me. While I love the feel of “No Fun,” I don’t like the actual lyrics. I think they’re flippant in some places while they can be very astute in others. No fun was definitely what we were having at that particular time.

“SATELLITE”

COOK: It’s about us running around London doing our earliest gigs in the satellite towns.

LYDON: We used to play in the satellite towns around London—St. Albans. We’d get twenty pounds to play Middlesbrough. We had to hire a van, and there was no chance of any hotels. It was just trundle off up there, then trundle back the same night. There wouldn’t be a lot of change left over.

It’s the story of the traveling nonsense and picking up enough money to survive for a day or two. We had to do it. But in a way, that’s what built the Sex Pistols’ crowd. They came from all those godforsaken new towns—Milton Keynes, St. Albans. As bad as it was in London for young people, they had nothing at all in the satellite towns. No social scene, nothing.

COOK: We played those gigs outside London—Northeast London Polytechnic, St. Albans Art and Design College, Welling Garden City—because we thought we’d be so awful, we didn’t want that many people to see us. We were still learning to play and just be comfortable in a band. It was a chance for us to get away from the bullshit of London.

LYDON: The only other gigs available would have been pubs or art colleges. Art colleges at that time were not the place. You would get snotty attitudes thrown at you. There was a semifashionable scene in London, which focused on Dr. Feelgood and the pub rock thing—something I personally never wanted to be a part of at all. It tended to be older people who were much more proficient with their instruments playing retro R&B.

COOK: There was another reason we liked playing a bit farther out. There was a bit of a buzz about the band before we even played a gig. It was ridiculous. We were this band that had something to do with Malcolm, the Sex boutique, and Seditionaires. We wanted to do some gigs for ourselves, get together as a band, and beat each other up on a transport van away from the motorway.

LYDON: We didn’t have Malcolm McLaren’s friends turning up. At that time it was just a clothes horse display by that lot. None of the band wanted to be a part of that.

“NO LIP”

COOK: “No Lip” is a Dave Berry cover version that was totally changed. It’s a jumpy uptight pop ditty. Berry was a crooner who fancied himself as a sex symbol. It was Glen’s idea to do it.

LYDON: I made it offensive, that’s what I did. The people who write these songs don’t realize how easy it is to do. It’s so nice that you just grab it by the fucking bollocks and squeeze. You give it an edge. Instead of being the victim in these songs, you turn yourself into the protagonist.

COOK: That’s what we tried to do with all the cover versions.

“STEPPING STONE”

LYDON: We were actually plumbing the depths here. There wasn’t a lot of songs out there that you could connect yourself with. We just wanted straight rock songs. A lot of these records would be picked up from a couple little stalls on the Soho market that sold old mod records and stuff. The mods were the last people—before they turned into soul boys and skinheads—to do anything musically in the U.K. After that it was all about pomposity and glitter rock. I was interested in the mod energy. We had to begin somewhere, and that was as good a place as any to start. We just took that as a launching pad and went on to something else. It showed the Pistols were a hell of a lot better than the rest. You must bear in mind that at the time, any real music going around was from the likes of Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. It took about fifteen trucks to carry their equipment and elaborate keyboard nonsense around. It was brain-dead and had no energy. It was art college stuff, certainly nothing for young people.

SECOND PHASE: LET RIP, VOLATILE, FULL-FLEDGED SONGWRITING ON OUR

OWN

“NO FEELINGS”

LYDON: This originally came from a Steve Jones riff. It would work this way: one night someone would have an idea, and then everyone else would just build around it until it was done.

COOK: Steve would come in with the riff, and John would be writing the lyrics. We’d be playing away and come up with other ideas. It evolved as simply as that.

LYDON: I had very little to do at all with the Pistols’ music. I knew nothing about music. While they’d be fiddling about, I’d be in the corner writing. I’d just shout out if I liked certain bits and I had lyrics to fit in. It’s a haphazard way, but that’s the way it was. You don’t need to be technically proficient at your so-called art to write songs. If you are musically proficient, usually you won’t be any good at writing songs because you won’t be able to express your feelings. You’ll be bogged down in the technology of note perfections, set patterns, and set ideas.

