Sex Pistols File

Ray Stevenson (editor) Sex Pistols File (1978)
I borrowed this from some kid at school and spent the next couple of weeks absorbing more or less every last detail. With hindsight, I'm not even sure I had any of their records at that point and may only have known them from Sid's versions of Something Else and C'mon Everybody. By the time I had enough of a disposable income to buy my own copy, it had vanished from the shelves and the moment had passed. Now catching up, four decades later, I'm astonished to realise that I vaguely knew the guy who put the book together. My friend Carl came to know Ray Stevenson fairly well in later years and so I met him down the pub on a couple of occasions. I knew he had one hell of a reputation as having taken many of the best known photographs of the whole punk era, and I vaguely recall he had some great stories, but somehow the penny didn't quite drop beyond something fairly basic about my probably having seen his work in Sounds.

Well, fuck me.

The book is a scrappy splatter of Ray's photographs along with articles and interviews from the papers arranged in roughly chronological order so as to provide a pleasantly impressionistic summary of the rise and fall of the Pistols, and one which - oddly enough - seems to work better than the usual biographical narratives through the image and noise being preserved without any dominant authorial voice getting in the way. So it reads now just as it did then, from my perspective, as the fortunes of a bunch of older kids who were trying to make things a bit more fun and interesting than they had been for some time. Maybe it's not so much that I lost sight of what this book did for me, but I'd forgotten how much of it came from this thing. This was where I learned that sometimes it's necessary, even positive, to point out when something is dull or stupid or needs to be replaced by something better. We seem to have forgotten this of late, at least judging by the number of times I've had some self-appointed gatekeeper set me right about adults dressed as characters from children's television shows, or insisting that I really should try with such and such a fucking Yes album because the musicianship blah blah blah...

I don't really care that Rotten sells butter and votes Donald, and I don't really care that they were a boy band. They taught me the joys of saying no, and unpopular opinions, and not turning into your parents, and never having to say you're sorry. I sort of wish I'd realised this and had been able to directly thank Ray Stevenson when I had the opportunity, but never mind. It probably would have come across as slightly weird.

This one, in all sincerity, changed my life.