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This expensive collection will appeal to those interested in and working across
a wide range of intellectual and creative disciplines - sociology, psychology,
cultural anthropology and a bit of fuckology ...[1]
I.
Why is it that the very name Sex Pistols today creates tedium everywhere?
Probably because their story has been told over and over and over again, so that when one was tasked with submitting an original text on the band for a new Routledge Handbook it proved nigh on impossible: everything that could be said, had been said; everything that could be written, had been written.
The world needed a new collection of essays on, by, or about the Sex Pistols like it needed a hole in the head and I'm not sure which is worse; their recuperation by capitalism and the culture industry; their archiving in museums and art galleries; or their becoming the focus of academics who like to think of themselves as punk scholars.
If Malcolm McLaren's watchwords were sex, style, and subversion, mine are now silence and secrecy; words which have an important role to play as part of a cultural counter-narrative or, more precisely, a strategic non-narrative. Perhaps if we can give the Sex Pistols back some of their mystery, they might regain some of their allure, their magic, their danger.
My problem, however, as a writer who had formally agreed to submit a piece to a book project that wishes to critically examine (and celebrate) the diverse legacy of the Sex Pistols, is what might this strategy mean in practice. The last thing I wanted to do was further illuminate the band or make them more accessible: Do not play, don’t give the game away (Lesson 4).
My solution was to follow Amy Winehouse and go back to black … For black is the colour from which the Sex Pistols were born and to which they will always return; the colour that fascinated McLaren as an art student and which is associated in Western culture with the anarcho-nihilism and seduction of evil that the Sex Pistols would later embody.
II.
The Routledge Handbook of the Sex Pistols is published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of a key event in the band's history: the release of their debut single, 'Anarchy in the U.K.' (EMI Records, November 1976). A record that originally came in an all-black sleeve, with no information and no image of any kind: a perfect statement of what the band were all about, politically, philosophically, and artistically.
It's debatable whether McLaren was nodding towards Malevich's 'Black Square' painted sixty years earlier, recalling Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760), or if, as Paul Gorman suggests, the insistence on such a sleeve was simply in line with his own aesthetic, as seen in his portraits of the 1960s and the clothes designs produced with Vivienne Westwood for Sex [2].
Either way, it was a great idea and when EMI executives complained that an all-black sleeve with no identifying information would make it extremely difficult for fans to find it in the record stores, McLaren smiled and said: I don't want them to find it.
And when one of my editors was told that I planned on submitting a text consisting of thirteen all-black pages pointed out that no one will be able to read it, I echoed Malcolm in my reply ...
III.
Predictably, they weren't terribly impressed by the idea. They thought it was fine as an art school prank, but not appropriate for a comprehensive, peer-reviewed, must-have volume in the Routledge Music Handbook series [3].
And so I compromised and wrote a fairly standard academic essay, albeit one in which I privileged The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1979) over Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) and gave full credit for the Sex Pistols as a conceptual art project to McLaren working in collaboration with Vivienne Westwood and Jamie Reid.
By downplaying the contribution of the actual band members - who cares about the music? - I was able to argue that things only really became interesting once Rotten was thrown out of the band [4]. In this way, I hoped to subvert the book's effort to "immortalize the Pistols in perpetuity" [5] and prevent the canonisation of St Johnny.
Just to be clear: I've nothing against the good people at Routledge. In fact, I will always be grateful to them for publishing Nick Land's book on Bataille - The Thirst for Annihilation (1992) - despite rumoured reservations concerning the work.
And I've nothing either against the editors of the book: Mike Dines may be a bit of a hippie, which raises issues around trust for some people, but he's essentially a good egg and Gabriela Gelain é a minha brasileira favorita (with the exception of Clarice Lispector).
It's just that I loathe hagiography and wish to shit on any book that flirts with the genre à la Seve Jones.
The Sex Pistols were not "instrumental in creating a cultural transition from the staid 'black-and-white' authorized era of post-war austerity to what was to become a more radical and creative future in which everybody had agency and a do-it-yourself ethos that transformed social norms" [6].
They were, rather, the most notorious, filthy, disgusting, dirtiest rock 'n' roll band in the whole bloody world! [7]
Notes
[1] This opening is, of course, a hybrid paraphrase of publisher's blurb and Johnny Rotten's bored studio preamble to the band's cover of The Stooges' 'No Fun', which became the B-side to 'Pretty Vacant' (Virgin Records, 1977). Click on the link for the unedited version recorded in October 1976.
[2] I have discussed all this in the post titled 'But Malcolm, They'll Not Be Able to Find It' (24 March 2024).
[3] Obviously, there is a playful, pranksterish aspect to this work, but I still see it primarily as a provocative piece of meta-commentary that powerfully affirms the nihilism at the heart of the Sex Pistols project. The Black Essay would have effectively highlighted the irony of celebrating a movement based on No Future fifty years after its inception.
[4] See Stephen Alexander, 'Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Swindle: Or Why I Still Believe in the Ruins', in The Routledge Handbook of the Sex Pistols, ed. Mike Dines, Gabriela Gelain, Paul Graves-Brown and John Schofield (Routledge, 2026), pp. 180-191.
[5] Ellen Bernhard, Assistant Professor of Communication, Georgian Court University (USA), writing in a critical review of The Routledge Handbook of the Sex Pistols that features as the book's frontispiece and appears on the Routledge website. This phrase is everything I resist in my essay via the promotion of a gargoyle aesthetic and belief in the Ruins.
[6] I'm quoting from the description of The Routledge Handbook of the Sex Pistols, presumably written by the editors.
[7] Malcolm McLaren (as The Embezzler) speaking to camera outside Seditionaries in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (dir. Julien Temple, 1980).
[8] The first figure shows the original sleeve design for 'Anarchy in the U. K.' by the Sex Pistols (EMI, 1976) The second is the 13th and final page of my unused 'Black Essay' (2024) intended for The Routledge Handbook of the Sex Pistols. The first section of this post is based on the abstract for this non-text.
