12. Sex PistolsNever Mind The Bollocks Here’s The Sex Pistols

In my book this isn’t a punk record – it’s a fantastic rock album. I mean, it’s produced by Chris Thomas for goodness sake. Cookie (Paul Cook) is a fantastic drummer: I know him because he plays in Phil Collen’s other band, The Manraze Then you have Steve Jones – fucking amazing guitarist. Matlock had gone by this point, I think he was on ‘Anarchy…’ and Sid was on ‘Bodies’ but apart from that Jones did all of the guitar and all of the bass parts as well. And he probably did more overdubs on that than we did on bloody Pyromania – it took nine months to record. It’s a real album: it represents punk, but in many ways it doesn’t. The Pistols record is as planned out as a Genesis album. And that’s why it works: it’s fucking brilliant. Nobody snarls like Rotten: his ‘we mean it, man’ on ‘God Save the Queen’, it puts the hairs on my arm up to this day.