Sex Pistols

John Scanlan is a cultural historian and analyst who works with In Certain Places, a public art project based at the University of Lancashire. His previous books include Memory: Encounters with the Strange and the Familiar (2013), Rock ’n’ Roll Plays Itself (2022) and The Idea of Waste: On the Limits of Human Life (2025), all published by Reaktion Books.

Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine dares to be different. Why? It is not another regurgitation of the history of the Pistols. It aims to place the reader back in the 1960s and ’70s and explore the Sex Pistols phenomenon as it was experienced in the era that spawned it one of scant information, sparse news outlets and very little access to the music. It reminds the reader how different the world of today is, where Pistols footage, audio and even the Grundy show can be accessed in an instant on the internet. Back in the day, if you didn’t see it yourself, you didn’t see it. Importantly, the book helps define how the myth, controversy and enigma of the Sex Pistols was given oxygen by, ironically, this very vacuum. - SexPistols.netIt’s a fast read, with clean writing and little editorializing . . . [Scanlan] uses quotes and rare photos to give the reader a sense of the time and place, which is as important to the Sex Pistols as the people involved in their rise . . . Great book for fans of the band who need a little more ammo in the face of trite dismissals, or punk history buffs alike – Poison in the Machine is a fascinating read. - Dying SceneAmbitious . . . Scanlan, who wrote 2015’s excellent Easy Riders, Rolling Stones, breaks from the intellectual slumming that often smothers the band, repositioning the Pistols as Malcolm McLaren’s anarchic art project that misfired when they kick-started the UK’s punk revolution and made a ‘classic album’. - Kris Needs, Record CollectorIn addition to his impressive historical account, Scanlan threads a variety of analytical considerations into the book, thus endowing it with a sound intellectual basis. For instance, he investigates a broader disparity between reality and perception and delves into the indispensability of cultural memory. Of the former, he writes that ‘this gap between the reality and its representation – so at odds with the world we live in today, where the gap is non-existent – also added to the perception that the Sex Pistols had, by 1977 already entered the realms of myth’. The author does some important conceptual unpacking for cultural memory as well. He asserts that this memory is embodied by ‘the panoply of media artefacts, material objects and memoirs that feed into various forms of reanimation’. Examples the author provides of these are film documentaries, commemorative events, and exhibitions. In an embodiment of cultural memory and the reality/perception dichotomy, the author presents the reader with the idea that there were two Sex Pistols: manager Malcolm McLaren’s and frontman John Lydon’s. These two groups were an idea and a musical entity, respectively. - Zach Thomas, Rock Music Studies