On 6 November, 1975, the Sex Pistols played their first ever concert, opening for a vaguely nowhere rock'n'roll revival band called Bazooka Joe, in one of the common rooms at St. Martin's College, London. The Pistols went on, "and it was really loud...deafening. And we were going mad because this was our first gig and we were all really nervous." The set list which they'd rehearsed for weeks was suddenly written in a foreign language, "none  knew what we were doing." There wasn't a murmur of applause, and the Pistols had thrashed around for twenty minutes when "suddenly, you had this great big hand pop out and someone pulled the plug out." The Sex Pistols' first gig ended in a silence almost as confused as the noise which it replaced. Anti-pop? No, just a gaggle of stage-frightened noise merchants.

Taking the standard themes of youth disorientation, then twisting them through Rotten's own sense of sociological distortion, pretty much the Sex Pistols' entire repertoire was composed by the summer of 1976, and had been recorded by the fall. "Seventeen", "Satellite", "Problems", "Pretty Vacant", "God Save The Queen", "Anarchy In The UK" explode out of the speakers in a barrage of disaffected noise which ensured not only that group would have a genuinely marketable public profile by the time the media finally cottoned on to them, but that they also had the repertoire to match their reputation.

And almost accidentally, they were also setting the standards that whole new musical community could strive toward, the Punk ethic of Do it Yourself forming around the notion that if the Sex Pistols could write their own songs, anyone could.

Written by Alessandro Silvestri