Sex Pistols vs. The Clash, the yin and yang of punk

Over four decades ago, the Sex Pistols and The Clash rattled Buckingham Palace – both its residents and their subjects. Though today, are the two bands no more than faded sepia photographs in an old family album? Or are they deceased messengers of ideas that are still as fresh as ever? Even if the passing years bring hindsight, they can also erase an essential context that’s always worth being reminded of. While the first notes of Anarchy In The UK resounded (the Sex Pistols’ first single recorded on October 17, 1976 and released the following month), rock ‘n’ roll had become bloated and was packing out the stadiums. We’re lightyears away from the cry of revolt that it originally symbolized, when it was performed with whatever there was to hand, preferably in a garage. It went from the music of rebellion to a cash drawer symphony. And between the instrumental diarrhoeas from psychedelic rock, the heaviness of the nascent hard rock and the experiments of frustrated jazzmen who fed into progressive rock, the genre’s DNA was severely modified in the middle of the 70s. Rock had lost its urgency, its simplicity, its violence and its sincerity. Even the hippy values seemed to get back into line. And we’re not even taking into account that the English skies were dark grey at the time: the soaring unemployment, the economic crisis at its peak, the issues with Northern Ireland, and the monarchy detached from young people. It’s on this lovely dung hill that four delinquents, only 20 years old at the time, raised their flag. Four young Englishmen (who didn’t really get along) led by John Lydon, a.k.a. Johnny Rotten, possessed by the devil and displaying a Pink Floyd t-shirt on which he handwrote I hate. They existed for just two years and a half (from the summer of 1975 to January 1978) and only one studio album to go down in history: Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols.