The Filth and the Fury:
Sex Pistols x D. H. Lawrence
Obscene language ... what language is that? I speak nothing but the fucking English language.
And if that's obscene then tough shit. - Johnny Rotten [1]
I.
Whilst their manager Malcolm McLaren tried to package the band as a combination of sex, style, and subversion, the press had other ideas following the Bill Grundy incident (see below) and would often discuss them in relation to another trio of terms beginning with the letter S: swearing, spitting, and scandalous behaviour.
It's the first of these things - i.e., the use of language regarded as coarse, blasphemous, or obscene - that I wish to briefly touch on here with reference both to the Sex Pistols and, firstly, to the writer D. H. Lawrence ...
II.
Following publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), Lawrence conceded that he would henceforth be known as the author who (re-)introduced the so-called obscene words into English literature [2].
But despite the abuse he received for this, Lawrence insisted on the necessity of having published his book unexpurgated and maintained that "the words that shock so much at first don't shock at all after a while" [3].
And that's not because we are corrupted by the words and quickly become depraved; rather, says Lawrence, it's because "the words merely shocked the eye, they never shocked the mind at all" [4].
He continues: "People with no minds may go on being shocked, but they don't matter. People with minds realise that they aren't shocked, and never really were; and they experience a sense of relief." [5]
For Lawrence, words such as shit, fuck, cunt, and arse, refer to perfectly natural acts and to organs we all possess: "Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body ..." [6] and so it is the mind we have to liberate, bringing it into harmony with the body and its potencies. Otherwise, we will fall into a kind of madness: like Swift [7].
Thus, whether one agrees or disagrees with Lawrence's use of four-letter words throughout Lady C. - and whether one thinks his attempt to cleanse language and free the mind works or fails - it cannot be said that he was merely attempting to épater le bourgeois.
Obviously, it was a novel "written in defiance of convention" [8], but the ridiculous desire simply to shock the respectable middle-class and offend slow-minded and mob-indignant members of the public, was not Lawrence's intention.
The bold (if slightly naive) attempt to give back the body its own phallic language and to startle individuals out of their word-prudery - to remind us that the word arse "is as much god as the word face" [9] - is an attempt to keep society sane.
III.
I'm not sure that the Sex Pistols shared Lawrence's philosophical concern with revaluing language and preserving social wellbeing, etc. Nevertheless, these foul-mouthed yobs as they were branded, managed to place the question of swearing back on the agenda for discussion - not once but twice.
The first occasion followed what is known as the Bill Grundy incident, in December 1976; a televised early evening interview which, as Paul Gorman says, has attained folkloric proportions within the cultural imagination:
"The impact of [Steve] Jones closing the encounter by calling Grundy 'a fucking rotter' - in the process uttering the expletive for only the third time in four decades of British television broadcasting - was to make the Sex Pistols both media demons and free speech causes célèbres." [10]
Amusingly, one viewer claimed that he had been so outraged by the incident that he had kicked in the screen of his new £380 colour television set, though I suspect he would be one of those mindless morons that Lawrence describes.
Still, it demonstrates that even fifty years after the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover - and sixteen years following the Chatterley trial at the Old Bailey - expletives could still cause shock and outrage amongst some sections of the Great British Public.
IV.
The second time the Sex Pistols brought the question of what does and does not constitute offensive language to public attention was in November 1977, following release of their debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks ... [11]
The album, banned from sale by several highstreet retailers - including Boots, Woolworth's, and WH Smith - was available at Virgin Records, including the Nottingham branch where, on 9 November, the police arrested the store manager, Chris Searle, for displaying promotional material which included the word 'bollocks' in the window, after previously warning him on several occasions not to do so.
Searle was charged with contravening the Indecent Advertisement Act (1889) and found himself in front of three local magistrates two weeks later.
What might have remained a small matter, became a story of great national interest when Richard Branson - owner of the Virgin Record Stores and the Virgin Records label that the Sex Pistols were signed to - hired the famous barrister John Mortimer QC to (successfully) defend the case.
By calling a professor of English at the University of Nottingham as an expert witness, Mortimer was able to show that bollocks in the context of the album title clearly meant nonsense and derived from an Old English term for the kind of rubbish spoken by clergymen in their sermons and had no obscene sexual meaning, even if, etymologically, the term referred to the testicles.
