Anarchy in the UK helps safeguard our heritage

Everyone remembers 1970s punk band the Sex Pistols for the raucous lyrics, their slamming of the Royal Family and their general anarchy in the UK.
But at no time does anyone recall the band’s concern for the sustainability of the country’s crumbling historic buildings or the upkeep of the coast and countryside.
Now visitors to National Trust properties in the West can recapture the punk within them with the help of some of the legends of the era.
In a striking change of direction for all concerned, the punk band that used to sneer at the Queen is to help the 116-year-old trust maintain its historic houses.
The band’s most famous song, Anarchy in the UK, features on a new fundraising compilation album released this week by the National Trust and Decca Records.
Called Never Mind the Dovecotes — Punk Collection, in homage to The Sex Pistols’ only proper album Never Mind The Bollocks, it also includes classic songs by The Jam, X-Ray Spex, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Sham 69, The Fall and John Cooper Clarke.
It sits rather uncomfortably with other National Trust and Decca collaborations such as Celtic Collection, Land of Hope and Glory, and Classic Voices II.
There is a precedent of sorts, however. Last year Jarvis Cocker, frontman for the Sheffield band Pulp, made an album for the trust but it was compiled from natural sounds at 13 of its venues. National Trust: The Album has been downloaded 20,000 times from iTunes.
Never Mind the Dovecotes is rather more abrasive.
Kevin Long, product manager at Decca Records and compiler of the album, said: “When punk rock hit British society in the late 1970s, it was met by the ‘establishment’s’ distrust and disgust. Today, the influence of the punk movement on British fashion and music is incalculable.”
Proceeds will support the trust’s work. The copyright for all of the songs on the 18-track album are owned by Decca and other labels.
It is not the first time that a Sex Pistol has supported the National Trust.
In 2003 John Lydon, better known as Johnny Rotten, voiced a radio advert for the trust on Classic FM.
He has since donned an English gentleman’s tweed suit to appear in a TV commercial for butter.He later rebutted criticism that he had sold out by claiming his fee had paid the advance on a UK tour by Public Image Ltd., the band he formed after the Sex Pistols.
The Sex Pistols were formed in Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s King’s Road boutique Sex. They played their first gig at St Martin’s College of Art in November 1975 and by the end of the next year they had found nationwide notoriety by swearing on TV. Their career peaked in 1977 with the single God Save The Queen disrupting the Silver Jubilee celebrations and the release of their album, which went to No 1.
Phillippa Green, National Trust brand licensing manager, said that the Sex Pistols were now a part of British heritage. “Nearly half a million of the trust’s members were aged between 16 and 25 in 1977, the birth of the British punk music scene. Over 30 years on, many of them now enjoy family outings at parks, beaches and historic houses. Perhaps this collection will offer them the chance to rekindle a little of that youthful spirit.”


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