Sex Pistols

The Sex Pistols, a London group whose active career lasted barely two and a half years, reshaped popular music. Formed in 1975, they set the punk movement alight across the United Kingdom, and their clothes and hairstyles became a defining influence on the subculture's fashion. Their first line-up of Johnny Rotten, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock, joined by Sid Vicious in early 1977, played a raw, confrontational style of punk that unsettled the establishment.

Their May 1977 single "God Save the Queen", released to coincide with the Silver Jubilee, was banned by the BBC and nearly every independent station, making it the most censored record in the nation's history. Their only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, reached number one in the UK in 1977. In January 1978 Rotten announced the break-up live on stage at the final gig of a troubled American tour. Vicious died of a heroin overdose in February 1979, following his arrest for the alleged murder of Nancy Spungen. A reunion tour in 1996 proved successful, and in 2024 Jones, Cook and Matlock reformed with Frank Carter standing in for Rotten.