The chairman of the court hearing reluctantly concluded that as much as he and his colleagues wholeheartedly deplored the 'vulgar
exploitation of the worst instincts of human nature for the purchases of
commercial profits', they must find the defendant not guilty of any crime.
Helped in part by the publicity surrounding the case, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols topped the charts and quickly went gold; Punk? Call it filthy lucre - a prime example of how to generate cash from chaos, as Malcolm might say.
V.
Of course, all of this is a long, long time ago and we live today in a very different world from the one in which Lawrence wrote or even the one in which the Sex Pistols recorded.
Indeed, one is almost tempted to speak now of the lost art of swearing as a once precious verbal resource has almost entirely been robbed of its potency. Rendered banal through endless repetition, the word fuck, for example, no longer shocks, no longer offends, no longer amuses, no longer endears.
That's not to say, however, that the present doesn't have its own list of taboo terms and one smiles to see the content warnings given at the start of TV sitcoms from the 1970s: discriminatory language is what gets Gen Z viewers clutching their pearls and calling for the morality police, not foul language.
Notes
[1] I have slightly altered the transcript of an interview that Rotten gave to Dutch TV in 1977.
The interviewer asks (rather strangely) about infamous language and although Rotten twice repeats this term in his answer, one suspects that he was aware that the interviewer intended to say obscene language, although, one cannot be quite sure; the Dutch translation that appears on screen is schuttingtaal, which is usually given in English as 'jargon' or 'secret language'.
Click here to watch on YouTube.
[2] As he writes in his 'Introduction to Pansies' (1929): "I am abused most of all for using the so-called 'obscene' words [...] all the old words that belong to the body below the navel [...]" - words that cause the censor-morons to get excited and allow policemen to think they have the right to arrest you. See D. H. Lawrence, The Poems, Vol I., ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 664.
[3-5] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover', in Lady Chatterley's Lover, ed. Michael Squires (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 307.
[6] Ibid., p. 309.
In his 'Introduction to Pansies', Lawrence writes: "What is obvious is that the [obscene] words [...] have been dirtied by the mind, by unclean mental association. The words themselves are clean, so are the things to which they apply. But the mind drags in a filthy association, calls up some repulsive emotion. Well then, cleanse the mind, that is the real job." See p. 664 of The Poems, Vol. I (2013).
[7] See Lawrence's remarks on Swift and his horror at the fact that his beloved Celia defecates in 'Introduction to Pansies' ... pp. 665-666. But see also my post entitled 'Celia Shits! Notes on Jonathan Swift's "The Lady's Dressing Room" and (Alleged) Coprophobia' (2 April 2024): click here.
[8] D. H. Lawrence, 'A Propos of Lady Chatterley's Lover' ... p. 334
[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to Pansies' ... p. 664.
[10] Paul Gorman, The Life and Times of Malcolm McLaren (Constable, 2020), p. 339.
For those readers who aren't familiar with the details of the Bill Grundy incident, let me briefly summarise: After Queen cancelled their appearance on the live television show Today show
at the last minute, the Sex Pistols were offered the spot in order to
promote their debut single, 'Anarchy in the UK', and explain what punk rock was all about.
Things started badly and quickly got worse when it was clear that Grundy was hostile and dismissive of the band and that the latter - particularly guitarist Steve Jones - were not prepared to take his bullshit, nor listen to his creepy sexual innuendo when speaking to a female member of their entourage called Siouxsie Sioux. Suggesting to her that they might 'meet afterwards' triggered Jones into calling him a 'dirty sod' and a 'dirty old man'.
Stupidly, Grundy then challenged Jones to 'say something outrageous' - which he did; calling Grundy a "dirty bastard" and a "dirty fucker". Grundy responded, "What a clever boy!" to which Jones hilariously replied, "What a fucking rotter!"
Predictably, the phone lines to the Thames switchboard lit up and the national press had a field day. Grundy was suspended by Thames and his career effectively ended. The Sex Pistols were fired shortly afterwards by their record label EMI and were now branded as public enemies.
The interview - click here - has become one of the most requested TV clips of all time. It will be noted that Johnny Rotten having muttered the word 'shit' prior to Jones's outburst almost apologises at first for his use of a 'rude word'.
[11] The album was originally going to be called God Save the Sex Pistols, but the title was changed based on a phrase favoured by
Steve Jones, which, as Rotten explained, was a popular working-class expression meaning 'stop
talking rubbish'.
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