The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle
Click Here - https://ssurll.com/2tla3m
When first approaching The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, it's best not to think of it as a Sex Pistols album; rather, keep in mind that it's the soundtrack to a movie that was mostly about Malcolm McLaren and only tangentially concerned the great band he managed. Only eight of the twenty-four songs on The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle feature the same band as on Never Mind the Bollocks, and most of those capture them stomping through covers in the studio, sometimes to impressive effect (Johnny Rotten sounds positively feral on the Who's \"Substitute\" and the whole band tears into \"(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone\" with malicious glee) and sometimes not (Rotten reveals he doesn't know the words to either Chuck Berry's \"Johnny B. Goode\" or Jonathan Richman's \"Roadrunner,\" and the band's familiarity isn't much greater). A live take of the Pistols roaring through \"Belsen Was a Gas\" is exciting, but sounds as if Rotten and the rest of the band were traveling in very different directions, and it's not hard to imagine why he quit the group after the show. Steve Jones and Paul Cook offer up a few tunes of their own, which lack the danger of the cuts with Rotten but confirm they were the backbone of a solid, scrappy rock band, and if Tenpole Tudor isn't much of a singer, on his numbers he delivers an impressive degree of sheer eccentricity. But a large percentage of the album is devoted to jokey material tied into the movie -- orchestral versions of \"EMI\" and \"God Save the Queen,\" a French busker performing \"Anarchy in the UK\" en Français, train robber Ronnie Biggs attempting to sing, and Malcolm McLaren ascending to show biz heaven with a cover of Max Bygraves' \"You Need Hands.\" And while Sid Vicious sounds like a good if unexceptional rock & roll shouter on a pair of Eddie Cochran covers, his inarguably remarkable version of \"My Way\" shows the man was incapable of comprehending the irony of his situation, and sadly sounds like the work of a kid destined to die young. Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols was the sound of a hydrogen bomb being dropped on your head, and The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle collects some of the debris left after the explosion; parts are brilliant, but it's ultimately a padded and slightly depressing look at a great band in collapse.
The bullet that killed punk rock. Maybe the greatest exploitation film ever made, exploiting a band in an attempt to convince an audience they've been exploited. McLaren's a liar, of course, but no matter if what he's selling is truth, this shatters any sort of myths, both the ones he's trying to promote and the ones he's trying to dispel. Forget post-punk, this is postmodern-punk!
The strangest, incoherent to the point of surrealism rock doc I can think of. It serves as a commercial for a band that had already been broken up by the time this was released.It's alsomoreabout Malcolm McLaren then the sex pistols and that is as sex pistols as it gets.The cartoons and disco sex pistols covers are great. Check it out. If your into that sort of thing you fucking weirdo.
\"No other disc in rock (Never Mind the Bollocks) divided time into a \"before\" and \"after.\" Though it took me forever to realize it, the division owes as much to the band's music as to their hairdos. Much of the music was banned in Parliament, which makes it as dangerous as Barry McGuire or Frankie Goes to Hollywood\"- Chuck Eddy\"Rock and roll is over, don't you understand The Pistols finished rock and roll; they were the last rock and roll band\"- Johnny LydonThe story of the Sex Pistols and the original punk rock movement in England is pretty well know by now but despite all the facts there are still plenty of glaring misconceptions about this part of rock's history, specifically related to the Pistols themselves.I loved and still love punk mainly because it showed me that in music, and probably elsewhere, anything can go. But if I got anything out of it, it was to question everything. Deifying it and glancing over some big problems with it just to immortalize it, pisses all over it.THE SEX PISTOLS WERE A BANDTechnically, of course, they were a group but not in the sense that they were individual people making individual decisions about their music, their shows or any media blitz. Just as with the Monkees, they were pieced together by canny manipulators of the young that had something exact in mind. Of course, neither band would have taken off without SOME talent. The Monkees had professional songwriters and musicians to take care of their records. The Pistols were a rag-tag ensemble without much distinctive character until a green-toothed savage named Lydon wandered into Malcolm McLaren's shop (This assumption itself may be suspect as Glen Matlock is supposedly responsible for writing the music of the Pistols songs while he was with the band). McLaren lumped them together and got behind them, knowing he had something marketable.THE PISTOLS BROKE UP AT THE RIGHT TIMEBy January 1978, they and McLaren all hated each other, one and all. McLaren was trying to get Rotten out of the band and carry on with the rest of the group. Rotten for his own part, asked Jones and Cook to join him and quit McLaren. Of course, they sided with McLaren who flew them to Rio to record with Ronnie Biggs in the hope of carrying on with the Pistols. When they had enough of McLaren's financial shenanigans though, like Rotten, they took him to court to sue for royalties. It's an age old story- \"artistic differences\" and \"money problems.