Review: Rhino High Fidelity takes on the Sex Pistols
Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols gets the audiophile treatment.
There's something not very punk about a $40 audiophile reissue of a classic album from that rough-and-tumble genre. But as Rhino continues to feed that insatiably hungry segment of the Venn diagram where record collectors and audiophiles meet with their Rhino High Fidelity (RHF) series, and they've previously graced the market with top quality reissues of albums by the Stooges and Ramones, a fresh pressing of the lone album by Sex Pistols was inevitable.
Released in 1977, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols had a seismic effect on the music community in the group’s native Britain, seeding the formation of dozens of bands in its wake, and has continued to inspire new packs of snotty youngsters to pick up an instrument and make a furious racket.
Despite its pedigree, the album doesn't necessarily leap to mind as an ideal candidate for a polished-up vinyl reissue like this. The original recording sessions, overseen by studio vets Chris Thomas and Bill Martin, were strong enough already, marked by an intensity and ferocity. If handled incorrectly in the remastering process, its overall impact could only be blunted.
Wisely, the powers that be at Rhino have handed the reins for the RHF series to Kevin Gray, probably the most trusted audio engineer working in the vinyl reissue business today. With the master tapes for the Bollocks sessions ostensibly in hand, Gray has tastefully enriched an already well-recorded document. A/B testing with my 1979 US pressing, this new reissue features some nicely enhanced low end, all to the benefit of drummer Paul Cook, whose tom-tom playing on tracks like “Seventeen” and “Pretty Vacant” is given some added punch, and the bass work of Steve Jones (covering for the dismissed Glen Matlock and the incapacitated Sid Vicious on all but “Anarchy in the U.K.”). There also seems to be an emphasis on the room tone captured at London’s Wessex Sound, where the album sessions happened in fits and starts over the course of seven months. It helps give Johnny Rotten’s vocals a bit more room to move within the stereo field, his vibrato given space to flutter and his sneering disgust honed to an even sharper edge.
While I certainly enjoyed the RHF edition of Bollocks, I am still stuck with lingering questions. The OBI strip with the album boasts that this edition was “cut from the original analog master tapes.” But, if Virgin Records was footing the bill for this album, wouldn’t their tapes be the true original with Gray using a dub sent to Warner Brothers in late ’77? All signs seem to indicate that that is the case. The track listing mirrors the US edition where “Problems” and “God Save the Queen” are swapped at the end of side one. Too, the insert features a nice hi-res scan of the WB tape boxes (the foldout also features some illuminating liner notes about the recording sessions from Thomas). Nothing to really get het up about, but would have been cause for alarm if this pressing didn't sound as good as it does.
I also can’t help but ask, was this worth it? Every punk record of the time, even one recorded at a studio with a 32-track Cadac mixing desk like Wessex, features a layer of ugliness and youthful impatience. While the latter was tamped down a bit thanks to Thomas and Martin’s firm hands at the wheel, the Pistols maintained a sonic nastiness that seeped through even “Sub-mission,” a two-fingers-up song the band cooked up in response to manager Malcolm McLaren’s insistence that they write a song about S&M. (The lyrics are about a mission in a submarine.) Wipe all that away, as Gray has expertly done here, and the immediacy of Bollocks dies down as a result.
