I was in a store recently that had for back ground music bits and pieces from Movie sountracks and various computer games when suddenly the sound of The Sex Pistols Anarchy In The UK blared out like someone knocking over shelves in an old Blockbuster store. They sang for it all right. Anarchy in the streets, that is. And thankfully that did not happen. I was thirteen, or so, when I first heard that song and all though they were singing for anarchy I did hope it would not come to that. Even as a young boy I had seen how bad things could get when social unrest was unleashed upon the streets. I saw whole streets ablaze and grew up almost at the geographical center of Ardoyne and had witnessed what it was like to grow up in a war zone. Our childhood had been played out with the Troubles as a back drop, as the snarling, biting real thing. So I understood this was only a song and not a call to arms. Or was it more than that?
It surely was to me and many others. Like the faint stirrings caused by the creation of something in Mount Doom, the ring of power this time around was a circle of music. Round and round our heads it went, changing us at a deeper level than we thought possible by a rock band. The Sex Pistols were making Gollums of all of us. We forget the taste of bread, or at the very least how to earn it. As a boy I thought musicians, particularly pop stars, fell from the heavens, fully formed,a race apart, speaking their own language, not bound by the rules of earth bound mortals (Boy, did I get that one wrong. They lean towards being more messed up than any "real" peple I ever knew. Like actors they were driven by their own demons to escape the realities of their lives and replace certainties with promises wrote in smoke and glitter.The Sex Pistols were the first band I knew who owned what they were. Not the faux-posturing of many less than modern contempary artists clinging to the notion they are keeping it real. More a sense of them not being able to escape the reality of who and what they were. I,m losing the thread of what I am trying to say here.They had something about them that marked them out as well different and they sold it to futurity...A friend recently told me he thought I had always overated The Pistols, that they were a bunch of thieving magpies who ripped off a load of sixties rifts by better bands. Yes, I do allow my friends to talk to me like this. Its just words after all. Maybe he is right, I am a bit thinly read on sixties music.At the time of my maximum enjoyment of The Sex Pistols I was rather living in the moment. And memories are made of moments..
I'm away to look for that thread I lost.
