Open your eyes you wimps, it's just a bit of beer! I thought you were punk? Photograph: Getty
Whatever the Sex Pistols' flaws, outstaying their welcome wasn't one of them. They were over and done with in 26 months - the time elapsed between their first gig, at St Martin's College in November 1975, to the American tour where they disintegrated, in January 1978. In that time, they changed music, and they did it with one album and four singles.
October 29 will be the 30th anniversary of Never Mind the Bollocks, and their original label, EMI, isn't missing the chance to re-release both it and the singles. On vinyl, no less, and with the original artwork.
If EMI has any sense of appropriateness, it will resist the temptation to also dig up the handful of Lydon-less "official" singles and albums that followed the singer's departure.
The Pistols' story began and ended with Never Mind the Bollocks and the first four singles (Anarchy in the UK, God Save the Queen, Pretty Vacant and Holidays in the Sun), and no good can come of excavating the desperate releases from the post-Rotten period. Or, God forbid, Sid Vicious's solo "work".
The Pistols stand almost alone in pop history as a band who said what they had to say and stopped as soon as they'd said it. You've got to love them for that. It could have been so different - had they been tolerate the sight of each other and manager Malcolm McLaren, had Vicious not been a heroin addict, they would most likely have ploughed on for years, into plump middle age and wan annual albums. Providence stopped that happening.
But providence has allowed many other artists to be so prolific that they're better known for the size of their catalogue than for their music. Prince, The Fall, Ryan Adams, Neil Young and Sufjan Stevens (who plans to release 50 albums, each dedicated to an American state) - just a few of the many who can't say no to the chance to get a little more music out there. But what if they had to condense their entire careers into tidy Pistolian dimensions? Which one album and four singles/tracks should it be?
I'll start with Prince: if he'd put out the Sign O the Times album and the singles When Doves Cry, 1999, Gett Off and Purple Rain and then never released another note, we'd still have the measure of the man. So what are your ideal one plus fours?
