Trivia / Sex Pistols

• Banned in China: Downplayed. While their music was never banned, the band itself was banned from almost every concert site in Britain, forcing them to tour under the name of The Spots (Short for "Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly".)
• Channel Hop: A rather infamous case in that they were dropped by both EMI and A&M Records after only releasing one single on each label. They were eventually picked up by Virgin Records, who unlike EMI and A&M had enough faith in the band to release their one and only studio album, their soundtrack to The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, and their live albums, and both release Sid Vicious' posthumous album and carry on the career of Johnny's next band.
• Creator Backlash: Johnny really thinks "Belsen Was A Gas" was too tasteless and a cheap attempt at shock value.^note Sid had written it as an attempt at Black Comedy for an earlier band, and it was recycled basically as album filler just to piss people off. Mick Jones of The Clash, who is Jewish, unsurprisingly would react adversely to it, and it is credited as the reason why the two bands never performed together. They stopped finding it funny around the time actual Nazis tried to infiltrate punk spaces, and by the time Johnny disowned it in 1996, some Nazi skinhead band had covered it unironically.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The original EMI and A&M releases of "Anarchy in the UK" and "God Save the Queen", respectively, are notoriously hard to come by thanks to the fact that the Sex Pistols were dropped form these labels after only releasing those singles, which went out of print in a heartbeat as a result. The A&M pressing of "God Save the Queen" in particular made headlines for having one copy sell upwards of £13,000 at an auction in 2006.
• The Pete Best: While Sex Pistols were formed in 1975, their roots trace back to 1972, when Jones (then a vocalist), Cook and a friend of theirs, named Wally Nightningale (guitarist) formed the band called The Strand. After a while, they recruited Glen Matlock on bass, renamed themselves as The Swankers, and later they fired Nightingale at the suggestion of McLaren, upon which Jones switched to guitar.
  • And even when the band recruited Rotten as their vocalist, they were rehearsing with second guitarist, a journalist named Nick Kent, although he was fired by Rotten immediately. ^note Allegedly, Kent later had nothing nice to say about the band. Kent later went to an influential music journalism career in his own right, writing for the NME and The Face. Subsequently, they hired Steve New in Kent's place, but because he did not exactly fit into the band, and because of Jones's improving skills, he did not last either. New later became the guitarist for Matlock's short-lived post-Pistols band Rich Kids.
• Promoted Fanboy: Sid Vicious began as a fan of the band before becoming their bassist.
• Short-Lived, Big Impact: The band broke up just 13 months after the release of their debut single. They only released a grand total of one studio album. Yet they are considered the pioneers of British punk rock, both musically and aesthetically.
• Trolling Creator: The band's initial shock value came from Lydon's nihilistic lyrics and the way he would deliberately antagonize live audiences, often to the point of inciting riots.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In England's Dreaming, John Savage's bio of the the band, Rotten mentioned that he wrote some songs during the Pistols' American tour in order to expand their sound. He would later record them with his next project, Public Image Ltd., when McLaren disapproved of the new material.
  • The band almost starred in Russ Meyer's Who Killed Bambi (formerly known as Anarchy in the UK), which he would have co-written with Roger Ebert. However, the film was abandoned, and the band went on to make The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle instead. In 2013, Ebert posted his script on his blog.
  • Before John Lydon joined the band, they first asked Midge Ure (later of Ultravox) to be their singer. He declined, but he would perform in another short-lived band called Rich Kids with Glen Matlock.
  • Around 1979, Jones and Cook started hanging out with Jimmy Pursey of Sham 69. They jammed a lot and even recorded some material and Pursey becoming the vocalist for a potential revival of the Sex Pistols was a serious possibility for a while.
  • Matlock revealed, that when Pistols reunited in 1996, he, Steve Jones and Paul Cook wanted to write and record a new album. Lydon, however, was against the idea.
  • It's been suggested that the band could have lasted longer if they got rid of Malcolm McLaren.
  • May even be "What Actually Happened, But Nobody Seems to Know": Johnny Rotten, in an interview with Rolling Stone, once mentioned that in the EMI studio where Never Mind the Bollocks was being recorded, in the next studio space Queen were recording, and the band actually invited Johnny to sing backing vocals on one track. He doesn't reveal which song or whether it actually came off in the interview, though he does recount the freedom that Queen was given in recording (specifically that Freddie Mercury was allowed numerous takes and their engineer could splice together the best of them to cover flubs) whereas the Pistols were pretty much "one-and-done" and his envy at the latitude Queen could command.
    • Then again, another version of the story (admittedly told on That Other Wiki) recounts a star-struck Johnny going into Queen's studio on all fours, sidling up to the piano where Freddy Mercury was, trying to introduce himself, before going back to the Pistols' studio. In this account, Queen's rather bemused engineer then went next door to ask the band to knock it off. It doesn't help that in THIS version of the story, Sid Vicious had previously been ejected from Queen's studio for trying to pick a fight with Mercury.
    • The infamous interview with Bill Grundy might not have happened if it weren't for Freddie Mercury's teeth - Queen were originally scheduled to appear on the program that day, but Freddie had an emergency dental appointment, so EMI offered the Pistols as a last minute replacement.
  • In a Hilarious in Hindsight way, allegedly, when the original line-up was being put together, one of the band names they considered before eventually deciding on Sex Pistols was The Damned.
  • Fred Frith of Henry Cow was approached by Bernie Rhodes, a friend of the Pistols and later on the manager of The Clash, who told Frith that the Pistols appreciated Henry Cow's musical attitude and would he be interested in working with them? Frith told Rhodes to tell the Pistols to give him a call. They never did. Later on, Henry Cow were informally invited to tour with the Pistols, but the Cow declined on the grounds that the Pistols' fans wouldn't appreciate their brand of complex, dissonant, political prog-rock.

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