“ANARCHY IN THE U.K.”

COOK: It was Glen’s riff originally, and Steve beefed it up.

LYDON: I kept really quiet that evening until about an hour before we left. I had written the words down while the band were in the corner arguing. I used to have terrible trouble rehearsing because I was so fucking shy about it. I always wanted to be brilliant, excellent, loved, and adored right from the start. When I finally finished the words, Glen was absolutely furious. He thought it was appalling and a silly idea for a song. I proved him right.

COOK: Glen felt a little precious about it being his song. He was upset about John’s terrain being thrown over the top. But the tension was working. John and Glen had such different ideals, and Steve and I were in the middle. “Anarchy” was the classic example of everything working perfectly.

LYDON: When I left the room during writing and rehearsal, I used to leave the door open just a little. I’d wonder, What the fuck is Glen on about?

“SUBMISSION”

LYDON: We were in Camden Town rehearsing at the Roundhouse for a small period. The arguments between Glen and me became severe by this time. Malcolm finally insisted we go to a small pub upstairs and sit down and work it all out. We did. We were given twenty quid to sit down and get drunk and put our differences aside. The result was we both got along on the Doors. The Doors was the common ground—we found a band that we, shockingly, both liked.

COOK: “Submission” had a classic riff that’s been done millions of times before. We slowed it down. It was similar to that Doors’ riff in “Hello I Love You,” the Who’s “I Can’t Explain,” and the early Kinks. We made it more subversive.

LYDON: Malcolm gave us his list of words and ideas. It was so funny. One of the words was

“submissive.” We turned it into “Submission”—a submarine mission. Glen and I enjoyed the

humor of it all. I don’t think Malcolm did.

“PROBLEMS”

LYDON: We had run out of ideas for songs—a major problem. The idea was put to Steve—the guitar hero of the band, who couldn’t come up with any riffs at all that particular evening—to put something together using an A, B, C, and D chord sequence. As the song progressed it got better. The cynicism of the title and the chords being A, B, C, D is still there. We didn’t add any bridges.

We were very good at burning them, though.

“NEW YORK”

COOK: Malcolm had this big thing about the New York Dolls. He was fascinated with them. He loved New York and thought it was all so great. He had been there once. “New York” was originally Steve’s riff, and John came up with the lyrics to wind up Malcolm. There’s still a lot of talk that New York started the punk scene and we ripped them off or such bullshit. People think we were influenced by it. We weren’t. The track was ultimately a put-down of that scene.

LYDON: The only thing anybody knew about this so-called New York scene was what Malcolm would tell us. It was hard to listen to the same old stories night after night, slightly changed each time. It got blown out of all proportion, and the mythology of it became unbearable. The song is a reaction to that. It used to be spectacular fun to play the song live, particularly down south in America. The

folks at the Longhorn Ballroom in Texas had the same opinion as us about New York. Everything that came out of New York was poetry-based and too artsy. These people were much older than us and had more old-fashioned attitudes.

“PRETTY VACANT”

COOK: Glen reckons the original riff was influenced by Abba’s “SOS.” I can’t see how he worked that out. John changed the lyrics again here. It’s about being young and hanging around being vacant.

LYDON: Glen was a closet Abba fan, and funny enough, so was Sid. We got rid of one Abba fan and got another one in its place. Once Sid ran up to the girls from Abba in the Stockholm airport to ask for their autograph. Sid was completely drunk and stuck his hand out. They screamed and ran away. They thought they were being attacked—or maybe they thought he wanted money or something. Steve toughened it up because the original guitar line was very sissy. Glen wanted it to

be very nice. My accent would have been on “Vacant” while Glen’s would have been on “Pretty.” “Va-cunt” is me all over. I love to play with words and throw them into different arenas. They didn’t mind it on the radio because they didn’t notice.

