Sex Pistols Say One More Time

The four original Sex Pistols will reunite to play a one-time concert November 8. John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock are putting on the leather pants and safety pins one more time in honor of the 30th anniversary of Never Mind the Bollocks, their only album.
The group had gone through various names and lineups since 1972, with Jones and Cook always at its center. They finally emerged as the Sex Pistols in November 1975 at a gig that, legend has it, they never finished because they were thrown off stage. Within a year, however, they were playing large clubs and doing concert tours in Britain.
But this is where image and substance diverged for the Sex Pistols, as well as for numerous other bands of the era. Like their American counterparts the Ramones, beneath the contrivance of the rebel-against-everything attitude, the Sex Pistols were a decent band with a solid rock sensibilities. One need only listen to their first single “Anarchy in the U.K.” to understand that there was far more to the band than image. But they were always overshadowed by their antics onstage, in the press, and on television. The media ignored the music for the most part (except to catalog dirty words) and focused instead on how far the band would go to destroy all that was good and pure.
Matlock left (or was fired, depending on what story you believe) in early 1977, to be replaced on bass by Sid Vicious, who had previously played drums for Siouxsie & the Banshees (“Love in a Void”). Unfortunately, that move was a self-fulfilling prophecy, and marked the point where the Sex Pistols actually became what people feared they were. Vicious was hired not for his
bass-playing prowess—he had none—but for his look and his “punk sensibilities“ according to the group’s manager Malcolm McLaren.
Jones (and some say Matlock) played bass during the recording of Never Mind the Bollocks, but as a live act without a competent anchor on bass, the Sex Pistols quickly degenerated into a parody of punk.
They split in 1978 during a disastrous US tour. And, of course, Vicious died almost a year later of a heroin overdose. The original members regrouped briefly in 1996 and 2003, but all had moved on to other things (Lydon to Public Image Ltd. and now as a judge on Fuse TV’s Bodog Music's Battle Of The Bands, Cook to alt rock band Man-Raze with Def Leppard’s Phil Collen, and Jones to Los Anegeles radio as host of his own show Jonesy's Jukebox, on Indie 103.1 FM).

For old time's sake, here's Anarchy in the UK.