Los Punk Rockers: The wonderfully awful Spanish Sex Pistols cash-in from 1978
Record companies have always been shameless when there’s a quick buck to be made, but few have displayed quite the entrepreneurial audacity of Dial Discos.
In 1978, rather than paying Virgin Records to license Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols for the Spanish market, the budget label reportedly decided it would be easier, and presumably a lot cheaper, to hire a local band to re-record the entire album from scratch, but the resulting LP, Los Exitos de Sex Pistols, wasn’t really intended as a tribute. The whole point appears to have been confusing unsuspecting record buyers into believing they were getting something close enough to the real thing.
The musicians themselves have often been rumoured to be members of the Spanish prog-rock band Asfalto, although that’s never been definitively confirmed. Whoever they were, they clearly had a copy of Never Mind the Bollocks and what sounds like an afternoon to figure it out. You can almost hear them learning the songs as they go, trying to keep up with Steve Jones’ guitar parts while simultaneously wondering how on earth Johnny Rotten managed to sound like that. It’s one of those records that almost certainly wasn’t supposed to become famous, yet decades later, it’s remembered far more fondly than the cynical cash-in probably deserved.
The legendary Shit-Fi blog once called it “the most shit-fi album of all time”, adding that it “simply does not get any stupider, stranger, more poorly played, funnier, or nigh-psychotic (and possibly psychedelic) than this record.” That’s a difficult verdict to argue with, because almost every decision made during these sessions somehow turns ordinary incompetence into accidental comedy.
The biggest source of entertainment, though, is undoubtedly the singer. He clearly understands the attitude Johnny Rotten brought to the original recordings, all sneering contempt and sarcastic swagger, but he seems to have only the loosest grasp of the English language.
Rather than singing Rotten’s lyrics, our man barrels confidently through what can only be described as enthusiastic approximations. Sometimes individual words emerge from the chaos, but more often the vocals sound as though somebody had listened to the Pistols album a handful of times and then attempted to recreate it entirely from memory. Even ‘Seventeen’ somehow mutates into something that sounds suspiciously like “I’m a lazy seven”, which has become one of the record’s most unintentionally hilarious moments.
Oddly enough, the music itself isn’t nearly as disastrous as its reputation suggests. Steve Jones’ famously enormous guitar sound is gone, replaced by a thinner, fuzzier production that probably had more to do with Dial Discos’ budget than artistic choice. Yet that roughness gives the album an odd charm. In hindsight, it actually sounds closer to the scrappy DIY punk records that flooded independent labels a year or two later than it does to the meticulously produced wall of guitars heard on Never Mind the Bollocks. It was almost certainly an accident, but accidents have a habit of becoming style in rock and roll.
Even the sleeve contributes to the strange appeal of the whole enterprise. The Sex Pistols had one of the most iconic album covers of the 1970s, all fluorescent colours and ransom-note typography, whereas Los Exitos de Sex Pistols looks as though somebody simply found a vaguely punk-looking woman, handed her a leather jacket and hoped nobody asked too many questions. It perfectly captures the spirit of the record: just convincing enough to make you stop and look, but completely incapable of surviving close inspection.
That’s probably why this album has endured. If it had been a faithful recreation of Never Mind the Bollocks, nobody would remember it. Instead, it’s become one of those wonderfully peculiar artefacts that could only have emerged during the record industry’s gloriously chaotic pre-internet years, when labels could still get away with schemes that seem almost unimaginable today. Somewhere between outright fraud, cultural misunderstanding and accidental outsider art, Los Exitos de Sex Pistols carved out a tiny place in punk history all of its own.
It’s a terrible record.
It’s also an absolutely fascinating one.