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Sex Pistols to celebrate Queen’s platinum jubilee with God Save The Queen re-issues

By | Published on Wednesday 4 May 2022

The Sex Pistols

The Sex Pistols’ official social media accounts have announced a reissue of the band’s second single, ‘God Save The Queen’, with two limited edition recreations of the original vinyl releases being made available to mark Queen Elizabeth II’s platinum jubilee.

Back in 1977, releasing ‘God Save The Queen’ to coincide with the monarch’s silver jubilee seemed so dangerous that some retailers refused to stock the record and some versions of that week’s official chart blanked out the track’s title. Yet putting it out again 45 years later to coincide with the latest anniversary of the Queen taking the throne almost makes it feel like the record is part of the official celebrations.

The single will be re-pressed so to recreate the original releases as pressed by both A&M and Virgin. Almost all copies of the original A&M version were destroyed after the label dropped the band just six days after signing them. The new version of it will be limited to 1977 copies. Meanwhile, the re-press of the Virgin release, which propelled the Sex Pistols to number two on the jubilee week chart back in 1977, will be limited to 4000 copies.

It’s not actually clear how much involvement with this the band themselves have had in all this. When Universal announced in April that it would be releasing a new Sex Pistols compilation, ‘The Original Recordings’, on 27 May (the same day that the ‘God Save The Queen’ singles will come out), John Lydon put out a statement saying that he “does not endorse or support it” and considers it “substandard compared to previous Universal releases”.



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