Sex Pistols
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols

THE REVIEW

1978 was a flash in the pan.

With the usual friends, I had set up a band. After lunch, we would meet in a dingy and rundown garage in the outskirts to play music or simply listen to some records and share our first beers in company. First because alcohol, like women, came late into my life. Eighteen years. That's how many I had turned a few days ago.
Salvatore on vocals, Matteo on bass, and Davide, whose size certainly wouldn’t prevent him from playing for Gabetti Cantù, divided his time between his passion for the drums and the care of his aquarium full of apple snails. He was the one who named the band: The Tunas. We played rock'n'roll. Or at least we tried to.

I wrote the songs. Me, who, in anticipation of an exam that seemed never to arrive and unable to decide my future, kept memorizing albums of the Stones, Bowie, and good old Lou Reed. They were bad, perhaps banal, and they all talked about Alessandra (because her name was Alessandra, not Giulia, you know?). She, wonderful and unaware of my passion, seemed to have very clear ideas: she would become a doctor. She was dating one of the leaders of the university student movement and, in her spare time, experimented with drugs of all kinds. But that's another story.

For us, playing in a band certainly didn’t help in having success with women. Neither did the Elvis Costello-style glasses—which would soon gain popularity—nor the short-cut hair. At that time, everyone wore their hair long. The Dutch anarchists of the spectacular national team of Neeskens, Rep, and Krol. And Mario Kempes, our idol and the number 10 star of the Argentinian national team, who in a few days would win perhaps the most controversial World Cup in football history, wore it long as well.
But it was about Alessandra we were talking that afternoon. The afternoon when punk arrived.

Francesca is Matteo's sister. She was twenty and rightly or wrongly had always considered us little more than overgrown children. The undisputed reign of our erotic-sexual imagination, she was as irritating as she was cute and sassy. The afternoon she arrived, punk was her.
She brought with her a record that in the land of Albion had already been popular for a few months. The specialized magazines were raving about it, and the people in the know talked of a real revolution. "I wonder if it's the same one predicted by the leaders of the university movements," I wondered.
Mocking our hidden resistance, she made room, dethroning Lloyd, Verlaine, and friends. That's how for the first time in my life, I heard "Never Mind the Bollocks."

The singer reminded me of Klaus Dinger from La Düsseldorf. He wasn’t bad. A few years later, he would give life to a band where his voice would meld well with the bass of an exceptional musician named Jah Wobble. But that’s another story too.
We listened in silence. We were shaken and almost frightened. We just couldn't accept someone could be more rebellious than the Stones, more hallucinated than Bowie, dirtier than Lou Reed's guitars and even angrier, more violent and perverse than Iggy.
The band was called the Sex Pistols and hailed from London. It was to London that Francesca had decided she would move. Italy was too small for her, and the United Kingdom's flag with a Thatcher face prominently displayed on the back of her miniskirt, swaying with feminine expertise, was certainly not enough for her. She wanted to live punk.
Defiant, like her. That's how the Sex Pistols sounded to our ears.

I almost jumped from my chair when the record stopped spinning. Francesca, baring her teeth, gave us one last wickedly pleased smile. Then she turned and left us alone. I thought there was nothing more punk than a woman smiling like that. And I still believe it.
For five minutes, maybe ten, no one spoke or dared to move. Our gaze was lost into emptiness, and we were elsewhere. I was thinking of Alessandra. Imagining her in London with a thick wall of incessant and pouring rain separating us. London, which I had never loved. I liked Liverpool. And Liverpool’s best player—yes, at that time, football occupied a big part of my life—was named Kenny Dalglish, and he wasn’t even English but Scottish. Just like Costello. I had to do something or I would lose Alessandra forever, and there would be no yellow submarine or Scottish wing that would later bring her back to me. I started feeling late.
That’s what I was thinking when Matteo got up, retrieved the record his sister had ousted from my previous life, and we listened to Guiding Light. All was calm again.

Francesca returned from London within a few months. Today she works as an assistant in a dental practice. She is a beautiful woman.

1978 was a flash in the pan. Just like the Sex Pistols.