Song of the Week:The Sex Pistols - God Save The Queen

Genres:Punk Rock
Album:Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols

Label:Virgin

Writers:Sex Pistols

"God Save the Queen" was released as the band's second single and was featured on their album "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols."

God Save the Queen was as much an event as a song. Its comprehensive rejection by the mainstream became its selling point, with its crude anti-monarchist message met by a similarly crude rejection as it was allegedly kept off the top spot. On the occasion of Queen's Silver Jublee, 6th June in 1977, the Sex Pistols played on a boat on the Thames before police boarded the boat and ended the gig. The title of this song is diractly taken from "God Save the Queen" the national anthem of United Kingdom.

More anarchy than politics, the song is a perfect reflection of the group:a vitriolic shambles that barely holds itself together. Comparing Queen with "fascist regime," beneath its "no future" sneer lies an empathy in lines such as "They made you a moron" and "Don't be told what you want/Don't be told what you need."

"God Save the Queen" is more English than the national anthem, just as Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" is more American than lrving Berlin's "God Bless America." It is an honest anthem for the unrepresented, and a bullet aimed at the elite. John Lydon later said it:You don't write a song like "God Save the Queen" because you hate English race. You write a song like that because you love them, and you'ra fed up of seeing them mistreated.