The year 1977 was a crazy time for Britain. The country was struggling to maintain the upswing of the sixties, a time when London had felt like the cultural centre of the world. The city now stank with the disrepair of a country running on empty both financially and seemingly morally. If there was one band determined to shake Britain out of its slumber it was the Sex Pistols.
A band born out of the frightful London punk scene, it was a situation they not only relished but it was a scene that had been built and crafted by the band and their Bromley contingent for this very purpose. Forged in London’s West End and, more importantly, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s boutique shop ‘SEX’, the scene really took shape under their tutelage. It was there that the ethos of punk had been expertly conjured out of ripped fabric and safety pins. They would bring disorder to the masses.
By the summer of ’77, the Sex Pistols had already left an indelible mark on British society. Their song ‘God Save The Queen’ had rumbled HRH Queen Elizabeth II’s jubilee celebrations as the band tore down the Thames screaming their desperate need for revolution, or at the very least their desperate need to be heard.
It was a song that sent shockwaves across the nation and was therefore routinely banned by radio and television stations — BBC was no different, stopping the band from performing the number two single (a hotly debated topic itself) on the famous Top of the Pops weekly chart show. However, that all changed when the band screened the promo video for their next single ‘Pretty Vacant’ — a lip-synching festival of ‘fuck you’ to the establishment.
The track was a bastion of that very sentiment. As Johnny Rotten, the band’s menacing frontman and songwriter said of the track to Rolling Stone: “’Pretty Vacant,’ the concept, turned into really just kind of a football chant. And it was adopted on the terraces by quite a few firms – firms being gangs of hooligans.” He continues: “There is an irony in that song because we weren’t very pretty, and we were far from vacant.”
Posted from: https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/sex-pistols-pretty-vacant-top-of-the-pops-story-1977/