\" The same thing happened to the Beatles.PUNK CHANGED ROCK FOR GOODIt was last year maybe that Never Mind the Bollocks finally went platinum in the States, almost twenty years after its release. Of course, when they were around and even after that, the Pistols never made a huge dent in the charts here with albums or singles like they did in the UK. Of course you could say, like the Velvet Underground, that their influence is so strong, that this itself outstrips the significance of their lack of chart success. No doubt that they did inspire hundreds, thousands of bands to play loud and fast but some things never change. Rod Stewart, Elton John, Paul McCartney and almost every other tired old rock dinosaur that punk sought to demystify and expose thrive even today along with many lesser siblings (Mariah Carry, Whitney Houston, Michael Bolton to name a few). As David Sealy noted, rock was just too big to be taken down so it lumbered along as putrid and pale as before. That's not even mentioning all the pop idiots (remember Duran Duran or Culture Club) who had those funny haircuts and clothes to make them look cool Even today.PUNK DIED ABOUT '78 OR '79You could just as well make a case that it croaked in '66 but so what Elvis Costello said that his quiet, mostly acoustic King of America was kind of punk album, showing not just plenty of smarts by the way of hard copy but also the real gist of what punk was about. Even Rotten/Lydon himself took a major detour after the Pistols with Public Image Limited- technically, they did not SOUND like a punk band but with his caterwauling and the savage guitars, who's to say It might be pretty laughable to hear Nirvana called a punk band but that's not altogether far-fetched: Cobain yelped, roared and thundered so what the hell's that supposed to be Just to say that it's different because it's not '77 is like saying that a saxophonist can't play jazz today because it's not the forties or Robert Cray shouldn't play blues because it's not the fifties anymore. Part of what punk was supposed to be about was erasing a lot of erroneous lines that divided people from making the music they love. ANYONE was supposed to be able to do it, rightIF THE PISTOLS NEVER EXISTED, THERE'D BE NO PUNK ROCKLet's see there's the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Television, Johnny Thunder's Heartbreakers, Pere Ubu, Suicide, Patti Smith, the Dictators, and believe it or not, Devo and Blondie that all where gigging and recording before Rotten wandered into McLaren's shop. Actually, McLaren managed the New York Dolls in their dying days and took plenty of fashion tips (slashed clothing, razor blades, and safety pins) from Richard Hell. When it comes to American music, the English are like the Japanese when it comes to American technology: they'll make copy after copy of it and sell it all back to us.THE PISTOLS' RECORDS WERE \"RAW\" RECORDSThat's to say that they didn't go around overdubbing strings or adding keyboards. All good and well but not entirely so. First of all, some of their demos featuring session pro Chris Spedding and their released recordings were done by Chris Thomas who had worked with the Beatles, Pink Floyd and Roxy Music. This isn't to suggest that such behavior is sinful or undesirable but if you want truly rawly produced records, listen to Bikini Kill or Half Japanese for starters: I'd guarantee that even the first Clash album sounds like Dark Side of the Moon in comparison.THE PISTOLS PURPOSEFULLY RIPPED OFF THREE OR FOUR RECORD COMPANIES AND LAUGHED ALL THE WAY TO THE BANKOf course, this is what Malcolm McLaren would love people to believe. The fact of the matter is that although he relished toying with the media, pounds and pence were his bottom line. There were not necessarily any guarantees that the record companies wouldn't sue the band and McLaren for \"breech of contract\" or something else rather than paying them off- they certainly couldn't have afforded to fight A&M or EMI in court. Also think of the band themselves: it was their \"naughty\" behavior that kept getting them sacked yet all the while McLaren kept most of the money to himself. If they had some elaborate scheme to get their money by getting the record companies p.o.'d, they have a lot of explaining to do (of course, none of them ever suggested this themselves).None of this is to say that punk was a waste or an aberration- it was or is just another shade of rock. That it tried to change the rules is not so laughable. It was up against too much and may yet have it's day. As \"Alternative\" today becomes mainstream, it may be that punk can still make a difference in the airwaves here as well as making a dent in peoples' grey matter. Of course, even this is all suspect. A cynic could just as easily tell you that it's \"sold out\" and that the major labels have finally made their peace with this music as a market has been developed for it. Sad to say, this may be the real reason that a number of punk bands (Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, Wire, Pere Ubu, Television, the Raincoats) have had another go at it. Of course, just like Album-Orientated Rock formats, capitalism may be too big a monster for punk to take on alone.THE REUNION: Malcolm McLaren must be kicking himself. He actually came up with the idea a couple of years ago. Lydon's response was \"What's he going to do Dig up Sid\" As Lydon and his mates saw that nothing was happening with their own careers (and not just commercially), they thought \"Why not\" Lydon himself hasn't done anything remotely interesting since the early days of Public Image Limited. The Pistols had been denied the American market when they started (thanks in part of McLaren's idea of getting the best (meanest) reaction from Southerners), so why shouldn't they finally get a decent pay-check from a tour of the States It worked for the Who a lot of times. I guess if Townshend can still sing \"hope I die before I get old\" with a straight face, Johnny can still cackle \"no future for me\" and mean it, man. Filty Lucre is pretty appropriate, considering what they have (or don't have) to offer now. 59ce067264