The Sex Pistols signing a new recording contract outside Buckingham Palace in 1977. Photograph: PA
Have you seen NME's campaign to get the Sex Pistols' 1977 single God Save the Queen to No 1 in next week's chart? Having decided that the group wuz robbed of their rightful place at the top of the chart 30 years ago - all to do with the music biz supposedly rigging the result of the June 4 1977 chart so that Rod Stewart's I Don't Want to Talk About It was that week's chart-topper, rather than the Pistols' anti-monarchy rant, which had to settle for No 2 - the paper is urging readers to buy the reissued single this week and give them their No 1 at long last. Punk's not dead! Pop a cap in the music industry's ass!
Even if NME were doing this out of a genuine desire to provoke, rather than as a mixture of scampishness and self-promotion, it would still be a pointless gesture. (Not to mention a futile one, given that God Save the Queen is at 28 in the midweek charts - looks like fans who've snapped up nearly every ticket for their November tour don't fancy coughing up for the single, too.) And it would come 30 years too late. The impact of a No 1 tune that calls the Queen a "moron", and her government a "fascist regime" would be a tiny thud in 2007, as opposed to the big bang it would have been three decades ago.
What seemed subversive then is merely quaint now. People who weren't born when punk was a thorn in the industry's side must deem a rock band railing about class distinctions and a "figurehead" who is "not what she seems" a comical waste of energy. And what sort of archaic device, they'll be wondering, is an "H-bomb"? The House of Commons may - according to John Lydon - have discussed charging the Pistols with treason at the time. Now, the NME will be fervently hoping that David Cameron won't claim to have it on his iPod.
We've become inured to shock in pop music. Almost nothing is taboo - a song called Fuck It (I Don't Want You Back) can skip to the top of the chart without a miaow of protest from anyone; mainstream male bands sing about kissing other men and shoppers hum it in Sainsbury's; the devil's would-be emissary on earth has enjoyed a fruitful Top 10 career that has only gone into decline because people have realised his music is terrible. Seriously, nobody would bat an eyelid if Cradle of Filth became the biggest band in the country - though that's unlikely to happen because, as Marilyn Manson has proved, the devil doesn't have all the best tunes. (Sometimes the devil's cupboard is so bare that he's stuck with the ones that made their way down the food chain from Kylie to Britney to Rachel Stevens to Michelle McManus.)
So what would be proved by God Save the Queen getting to No 1? Just one thing, really: that NME has more clout than you might expect in an era when the idea of trotting to the shop for a weekly fix of music news belongs to another age. But the paper should have taken note of the song's performance the last time it was re-released, which was only five years ago, to cash in on the Golden Jubilee. Even then, it refused to clamber any higher than 15. Number One that week, by the way, was Will Young's cover of Light my Fire. Yes, the music business even engineered a gay reality-TV conspiracy to stop the Pistols being heard. Shameful, eh?
