Best debut album

Possibly the most eagerly anticipated, the most explosive, the most iconoclastic album in my memory was Never Mind the Bollocks by the Sex Pistols.

I think all the songs have stood the test of time well, but to really ’get it’ you had to be following the music scene here in the UK in 76/77.

Their social impact was immense and the fallout had an after-life lasting decades. They made the Stones look like a bunch of naughty chartered accountants.

Their manager Malcolm McLaren might have thought he was orchestrating some kind of retro Rock N Roll experiment but soon found himself way out of his depth. As a direct consequence the unfortunate band members Lydon, Matlock, Cook and especially Steve Jones spent years of living through post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sid Vicious, bassist and figurehead, didn’t even make it that far.

edcyn,

"As much as I loved the Sex Pistols, they were too much of a one trick pony. I still regret, though, that I missed them when they played the Roxy (or was it the Whisky?). I went to buy a ticket. They had already sold out....not the Pistols themselves, though!"



No, they didn’t, not even given the odd butter commercial.

As for them being a one trick pony, I doubt whether they were given any room to develop. Not with crazy media scrum that followed them everywhere this side of the pond.

Nor for the mayhem that later happened on the other side, the infamously notorious US tour of early 78 which broke the band. Details only gradually emerged some time later in our music papers.

For some of us, that sense of losing something we never really understood was strong. All of a sudden things began to return to drab late 70s normality...

vinowino,

"Fleetwood Mac. ( aka The dustbin album. Peter Greens Fleetwood Mac)"


Green's Mac were a bit like Barrett's Floyd, or Curtis's Joy Division (now there's another great debut album - 1978s Unknown Pleasures) compared to what came later.

Less commercial maybe, but certainly no less good.

I'd still have Never Mind the Bollocks as the best debut but I wish I'd mentioned both Unknown Pleasures and The Velvet Underground.

One influenced Bowie and the other was influenced by him.

Neither can be very far behind. 

bobdg2000,

I feel that Chrissie Hynde is a vastly underrated vocalist.

Difficult to think of any other current female singer that sounds more human than her.

I’d love to hear her cover some of the standards.

Did you know she once did a duet with Sinatra?

https://youtu.be/ckgoALPBPRw