Hey, welcome to Fun Facts with Leslie. Today we are going to be talking about the Sex Pistols. I love the Sex Pistols and I'll tell you why. These people besides representing anarchy in the UK have managed to be part of our pop culture lexicon, 20 years after they originally emerged and only releasing one album.
You heard me, they only released one album. It was called Never Mind the Bullocks, here is the Sex Pistols. And the Sex Pistols are synonymous with anti-establishment, with the punk movement in the UK and with inventing Punk rock.
Now, what makes the Sex Pistols really interesting is that in being anti-establishment, they have become part of the establishment over the years. You can't go into a university class these days, and study pop culture, and study pre collage which is taking an object and reinventing it into another object without having Sex Pistols come up and having Johnny Rotten's face plastered up there with a safety pin through his ear, which I find completely interesting and ironic.
Now, the Sex Pistols two, I would say key members, being Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious are both super interesting characters. Johnny Rotten's name is actually John Lydon, he is still performing music today. Some people say that he got his name because his teeth was just so rotten, or because he was a rotten apple or a rotten name.
The other key member who you would really associate with the Sex Pistols is Sid Vicious. Now Sid Vicious, a lot of people know about him because first of all he died in a drug overdose at 21 and number two, it's widely speculated that he might have killed his lover Nancy. You can see a one version of the story in the popularized film Sid and Nancy. You can also learn about this in The Filth and the Fury which is a documentary about the Sex Pistols.
One last really interesting thing about the Sex Pistols is that they have probably got one of the shortest record contracts on the books in history. On March 10, 1977 the Sex Pistols were offered a contract by A&M, and they accepted it, they were awarded this contract outside Buckingham Palace, it was really fantastic, it was after their God Save the Queen performance and they were invited back to A&M headquarters to celebrate.
They celebrated by trashing the managers office and then Sid Vicious got really drunk and threw up all over the desk of the President of A&M. And A&M turned around and said, "Thank you, but no thank you" and by the 16th of March of that year, they had retracted the contract. And the Sex Pistols never, their album never would have seen light, had it not been for Virgin Records, who he stepped in, picked it up and released it.
So that's your Fun Fact about the Sex Pistols for this week, and I'll just leave you on one note; even though people continued to try and make them establishment, part of the establishment in 2006 when they were inducted infor Rock & Roll Hall of Fame The Sex Pistols were famous through the Sex Pistols still and they replied by saying, "we won't be there, we are not your monkey."
This is been Fun Facts with Leslie, have a great week bye, bye.
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