They only did it cos of fame

The Sex Pistols - 'E.M.I.' (Never Mind the Bollocks - Here's the Sex Pistols - 1977)

This entry may be interesting to get past some corporate firewalls and into your email inboxes!

Once you've filled your incendiary debut album with polemics on the British monarchy, abortion, civil unrest, The New York Dolls, the nature of state surveillance in West Berlin, as well as doing nothing, feeling nothing and caring about nothing, there can't be many more targets to bring up in the crosshairs. For the final track of their only album, Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols, The Sex Pistols managed to do a big gobby phlegm into the hand that fed them, if only for a couple of months.

‘E.M.I.’ is a diss¹ track that fires a broadside at, unsurprisingly, the record label E.M.I. for wanting to have their cake and eat it when it came to punk rock. Happy with the concept but not with the practicality of what rostering the band entailed. EMI was a massive record label at the time - the largest in the world, in fact, and wanted a piece of the pie. What scared them off The Sex Pistols by the time that 1976 had turned into 1977?

The band signed for E.M.I. in October 1976 on a two-year contract. This was weeks after they’d played a punk special at London’s 100 Club, organised by svengali Malcolm McLaren and featuring the likes of The Clash, The Damned, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, an early incarnation of Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Stinky Toys. Due to the music press's positive coverage, McLaren was allegedly able to secure a £40k advance from the record label. By the end of November, the band had released ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and were lined up, only because Queen’s Freddie Mercury was at the dentist, to appear on Bill Grundy’s Tonight show on 1st December 1976. Tonight was a show that went out on ITV at tea time. Not a show you should, for example, swear repeatedly on.

Many of you will know what happened next, so here is a sketch from the actor Kevin Eldon’s sketch show which recreates it with an Amish twist side-by-side with the real thing.

Afterwards front page headlines such as “The FILTH and the FURY” in the Daily Mirror appeared. As a result, the label had to contend with protests at the band’s gigs, seeing 13 shows cancelled in December and even workers refusing to work at the factory that was pressing more copies of their single. An EMI board meeting² in early December saw a discussion on dropping them, but ultimately, they were given a stay of execution. This continued into early 1977 when eventually, after more negative press around some shows in the Netherlands, the band was dropped entirely.

Not content with only being on one record label for mere weeks, they managed to sign with A&M with great fanfare outside Buckingham Palace in March 1977, only to last less than a week. In amongst all this chaos, the band recorded what would become their debut album and a version of their middle finger to E.M.I. before bassist Glen Matlock was sacked. They would go on to re-record without his contribution in May, but by the end of March, they were playing the song live³.

The song is as terse as the finger-pointing lyrics that it is backing. It makes it clear that the band were not putting on an act, and the label couldn’t control them and turn the outrage parade on and off when it suited them.

Johnny Rotten has described the song as one of his favourites⁴ and told Rolling Stone in 2017 that;

EMI wanted to sign us to show what a grand, varied label they were, but they really were not. This song was fun to write. It was actually mostly done in the studio because the groove was there, and it was relentless.

One of the great strengths of the song is that E.M.I. sounds great to shout in the fashion the band do. Rotten hangs the “I” out to dry more and more at the end of E.M.I. as the song continues. When Rotten gets this vocal delivery spot on, like he does here and on ‘No Feelings’ it is like being shouted at by an audiobook - neither ‘not singing’ nor ‘not speaking’ to you. Even the agitated guitar solo sounds like it is wagging a finger at the faces of all the suited squares at the record company. The drumming from Paul Cook is tight, loud and then loose and noisy at the right moments. The band also manages to sneak in a broadside at even more temporary home A&M at the song’s end before the album closes with a juvenile fart noise because why not?

1. Nothing to do with the market town in South Norfolk.

2. One board member was future UK Chancellor of The Exchequer, Sir Geoffrey Howe.

3. A first live outing was at Notre Dame Hall, London, on 21 March 1977

4. In his 1994 autobiography Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dog