The most famous song about Queen Elizabeth II is called God Save the Queen, and so is the second most famous. The Sex Pistols’ decision to record and release their anti-monarchist screed in time for the silver jubilee was the most brilliant provocation in a career consisting of almost nothing but brilliant provocations. The band had been playing the song for a few months under its original title, No Future, but manager Malcolm McLaren said the phrase sounded “like an ad for a bank”. Much better, he thought, to hijack the national anthem, turn it upside down and hitch a ride on the jubilee. What a coup.
Another thing the Sex Pistols’ hit shares with the national anthem is that it is not about Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor but a symbol of the British state. For John Lydon, the Queen is not just synonymous with “the fascist regime”, she’s “not a human being” at all. The song soon spirals away from the ruler towards the resentfully ruled, “the flowers in the dustbin”. Britain was so fraught in 1977 – politically, socially, economically – that to many young people, the patriotic jubilee festivities were a bitter farce of nostalgia and denial, like bunting on a bomb site. As Jon Savage writes in England’s Dreaming: “Here was the ultimate statement of pop’s everlasting present, just at the moment when the masses were celebrating the past.”
