Steve Huey, All Music Guide

While mostly accurate, dismissing Never Mind the Bollocks as merely a series of loud, ragged mid-tempo rockers with a harsh, grating vocalist and not much melody would be a terrible error. Already anthemic songs are rendered positively transcendent by Johnny Rotten's rabid, foaming delivery. His bitterly sarcastic attacks on pretentious affectation and the very foundations of British society were all carried out in the most confrontational, impolite manner possible. Most imitators of the Pistols' angry nihilism missed the point: Underneath the shock tactics and theatrical negativity were social critiques carefully designed for maximum impact. Never Mind the Bollocks perfectly articulated the frustration, rage, and dissatisfaction of the British working class with the establishment, a spirit quick to translate itself to strictly rock & roll terms. The Pistols paved the way for countless other bands to make similarly rebellious statements, but arguably none were as daring or effective. It's easy to see how the band's roaring energy, overwhelmingly snotty attitude, and Rotten's furious ranting sparked a musical revolution, and those qualities haven't diminished one bit over time. Never Mind the Bollocks is simply one of the greatest, most inspiring rock records of all time.

Billy Altman, Amazon.com

Recognizing that there's no such thing as bad publicity, manager-Svengali Malcolm McLaren molded the Pistols into the most confrontational, nihilistic band rock & roll had ever seen. Propelled by Johnny Rotten's maniacal vocals, Steve Jones's buzz-saw guitar, and (most importantly) bass player Glen Matlock's hook-filled compositional skills, the Pistols' early singles "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen" defined the raging style of British punk. By the time they recorded their lone 1977 album, Matlock had been bounced, replaced by the image-correct but utterly untalented (and ultimately group-dooming) Sid Vicious. Not a 10th as good as the singles, the album nontheless remains a bile-filled emblem of the times.

Andrew Mueller, Amazon.co.uk

The Sex Pistols' only proper album has become one of those records that is far more talked and written about than listened to. Only a handful of rock & roll bands can genuinely claim to have changed the world, and only one of those can claim to have done it with such a tiny discography (though any number of retrospective albums have been issued since the band met their messy end, this was the only one released while they were still a going concern).

It is impossible that any serious fan of modern music is not familiar with at least the singles collected here ("Pretty Vacant", "Anarchy In The UK", "God Save The Queen"). Jamie Reid's lurid yellow-and-pink sleeve artwork is also an enduringly influential cultural artefact. Mostly, though, what should never be forgotten about Never Mind. . . is that when all the mischief and mayhem it inspired or caused has been stripped away, it is a truly great rock & roll album: guitars as angry and adrenalised as any ever recorded, killer tunes, and Johnny Rotten's inimitable voice--the definitive articulation of disgust. Altogether perfect. Every era, and every home, should have one.

Martin Johnson, Barnes & Noble

Made to be the most high-profile confrontational record of the '70s, Never Mind the Bollocks is also one of the great rock records of all time. The Sex Pistols were the poster boys of punk rock; their followers dressed in combat boots wore spiked hair (often colored in hues not found in nature) and used oddly placed safety pins as accessories. Many record companies were frightened by the controversy caused by the single "God Save the Queen," an effective rebuke to the nationalism surrounding the Royal Jubilee. Finally, then small time Virgin Records released it and had an instant classic on its hands. Original bassist Glen Matlock and guitarist Steve Jones brought a considerable songcraft to tunes, which jackhammered their way into the listener's consciousness. "Anarchy in the U.K.," perhaps their greatest single, launches with "I am an anti-Christ/I am a An-ar-chirst/I don't know what I want/But I know how to get it/I want to destroy/Pacify/'cause I want to be in An-ar-chy." The establishment was repulsed. Rolling Stone featured them on the cover with the headline was "Rock is Sick and living in London." Though they broke up as quickly as they burst on the scene, Pistols won respect in other circles. Neil Young heralded them in his "My My Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)." Bassist Sid Vicious who had replaced Matlock shortly after Never Mind... was recorded was subject of the film Sid and Nancy, which told of their tragic affair and deaths. Lydon reformed the Pistols for a cynical reunion tour in the early '90s, but little can diminish the vitality of their only true recording.

The Sex Pistols: Johnny Rotten (vocals); Steve Jones (guitar); Sid Vicious, Glen Matlock (bass); Paul Cook (drums).

