Rhino Factoids: The Sex Pistols say, “Hello, EMI!”

38 years ago today, music fans in the UK awoke to discover that the Sex Pistols had been signed to a deal with EMI Records, a situation which it’s fair to say didn’t play out in quite as successful a fashion as the label might’ve hoped. Nor did the band let them forget it: even now, you can hear a summary of the Pistols’ brief stint on EMI as the closing track of the band’s lone album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

In his book Punk Diary 1970-1979, George Gimarc describes the Sex Pistols’ meeting with EMI as “a four hour rush meeting,” with the label’s A&R manager, Nick Mobbs, quoted as saying, “For me, the Sex Pistols are a backlash against the ‘nice little band’ syndrome and the general stagnation of the music industry. They’ve got to happen for all our sakes. Here at last is a group with a bit of guts for the younger people to identify with.” Clearly, Mobbs wasn’t the only person at the label who was excited about the Pistols’ possibilities: the band earned a reported £40,000 payday when they signed to EMI, which isn’t a bad payday when you consider that they were dropped by the label a mere three months later, having released precisely one single during their tenure.

Then again, that one single was a pretty freaking important one…

Glen Matlock, the Pistols’ original bassist, found out about the abrupt conclusion of the band’s EMI contract when he got an early morning call from The Daily Mirror. “This voice (was) telling me, ‘You’ve been sacked from EMI. How do you feel about it?” Matlock recalled in his autobiography, 1990’s I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol. “I said, ‘Well, that’s nice, isn’t it?’ I mean it ironically, but as it was the very first thing I’d said to anyone that morning, maybe it didn’t come out sounding that way. Of course, it came out in the papers as ‘Glen Matlock thinks it’s really nice that The Sex Pistols have been dumped by EMI.’ The rest of the band really gave me a hard time over that.”

“It was an achievement rather than a detriment when EMI signed and – three months later – dropped us,” wrote John Lydon in his 1994 autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. “I honestly didn’t care. The check landed.”

That said, Lydon remains amused (or at least he was in ’94) by the song that resulted from the experience. “I recommend a lousy record company every time you run out of songs,” he wrote. “The material is glorious. It’s one of my faves of the lot.”