Thirty years after its release, John Lydon\u2014better known as Johnny Rotten\u2014offered this assessment of the song that made the Sex Pistols the most reviled and revered figures in England in the spring of 1977: \u201cThere are not many songs written over baked beans at the breakfast table that went on to divide a nation and force a change in popular culture.\u201d Timed with typical Sex Pistols flair to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II\u2019s Silver Jubilee, the release of \u201cGod Save The Queen\u201d was greeted by precisely the torrent of negative press that Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren had hoped. On May 31, 1977, the song earned a total ban on radio airplay from the BBC\u2014a kiss of death for a normal pop single, but a powerful endorsement for an anti-establishment rant like \u201cGod Save The Queen.\u201d<\/p>\n
While some in the tabloid press accused the Sex Pistols of treason and called for their public hanging, the BBC was more moderate in its condemnation. In response to lyrics like \u201cGod Save The Queen\/She ain\u2019t no human being,\u201d the BBC labeled the record an example of \u201cgross bad taste\u201d\u2014a difficult charge to argue, and one the Sex Pistols wouldn\u2019t have wanted to dispute. Even with the radio ban in place, however, and with major retailers like Woolworth refusing to sell the controversial single, \u201cGod Save The Queen\u201d flew off the shelves of the stores that did carry it, selling up to 150,000 copies a day in late May and early June. With sales figures like that, it seems implausible that \u201cGod Save The Queen\u201d really stalled at #2 on the official UK pop charts, yet that is where it appeared, as a blank entry below \u201cI Don\u2019t Want to Talk About It\u201d by Rod Stewart, the ultimate anti-punk. Like every other effort to suppress the song, refusing even to print its name in the official pop charts played right into the Sex Pistols\u2019 hands<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Like naughty schoolboys concerned only with the approval of their peers, the Sex Pistols baited the British establishment throughout their brief career, but never more so than during the Silver Jubilee. When they took to the waters of the Thames and attempted to blast \u201cGod Save The Queen\u201d from giant speakers loaded onto a boat chartered by Virgin Records chief Richard Branson, the police dutifully responded by chasing the boat down and arresting its passengers when they reached the dock. When members of Parliament threatened to ban all sales of the single, a Virgin spokesman replied: \u201cIt is remarkable that MPs should have nothing better to do than get agitated about records which were never intended for their Ming vase sensibilities.\u201d Like the BBC ban announced on this day in 1977, these incidents only fed the controversy the Sex Pistols had set out to create.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thirty years after its release, John Lydon\u2014better known as Johnny Rotten\u2014offered this assessment of the song that made the Sex Pistols the most reviled and revered figures in England in the spring of 1977: \u201cThere are not many songs written over baked beans at the breakfast table that went on to divide a nation and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3506],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.beanybux.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}