They were working-class teenagers from London's Shepherd's Bush district, and their initial influences were rooted in Roxy Music, David Bowie, and what would come to be called junk shop glam. The Sex Pistols story began in 1972, when 17-year-old Steve Jones and 16-year-old Paul Cook decided to form a band. The group's only album from their original incarnation, 1977's Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols, is a cornerstone of British punk, 1980's Flogging a Dead Horse collected the original singles that earned them their reputation, 1996's Filthy Lucre Live, recorded at a reunion concert, is that rare Sex Pistols live album with decent fidelity, and 2021's 76-77 is a box set that collects the band's pre-Never Mind the Bollocks studio sessions.

Even as the media treated them as pariahs, the potency of their music and their image spoke to an audience waiting for something different than the prog and soft rock sounds that ruled the charts in the 1970s, sparking a revolution that is still playing itself out. The Sex Pistols' music was not formally groundbreaking, yet their simple meat-and-potatoes rock was filled with a power and aggression that was all but unknown in the mid-'70s, and the ferocious, sneering vocals of Johnny Rotten (as well as his pointed, accusatory lyrics) upended all expectations of how a rock frontman should look or sound. In just over two years, the group's success de scandale took them from utter obscurity to global infamy, beloved by converts to punk rock, hated by nearly everyone else, and subject to legal and vigilante persecution in their native England. They didn't invent punk rock, and they weren't the first British punk band to perform or record, but no band did more to turn punk into a global cultural phenomenon than the Sex Pistols.

Sex pistols discografia mega