Put this alongside BLONDE ON BLONDE and REVOLVER as an album that changed the face of rock forever. Along with the Clash and the Damned, the Sex Pistols were one of the first bands to channel the anger of dole-queue '70s Britain through a fierce musical amalgam of pub rock, the Stooges and the New York Dolls. Despite their influences, Johnny Rotten and company created something utterly unlike what had come before. Their anarchist/nihilist attitude, reflected in tunes like "Anarchy in the U.K." and "No Feelings" spoke to a new generation of kids, more profoundly disaffected than any other in the 20th century.
Rotten's snarling, distinctly British delivery of his agitational lyrics made Dylan sound like Mario Lanza, and the pile-driver guitars of Glen Matlock and Steve Jones move the songs along like a well-oiled but ornery machine. For all their iconoclasm, though, the Pistols were far more indebted to traditional pop song format (and dynamics) than most of the punk bands that followed in their wake. Consequently, for all their anger and urgency, such songs as "Submission" and "Pretty Vacant" enter the ear easily, only beginning to cause real internal damage once they get into your gut. One of the most essential rock albums of all time.

Andrew Collins, Q Magazine

On November 24, 1977, the manager of a Virgin record store in Nottingham, Mr Christopher Seale, was reluctantly cleared of "displaying indecent printed matter", and Never Mind The Bollocks went back in the shop window. Boots, W.H. Smith and Woolworth's refused to stock it, Conservative Shadow Education Secretary Norman St John Stevas denounced it in The Sun as "a symptom of the way society is declining"; Record Mirror compliantly masked the word "Bollocks" from a page advertisement, and the Independent Television Companies Association refused a £40,000 TV advertising campaign for the album, objecting not just to the B-word but to "the product itself". It is 21 years later (any old excuse for a re-release), and in many ways, it is hard to imagine what all the fuss was about. Which is precisely why this record, less than 40 minutes long and the only album release from a band who existed for 26 months, is still worthy of fuss. It defined punk. Recorded between March and June 1977 at a time when it wasn't easy to be the Sex Pistols - banned here, blocked there, buffeted between one McLaren scam and the next - that this album was any cop was a miracle, what with the bass ineptitude of Sid Vicious ("too fucking drunk" is John Lydon's studio memory) and the pressure to reshape rock'n'roll when, as producer Chris Thomas astutely observed, the Pistols were actually like The Who. Rolling Stone's reviewer described the eventual, 12-track album as "two subway trains crashing together under 40 feet of mud", unfairly overlooking the clarity Thomas brought to the Pistols' plodding blueprint (this edition is taken from the original analogue recording for extra bollocks). It's a one-speed affair, slower than it once seemed, but still vivid and horrible thanks to Rotten's hallmark atonal jeer, and always barged along by Paul Cook's purposefully thumped tubs. There is more of this in Oasis than Beatles-preoccupied wisdom dictates. The four spotless, evenly spaced singles still dominate, though Submission, EMI and Problems survive as worthwhile cuts, and there's always a new, fancy, 32-page booklet for incentive. But there's really no excuse for owning Revolver and Pet Sounds and not this. It's like punk was just happening. And it's available in all good shops.

Paul Nelson, RollingStone, issue 259

When the father-house burns....Young men find blisters on their hearts.

—Old Ukrainian Proverb

If it's not clear to you now, it's going to be: the rock wars of the Seventies have begun, and the Sex Pistols, the most incendiary rock & roll band since the Rolling Stones and the Who, have just dropped the Big One on both the sociopolitical aridity of their native England and most of the music from which they and we were artistically and philosophically formed. While a majority of young Americans are probably going to misunderstand much of the no-survivors, not-even-us stance of the punk-rock New Wave anarchy in the U.K. (compared to which, the music of the Ramones sounds like it was invented by Walt Disney), none of us can ignore the movement's savage attack on such stars as the neoaristocratic and undeniably wealthy Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Elton John, et al., whose current music the Pistols view as a perfect example of jet-set corruption and an utter betrayal of the communal faith. It's obviously kill-the-father time in Great Britain, and, if this is nothing new (after all, Jimmy Porter, England's original Angry Young Man, spewed forth not unlike Johnny Rotten as far back as 1956 in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger), it certainly cuts much deeper now because conditions are unquestionably worse. And when one's main enemy is an oppressive mood of collective hopelessness, no one learns faster from experience than the would-be murderer of society, I suppose.

