To celebrate this year’s Platinum Jubilee, director Julien Temple has released a new video for the Sex Pistols’ classic single, “God Save The Queen”. The new clip combines footage from the performance video shot by Temple at London’s Marquee Club in May 1977, with footage of the band’s notorious Thames river boat party on the Silver Jubilee day in June that same year. You can check it out below.
Forty-five years later, the “God Save The Queen” video also coincides with the worldwide launch of the TV series Pistol. It also features exclusive footage of some of the earliest, most important and influential women fans of the band including Vivienne Westwood, Jordan, Debbie and Tracey, Catwoman, Siouxsie Sioux and Helen of Troy amongst others.
The original release of the seminal song in 1977 was set to coincide with the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations and caused huge controversy in the UK. The band was dropped by its label A&M in the midst of the uproar after just six days, with 25,000 copies of the record destroyed by the label. Some copies, however, did survive, and they are now among the most collectable records in rock.
Following the A&M fallout, Sex Pistols were quickly signed to Virgin instead, through whom they officially released “God Save The Queen.” Despite being banned by the BBC, the track reached No.1 on the NME chart. It also landed at No.2 on the Official UK Singles Chart, sparking rumors that it had been deliberately kept from securing the top spot.
To celebrate the anniversary of an iconic and era-defining release, two versions of the single are being re-released. In honor of the scrapped A&M release, 1,977 copies of that label’s version of the single will be available, while a further 4,000 copies of the Virgin single will also be put on sale. Both versions recreate the original artwork, with the A&M edition featuring its generic company sleeve and pressed on silver/platinum vinyl. The Virgin single has the absolutely iconic Sex Pistols artwork designed by Jamie Reid.
For the first time in over 20 years, 20 of the Sex Pistols‘ recordings from 1976 to 1978 are collected together to tell the story of one of the world’s most influential and extraordinary bands. Out now through UMC, The Sex Pistols: The Original Recordings covers a historic period when the band were rarely out of the news or the charts.
Sex Pistols left the British Establishment shaking when they exploded onto the music scene, kickstarting what later became known as punk – a term the band were never comfortable with. Young people ripped up not just their musical forebears but their social ones too and Sex Pistols were the snarling, ferocious figurehead of the revolution.