SEX PISTOLS - THE GREAT ROCK 'N' ROLL SWINDLE (1980)

The Sex Pistols—John Lydon, Sid Vicious, Steve Jones, Paul Cook—were one of the undisputed lynch pins in the late 1970s punk movement, a larger than life entity that shook up England and eventually the rest of the world in a meteoric rise and fall that still reverberates today. Sex shop owner/producer/bon vivant Malcom McLaren has been credited as forming the band allegedly as a pre-fab outfit, and with The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle the message is blurred and cobbled together so that McLaren is presented as the leather-mask-wearing Svengali building a band to literally swindle the masses.

The fuzzy line between truth and fiction exists in spades in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle from director Julien Temple, a legendary bit of filmmaking that earns its importance as one of the few remaining video documents of the well-crafted fury that was The Sex Pistols during their short, manic life. By the time this film was eventually finished in 1980, the group had long since disbanded, Sid Vicious was dead and the myth had begun to eclipse the reality. That's where Temple's disjointed punk history lesson is so essential, because it is in between the bizarre, surreal connecting points that the power of the music rises above the in-jokes and silly ramblings.
It is those odd in-between moments that Temple collects with the proper punk aesthetic— all mean, subversive and anti-social— but what makes this anything but a swindle are the live clips and pre-MTV music videos that are stunning in their raw power. Watching the band rip through No Feelings live in the studio proves the band was no joke, and the lip-synching during Pretty Vacant has Lydon showing why he was (and still in, in my opinion) one of rock's finest frontmen while the leather-jacket-clad Vicious exists as punk's eventual charismatic martyr icon, a drug-addled thug with questionable bass skills and a violent streak a mile wide.
One of the signature sequences, aside from all the great Never Mind the Bollocks music, is the Sid Vicious rendition of My Way that should cement his stature as the living definition of punk for those youngsters who think Green Day invented three-chord swagger. Sauntering down that huge light-up staircase, appearing alone onstage, Vicious delivers a remarkable take on the Ol' Blue Eyes standard, and it wouldn't be "punk" if it didn't end with him shooting the audience before flipping them over as he staggers offstage.
In fact, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (and I'll add The Ramones End of the Century to that list, too) should be required viewing for every "alternative" music fan under the age of 16, because this isn't just poser posturing.