Never Mind the Bollocks

I just watched a documentary from 2002 called Classic Albums: Sex Pistols - Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. It was a lot of fun, and I'm eager to compare it to The Filth and the Fury, another documentary about the Sex Pistols from 2000, which Steve posted about here. I gather that documentary is perhaps more historical whereas this one is more focused on how the music was made. It featured many interviews with producers and sound engineers who worked on the classic album itself. I have a pretty low tolerance for lengthy discussions of studio wonkery (I don't know what compression is and I don't care to learn), but I found those pieces fascinating. As I'd often heard, Sid Vicious played not a note on the album; all of the bass lines were guitarist Steve Jones basically playing the same bar chords an octave lower. Also, while Steve Jones is no Kevin Shields, there are many more guitar tracks on any given song that I'd realized. Basically, it turns out that the Sex Pistols--with the glaring exception of Sid Vicious--were actually quite talented musicians.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the documentary, which included individual interviews with all four members of the band (by which I mean to include original and current bassist Glen Matlock, who co-wrote many of their greatest songs), was how generous they were to each other and how sad and wistful they were over their lost opportunities. I just wasn't expecting quite so much perspective from Johnny Rotten, I guess.