THIRD PHASE: FINAL GROUP OF SONGS WRITTEN CLOSE TOGETHER, MORE

MUSICAL; NO LONGER CONFUSED ABOUT WHERE WE STOOD

“GOD SAVE THE QUEEN”

COOK: It started with Glen’s bass riff. Then Steve got hold of it, then I started playing. Suddenly John came up with “God Save the Queen.” We thought, What’s this? We hadn’t worked on songs for ages. They came about quickly. I would slow the band down. Relax, let’s not go too mad. Most people think about punk songs being three-minute thrashers. Our songs aren’t fast. Our songs were slow in tempo compared to those sorts of songs. I would hold everyone back a bit, especially

Steve. He liked to go full steam ahead without thinking too much about it. It was hard sometimes because everyone was so pumped up. The songs could get much faster live than the way we recorded them in the studio.

LYDON: The whole thing was written in one go. I had the lyrics ready. I wrote them a while back but never used them. The words didn’t fit in with any of the other tunes. I didn’t think they would ever fit in with the pattern that Glen had. Steve fell into it very quickly. Paul aided and abetted it very quickly with the drums.COOK: It wasn’t written specifically for the queen’s anniversary jubilee. We weren’t aware of it at the time. It wasn’t a contrived effort to go out and shock everyone. No way. It didn’t even click that there was a jubilee coming up. Eventually it did come out on the anniversary.

LYDON: I had so many arguments with Glen and Steve. Where’s the chorus? You can’t write a song like that. It’s not musical. My flippant answer was: What is musical? The “No Future” part was an end refrain, an outro.

“EMI”

LYDON: I recommend a lousy record company every time you run out of songs. The material is glorious. It’s one of my faves of the lot. Again, it’s not done in the way a song technically should be. These songs break so many traditions of songwriting. Isn’t it funny? After sacking the Pistols, EMI ends up with them again fifteen years later.

COOK: We weren’t trying to be clever. Just blatant. EMI. You know what this is about. Direct.

“HOLIDAYS IN THE SUN”

COOK: We had to get out of London. Malcolm wanted us to leave for a while because we were causing too much trouble at the time. We were fed up with not having any money and the pressure of London. All the publicity and the fights were going on. Malcolm was trying to put a deal together and we didn’t want to be around. We went down to Jersey, then had quite a good time in Berlin for a couple of weeks holiday. Some people used to compare the song musically to a Jam song called “In the City.” It’s about everyone’s paranoia.

LYDON: We tried our “Holidays in the Sun” on the isle of Jersey, and that didn’t work. They threw us out. Being in London at the time made us feel like we were trapped in a prison camp environment.

We didn’t have enough money to escape from the infamy of it all. There was hatred and a constant threat of violence. The best thing we could do was to go set up in a prison camp somewhere else. Berlin and its decadence was a good idea. The song came about from that. I loved Berlin. I loved that wall and the insanity of the place. Twenty-four hours of chaotic fun. It was geared up to annoy the Russians. West Berlin at the time was inside the communist state of East Germany. It was a fairground with only one airport and one motorway leading into it—surrounded by downtrodden, dull, gray, military-minded bastards who live thoroughly miserable lives. They looked in on this circus atmosphere of West Berlin—which never went to sleep—and that would be their impression of the West. I loved it. I had this feeling of Berlin being this wall all around me. It was a ridiculously small wall, and the whole thing seemed absolutely absurd. You’d get that marching vibe when you’d look over the wall at them. All you’d see would be soldiers. I’d be up on one of those stands at the wall giving two fingers up to the soldiers. The West Germans told me that they would shoot me and maybe cause an international incident. I would say, “That’s what I’m here for! To me, that’s a holiday!”

“BODIES”

COOK: Pauline was a mad fan who used to turn up everywhere. She turned up at my door, too. She was dangerous and very crazy—someone you really had to worry about. She was a pretty girl, but she had these really mad eyes. You had to keep your distance from Pauline.

LYDON: Pauline was a girl who used to send these letters to me from some nuthouse up north in Birmingham. She was in a mental asylum. She turned up at my door once wearing a see-through plastic bag. She did the rounds in London and ended up at everybody’s door. She had a very curious way of finding out where everybody lived. Like most insane people, she was very promiscuous. The fetus thing is what got me. She’d tell me about getting pregnant by the male nurses at the asylum or whatever. There’s a line in the song about Pauline living in a tree. She actually had a treehouse on the estate of this nuthouse. The nurses couldn’t get her down, and she’d be up there for days. Apparently, punk rock pulled her out of her cocoon. She might have had wealthy parents who buggered up her life—probably a bit like Nancy Spungen, really. She was one of many lunatics who used to attach themselves to us.

