Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols - The Sex Pistols

Provenance: I'm no punk, believe you me, but this is as canonical as it gets. Got this in an independent record store in Bournemouth that was by the town centre bus stops. The guy who worked there absolutely loathed me for liking bands wot did guitar solos.

Review: You've got to be shitting me, right? This ain't punk.

To clarify - formally, Never Mind the Bollocks... is closer to some of the classic rock and power pop of the era than it is to its genre contemporaries. Trying to speak intelligently about punk as either an aesthetic or an attitude is difficult, because it often depends where and when you're talking about.

But if you associate punk with a lo-fi sound, an amateur ethos and a prickle of danger, you would not be thinking about the Sex Pistols. This album is every bit as big, bright and chunky as any of the classic rock bands supposedly so derided by the young pups of punk. Never Mind the Bollocks... is also a wonderful bit of grave-robbing, as practically every guitar lick is copped from the golden age of rock 'n' roll. That's not just me either - goddamn Chuck Berry could hear it too. Hell, for a gaggle of snotty upstarts they certainly do like their interpolating guitar breaks, as much as any blooz rock band. The one element that does stand out from the crowd is Johnny Rotten's sneering alveolar trill, but even then, is it any weirder than, say, Family's Roger Chapman?

And yeah, one other thing - the songs are fucking brilliant.

At the end of the day, who gives a monkeys if the Sex Pistols were ultimately resurrection boys who added a smear of mucus to their retrograde rockin'? There are still real, visceral thrills to be had; the blathering about going under the Berlin Wall on 'Holidays In The Sun', the sand-blast nastiness of 'Bodies' and that opening couplet of 'God Save The Queen' are all absolutely spot on. I should probably acknowledge that, writing in 2017, I've become somewhat inured to the 'Sex Pistols as shockmasters' narrative, especially as every blessed documentary about British pop music in the 1970s is obliged to include a transition depicting the dinosaurs of prog (scene: Peter Gabriel dressed as a flower) being swept away (music: opening bars of 'Pretty Vacant') by the rising tide of punk (scene: it's only the bloody Sex Pistols!). Yawn.

The truth is, Never Mind the Bollocks... is little more than an update of a structure and sound that was popular twenty years before its release (rock 'n' roll, baby), and one could make the argument that its simple chord progressions and cavernous drum sound are the legacy of a genre - glam rock - that had its heyday only a few years prior. If you sped up the stomp of, say, Slade, Gary Glitter or Mud, would it sound so different to what the Pistols were selling? To these jaded ol' ears, the most 'punk' song on the album is 'Sub-Mission', if only because it wouldn't be out of place on Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power. 

The Sex Pistols were a great band, who represented a mood, a time and a moment that was bigger than they were. Ultimately, the music didn't go anywhere daring, but nor did it have to. It was still recognisably loud, spirited and disruptive, and if not revolutionary then certainly revanchist when it came to rock 'n' roll reclaiming the mantle of rebellion. And besides, even if I were not privy to even a semi-quaver of their music, I would love them anyway purely on the basis of their interview with Bill Grundy. Also, there's a good chance that had the Sex Pistols not existed we wouldn't have been treated to Sloppy Seconds and that, frankly, is an intolerable state of affairs.

Motivation Radio - Steve Hillage

Provenance: This is a very new album for me, as I received it for Christmas 2016. However, the reason I had wanted it stretches back a few years. I had been to see Gong play in Exeter, for whom Hillage served as both guitarist and support act. I was rather taken with his solo work I heard that night, especially 'Salmon Song'.

Gong were fantastic that night. The late Daevid Allan dressed in a gnome costume augmented with compact discs and regaled the audience with a story about collecting psilocybin mushrooms from "the wooded glades of the city." May he and Gilli Smyth enjoy the long and cosmic trip back to Planet Gong.

Review: Ugh. After wrasslin' with Ted Nugent's brutish and nasty Craveman it's a delight to lift one's gaze beyond the horizon and peer into the depths of a universe filled with a pure and positive energy. Okay, perhaps Steve Hillage hasn't exactly awoken the New Ager within, but the attitudes of discovery and wonder that pervade this album are certainly infectious. Hell, it's even there in the album cover; a wide-eyed, blissed-out Hillage, dressed like an initiate into a vaguely sinister cult, superimposed upon an image of 'The Dish' at Parkes Observatory. The inference is clear; keep your eyes on the skies and your ears tuned into the music of the spheres.

So what was Hillage concocting back on Earth to aid our ascent to a higher plane? The short answer: something endearingly eccentric.

Within the first track you're already tasting some really cool flavours - strange synthesizer sounds, Hillage's oddly attractive vocals (with no attempt made to hide his English accent) and some questing guitar work. Somewhat unexpected is the definite funk sound that is perceptible early on, and becomes more marked on songs like 'Motivation' and 'Saucer Surfing''. Reading around, I learnt that Hillage had, at this time, become quite enamoured with US funk acts such as Earth, Wind and Fire, and had consciously tried to capture some of that groove. Not that you'll ever confuse this with Mothership Connection.

With his adoption of funk, Hillage has also sloughed off a fair amount of the trappings of prog. That's not to say that this collection is any less weird as a consequence. So the seemingly straightforward heavy riff-rock of 'Light in the Sky' is undermined by Miquette Giraudy's breathy, panicked (and somewhat unexpected first time around) contributions. 'Radio' is the most singular song about radio since Helen Reddy's disturbing 'Angie Baby' (go on, have a listen and try explaining to me what's going on). In a final flourish, Hillage flips the sweaty priapism of Buddy Holly's 'Not Fade Away' into a song about universal love and personal inspiration. Come on, that's adorable!

At a remove of some forty years some of the sentiments can seem twee or naive to the average punter, and the synth tones are decidedly retro (so much so that they are possibly in vogue again). Was it a queer duck in 1977 too? Received wisdom suggests that such sensibilities couldn't survive in the midst of the punk crucible, but on the that punk score received wisdom is utterly wrong. (As an aside - I've lost count of the number of BBC music documentaries that show Rick Wakeman in a cape or Peter Gabriel dressed as a flower and there's a keyboard playing an interminable solo the whole time, and it's interrupted by a narrator going "But then..." and suddenly it's the intro to 'Pretty Vacant' and the Sex Pistols have destroyed everything that came before them. Everything. I mean, it's just pathetic. You can't even call it revisionism, it's just stupidity.)

However, in real time - the time you take to tune in to Motivation Radio - it is genuinely difficult to resist. If music can be escapist, then what better than an album that gives your inner consciousness a road map of the Milky Way and blasts you off with all best wishes in the world? Some music is aimed at the body, some towards the groin, some towards the head. Motivation Radio aims for the galaxy, and is all the more better for doing so.