Nineteen-seventy-six was the year punk broke — a moment when a cultural and musical revolution reshaped the landscape of popular music. In England, one band was about to lead the charge and etch itself permanently into the public psyche: the Sex Pistols.
Among the witnesses to their birth was journeyman guitarist Chris Spedding. At the time, Spedding was one of England’s most in-demand session players, contributing guitar to recordings by artists such as Jack Bruce, John Cale, Donovan, Elton John and David Essex, and later Bryan Ferry, Paul McCartney and Joan Armatrading.
Spedding first saw the band perform in March 1976 at London’s famed 100 Club.
“When I first saw them, there were about 15 people in the audience and 10 people in the audience when they'd finished,” Spedding recalls today. “I sort of immediately saw that this is what we needed in rock music at the time — something like this with new blood.
“When I heard them, it was obvious that the A&R people from the record companies weren't coming to see them. They had this reputation of putting people off.
“So I said to [their manager] Malcolm McLaren, ‘What you guys need — and what the current wisdom at the time was — is a three-song demo with the best three songs. If a record company hears something they like, they're going to sign you. They're not going to sign you by coming down to see you.’”
Spedding offered to lend a helping hand. On May 15, 1976, he took the group into Majestic Studios in Clapham — a studio that had previously been a cinema — to record a three-track demo, with Spedding handling production duties.
“I said to them, ‘Okay, I can help you guys,’ because I’d been around studios a lot and I knew how to make a demo,” he says. “I went to one of their rehearsals at their place in Denmark Street and listened to all their songs, made notes of the titles and said, ‘These are the three songs we’re doing: “Problems,” “Pretty Vacant” and “No Feelings.”’ They hadn't written ‘God Save the Queen’ at that time, otherwise I'd have probably included that too.”
Spedding chose Majestic Studios because he had worked there previously while contributing electric guitar to Brian Eno’s 1974 debut solo album Here Come the Warm Jets.
“I remembered getting a good sound out of that studio,” he says. “And it was a 16-track studio too, because I didn't want to go into a 24-track studio with all the bells and whistles. The Sex Pistols had never been in a proper studio before, but the session was done very quickly. We went in one day around 11 o'clock to set up, and by five o'clock that afternoon we were finished with the three songs.”
The demo helped secure the group a record deal with EMI Records, which released their debut single “Anarchy in the U.K.” later that year. Spedding also passed the demo on to producer Chris Thomas, who would go on to produce the band’s debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, released by Virgin Records in October 1977.
As the band’s notoriety grew, some questioned Spedding’s early involvement with the group.
“I had a run-in with a music business journalist in a nightclub who thought he was helping me out by saying, ‘Chris, you better watch your reputation because you've been associated with the Sex Pistols,’” Spedding recalls.
“So I said to him, ‘Well, each to his own — but when did you hear them?’
‘Oh, I've not heard them, but everybody knows they're terrible,’ came the journalist’s reply.
“And that was it. I don't think that guy lasted very long as a music journalist. He got it totally wrong. I got them their deal with EMI. And I got them their producer, Chris Thomas. So the whole thing, as far as I was concerned, was a success.”
In the studio, Spedding made sure the band’s raw live spirit translated onto tape.
“I would help them out by listening to their instruments, making sure there were no buzzers or rattles that most musicians don't hear,” he says. “If you're attuned to studio sound, when there's a rattle on the snare drum, for example, you'd hear it and try to get rid of it. But of course Paul Cook’s drums sounded fantastic. So did Steve Jones. I even brought my own amp down so he wouldn't have one that gave up the ghost while running.”
“I also made sure they could hear everything clearly in their headphones and got them to run through the song from start to finish. At the same time, without them knowing, I’d ask the engineer to push record and they’d play it perfectly with no nervousness about it.
“I knew that any musician who's never been in the studio before might start getting nervous once they see the red light. So we went through the songs quickly by fooling them into thinking I wasn't recording the takes. I never made them play things over and over again. They knew the songs. They only needed to play them once, and once we had a good sound I wanted to keep that spontaneity.”
Over the years, rumors have persisted that Spedding — not Pistols guitarist Steve Jones — played the guitars on those early recordings.
“I'm not the sort of guy who's going to go in with a group that has a perfectly fine, accomplished guitar player and start playing all his parts,” Spedding says. “He's going to get pissed off at me, and it wouldn't accomplish anything.
“I had been playing for about 20 years and Steve Jones had only been playing for about two years, but I couldn't think of any way of playing Sex Pistols music better than he did. So I wasn't about to say, ‘I want to produce you — and then play all the guitar parts.’”
