It seems incredible to think that when the Sex Pistols released the eternally excoriating Never Mind The Bollocks…, their debut album, they were just 78 days from extinction.
That’s how quickly it happened; vaporised into a cloud of acrimony, embezzlement, addiction and death, that’s how fast the world’s most vilified group flipped from present to past tense. At the end of what would be their final concert for 18 years, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, on January 14, 1978 singer Jonny Rotten exited the stage with a rhetorical summation that has since become arguably the most famous quote in all of rock’n’roll; “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”
Decades later, I had the opportunity to ask Rotten ( now answering to his birth name John Lydon) exactly what he meant by this.