In a commercial sense, however, the Sex Pistols will probably destroy no one but themselves, but theirs is a holy or unholy war that isn't really going to be won or lost by statistics, slick guitar playing or smooth studio work. This band still takes rock & roll personally, as a matter of honor and necessity, and they play with an energy and conviction that is positively transcendent in its madness and fever. Their music isn't pretty—indeed, it often sounds like two subway trains crashing together under forty feet of mud, victims screaming—but it has an Ahab-versus-Moby Dick power that can shake you like no other music today can. It isn't particularly accessible either, but, hard to believe and maybe not true, record sales apparently don't mean much to the Pistols. (They never do when you don't have any.)

It seems to me that instead of exploiting the commercial potential of revolution, the Sex Pistols have chosen to explore its cultural possibilities. As Greil Marcus pointed out, they "have absorbed from reggae and the Rastas the idea of a culture that will make demands on those in power which no government could ever satisfy; a culture that will be exclusive, almost separatist, vet also messianic, apocalyptic and stoic, and that will ignore or smash any contradiction inherent in such a complexity of stances....'Anarchy in the U.K.' is, among other things, a white kid's 'War ina Babylon.'"

But before we make the Sex Pistols and their cohorts into fish-and-chips Zapatas, and long before sainthood has set in on Johnny Rotten, we should remember that this band has more on its mind than being a rock & roll centerpiece for enlightened liberal discussion. First of all, they're musicians, not philosophers, so they're probably more interested in making the best possible mythopoeic loud noise than they are in any logical, inverted political scripture. They're also haters, not lovers, a fact that may worry many Americans since the idea of revolution in this country is usually tinged with workers-unite sentimentality and the pie in the sky of some upcoming utopia. Johnny Rotten is no Martin Luther King or Pete Seeger—he's more like Bunuel or Celine. He looks at it all and sees right through it, himself included. While he's ranting at England ("a fascist regime") and the Queen ("She ain't no human being"), he doesn't exactly spare his own contingent: "We're so pretty, oh so pretty—we're vacant/... and we don't care."

Musically, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols is just about the most exciting rock & roll record of the Seventies. It's all speed, not nuance—drums like the My Lai massacre, bass throbbing like a diseased heart fifty beats past bursting point, guitars wielded by Jack the Ripper—and the songs all hit like amphetamines or the plague, depending on your point of view. Rotten's jabbing, gabbing vocals won't leave you alone. They either race like crazed, badly wounded soldiers through fields of fire so thick you can't tell the blood from the barrage, or they just stand there in front of you, like amputees in a veterans' hospital, asking where you keep the fresh piles of arms and legs.

Johnny Rotten may be confused, but he's got a right to be. He's flipped the love-hate coin so often that now it's flipping him. Overpowered by his own psychic dynamite, he stands in front of the mirror, "in love with myself, my beautiful self," and the result is "No Feelings." You say, "Holidays in the Sun," and he says, "I wanna go to the new Belsen." On "Bodies," he doesn't know whether he's against an abortion ("screaming bloody fucking mess") or whether he is one. Rotten seems to stroll right through the ego and into the id, and then kick the hell out of it. Talk to him about relationships and you get nowhere: "See my face, not a trace, no reality."

That said, no one should be frightened away from this album. "Anarchy in the U.K." and especially "God Save the Queen" are near-perfect rock & roll songs, classics in the way the Who's "My Generation" and the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" are. And, contrary to popular opinion, the Pistols do have a sense of humor. They're forever throwing out musical quotes, many of them outlandish (the beginning of "Pretty Vacant" echoes the Who's "Baba O'Riley," the chorus on "EMI" is a direct steal from Jonathan Richman's "Road Runner," and "New York" completely trashes the Dolls' "Looking for a Kiss"), from groups they obviously at least half admire. If Graham Parker can come away from a Sex Pistols concert saying it was just like seeing the Stones in their glorious early days, just how many contradictions are we talking about?

Those who view the Sex Pistols only in eve-of-destruction terms should remember that any theory of destruction as highfalutin as Rotten's also contains the seeds of freedom and even optimism. Anyone who cares enough to hate this much is probably not a nihilist, but—irony of ironies—a moralist and a romantic as well. I believe it when Johnny Rotten screams, "We mean it, man," in conjunction with destruction, but, in a way, his land's-end, "no future" political position is the most desperately poetic of all. We want to destroy everything, he says, and then see what's left. My guess is that he believes something will be.

© Frank Steven Groen