ABSTRACT
When Sex Pistols guitarist, Steve Jones, called television presenter Bill Grundy a ‘fucking rotter’ on live TV, he helped spark one of the most intense moral panics Britain had seen since the 1960s. In 1976 punk rock stalwarts the Sex Pistols (then a little-known band) had been booked onto an early evening TV chat show to discuss their first single, ‘Anarchy in the UK’. However, baited by Grundy (the programme’s host), the band sneered, swore and made themselves as disruptive as possible. The insults were jokey, but the humour of the episode was lost on the British press and the tabloids lambasted the Pistols as ‘Foul Mouthed Yobs’ (Daily Mirror, 2 December 1976). In the furore that followed, promoters cancelled the Sex Pistols’ concerts, the band were beaten-up in the street and the BBC refused to play their records. Nevertheless, paradoxically, the reaction also lent decisive momentum to events and-as with the mods and rockers of the early 1960s-the fevered media attention gave greater definition to the emergent punk subculture and the Sex Pistols’ records soared up the charts.
