Into the abyss: the Sex Pistols bookended

The silence in your eyes / Seen it in your eyes / Seen it in your eyes

"Music opens up abysses", says Günter Grass in his amazing novel Dog Years, and I think you can clearly see that in this painful clip of the last song the Sex Pistols (pre-reformed, cash-in version) ever played live. 

 

It's a difficult watch. Four people looking like they're isolated in their own non-fun worlds: Lydon occasionally managing a bit of half-hearted barbed wit ("I'm a lazy bastard", "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?") but mostly looking bored, lost and sickened by it all; Jones seemingly in a (drink-fuelled?) world of his own, apparently doing a bit of perfunctory spitting into the audience at the end; Cook bashing away with a sort of hopeless professionalism; Vicious just utterly ... gone. The slowed-down middle part is almost interesting but mostly it's a tired stodgy mess, with Lydon's voice shot to bits and the whole thing dragging on to die its inevitable death. Death in a ditch. One of the YouTube thread commentators calls it "Sad, poignant, beautiful, repulsive, tragic", which is sort of right, but only if you keep those five adjectives together. And the key words are surely sad and repulsive. At their peak (pre-Grundy) the Sex Pistols were clearly mesmerising and electrifying, even in their sheer ungainly ugliness. On top of their piledriver rock sound and splenetic vocals, the key part was surely the sense of freefall. That anything might happen. The abyss beneath their feet or whatever. Just as early PiL were incredible because of the space in their sinister metal dub sound, so the SPs were great because their gigs (and to some degree their records) were apparently going to upend rock's conventions. Destroy it! Or at least expose its vacuousness. It was absolute presence and the threat of empty space. A sort of hostile vacancy. That's why I always thought the seething look on Lydon's face at the end of Anarchy on the set of Tony Wilson's So It Goes was one of the band's high points. It's a sort of bookend to the Winterland show. Yeah man, to quote Andi Sex Gang, they were going into the abyss ...