“MY WAY”

COOK: Sid doing “My Way” was for The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle film. Eventually they recorded it in Paris. I wasn’t on the song. Steve came over and played guitar on the track. John had left the band by this time, and I was sort of out of it by that time, too. I didn’t have much to do with Malcolm. He was off on his own trip making the film. Steve was involved in the film much more than me. Sid was in the band when we wrote “Body” and “Holidays in the Sun,” but he wasn’t really involved in the songwriting during the Pistols.

LYDON: Didn’t Sid have hepatitis in the hospital at the time? We still credited the band with songwriting. We weren’t mean about that shit. Once you start separating people when it comes to copyright on publishing, you’re not a band anymore. It becomes egos and you get nothing but trouble. We’d see that with a lot of the other bands around at the time. Falling apart over nothing. I was beginning litigation against Malcolm. The name Sex Pistols continued without me for the film. I’m not going to be prissy here and insist that “My Way” not be included. It should be included because the name just went on. If you notice a drop in quality, that’s neither here nor there. 

COOK: A lot of stuff came out under the Sex Pistols name after John left because Malcolm was trying to get the film together. He was desperate, and Virgin was giving him money to finish it. Using the name Sex Pistols was the only way to raise cash.

“SILLY THING”

COOK: “Silly Thing” was a thing Steve and I put together for the film. It was originally called “Silly Cunt.” It was about Sid or it could have been about Malcolm. Everyone. It dealt with the stupidity of the whole Pistols fracas after we had all broken up. Steve’s singing on this track.

LYDON: I liked it when I first heard it because it was really funny. It was deeply cynical and showed that the boys had learned something over the years. It was an affectionate dig. When it all fell apart we really were stupid with each other. “Silly Thing” was an ominous note to end with. It’s absolutely right. The fanatics out there take things far too seriously. They’d probably be appalled at the way we view our own material because they see it quite differently. They want us to have their visions and represent their attitudes about our work. Audiences are far too fucking demanding on the people they like and dislike. The truth always lets them down because it destroys their fantasies. One thing I always wanted with the Sex Pistols was that it wasn’t about fantasy. That was clear right from the start. We never hid anything.

Tim DiGravina, Allmusic 

The musical soundtrack to director Alex Cox's Sid & Nancy works as much magic as an album as it does accompanying the movie's tragic-comic imagery. The album exists as a compelling compilation of three elements: original songs by punk and post punk artists; Pray for Rain's somber, fragile score; and actor Gary Oldman's interesting turn as Sid Vicious on two tracks. Joe Strummer appears twice, first on "Love Kills" and then on "Dum Dum Club"; both songs are built on dynamic, powerful melodies and both see Strummer in fine form. The Pogues also appear twice, but neither track features Shane MacGowan on vocals. "Haunted" features vocals by Cait O'Riordan (the song would later appear via Shane MacGowan and the Popes as a duet between MacGowan and Sinead O'Connor) and "Junk" is an instrumental which actually sounds remarkably similar to Pray for Rain's score. That score, a minimalist, moody, and organic beast, is represented by four tracks which sound a great deal like Tangerine Dream on a good day. Circle Jerks' stab at the movie's "love kills" theme is the second song here to take the name "Love Kills." It's a punk gem with attitude to spare, made great by snarling, effective vocals. John Cale's "She Never Took No for an Answer" is an entire world of atmosphere and ambivalent, sad romance. "I Wanna Be Your Dog" and "My Way" see Gary Oldman doing his best impersonation of Sid Vicious and that title character's musical inability; the two covers are as interesting and worthwhile as the originals. All 13 tracks somehow work perfectly together, except perhaps Sex Pistol Steve Jones' lightweight "Pleasure and Pain." Sid & Nancy is a must-listen for fans of the film, and it's one of the best movie soundtracks of the 1980s. It's stylish, brash, and wholly entertaining.

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