On the face of it, Queen and the Sex Pistols could not be further apart from each other. Queen were good fun, apolitical and dynamic, and the Sex Pistols were seriously committed to eviscerating the status quo, complete with three bar chords and vitriolic lyricism. In short, Queen represented the refined side of music, and the Sex Pistols the primal.
In the late 1970s, when the Sex Pistols had risen to become the UK’s most breathtaking act, it was groups like Queen who they were waging their crusade against.
Famously, the connection between the band’s started when Queen had to pull out of their appearance on the Today programme as frontman Freddie Mercury went to the dentist for the first time in 15 years, with the Sex Pistols booked as a last-minute replacement. What ensued was the most notorious television appearance by any band in history.
So, in a tale as old as time, when both parties found themselves occupying the rooms next to each at Wessex recording studios, it wasn’t long before they came into direct conflict. Queen frontman Freddie Mercury gave a masterclass in acerbic wit when making the most overrated punk of all time, Sid Vicious, look like a moron, a name Queen drummer Roger Taylor has always said is befitting of the late bassist.
At the time, in 1976, Queen were recording their classic album News of the World, and the Sex Pistols, who had only released one single, ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’, were laying down what would become their only studio album before they imploded, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.
Whilst the eventual showdown between Mercury and Vicious is the moment that grabs all the headlines, in his 2011 memoir, Queen Unseen, Queen’s roadie Peter Hince detailed one occassion when Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten “crawled” into Queen’s studio to pay his respects, in one the most surreal occurrences in music history.
Hince recalled that they had to discuss the matter with Sex Pistols’ sound engineer to stop the intrusion from happening again: “One of the band members just crawled on all fours across our studio up to the side of the piano, said, ‘Hello Freddie,’ and left on all fours. Could you make sure he doesn’t do it again?”
Johnny Rotten is one of the most layered figures in music, so there’s no real surprise that he was a fan of Queen, he’d even seen them in concert a few years prior. “I said, ‘Oh Johnny,’ that’s not a good idea,” Bill Price, the engineer of Never Mind The Bollocks, remembered in the 2002 Classic Albums documentary after Rotten told him he wanted to meet Mercury.
“Sometime later Johnny came back and said, ‘I’ve been to see Freddie.’ I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ And as he said it, there was a tap on the door, Queen’s producer said, ‘Freddie was playing piano. One of the band members just crawled on all fours across our studio up to the side of the piano, said, ‘Hello Freddie,’ and left on all fours. Could you make sure he doesn’t do it again?’”
This was all well and good, as beneath all the weirdness, it came from Rotten being too nervous to speak to an artistic he greatly respected. However, in his typical manner, it was Sid Vicious who ruined everything. Roger Taylor recalled: “Sid came in, and Sid was a moron, you know. He was an idiot.”
Sid attempted to be witty and was sarcastic to Mercury about a recent NME interview where he discussed his love for ballet, a form he’d been open about wanting to bring to the masses for a long time.
Hince recalled: “Sid Vicious stumbled in, the worse for wear, and addressed Fred, ‘Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses yet?’ Fred casually got up, walked over to him and quipped: ‘Aren’t you Stanley Ferocious or something?’, took him by the collar and threw him out.”
Mercury would reapproach the incident in a television interview in the 1980s, saying: “The Sex Pistols happened to be in the next studio. Can you imagine there was just the whole thing about punk rock and anti-establishment all coming under one roof?”
He continued: “And I got Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious to listen to one of our tracks, and I said ‘I’ll sing on one of yours if you sing on one of mine.’ You should have seen him, ‘We can’t be seen with Freddie Mercury’ and all that. I was wearing ballet pumps at the time…”
Utilising the sharp wit he always espoused, Mercury then recalled destroying Sid Vicious by giving him a taste of his own medicine. He said: “I called Sid Vicious ‘Simon Ferocious’ or something, and he didn’t like it at all, and I said, ‘What are you gonna do about it?’ And he had all these very, well, sort of.. .he was very well-marked, and I said, ‘Did you really make sure you scratched yourself in the mirror properly today?’ And he hated the fact that I could even speak like that. So I think we survived that test.”
