
Album · 1979
The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle
by Sex Pistols
The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle is an album by Sex Pistols, released in 1979, with 24 tracks.
- 24
- Tracks
- 74 min
- Runtime
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24 tracks · 74 min

Album · 1979
by Sex Pistols
The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle is an album by Sex Pistols, released in 1979, with 24 tracks.
Not yet rated — be the first
24 tracks · 74 min
When first approaching The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, it's best not to think of it as a Sex Pistols album; rather, keep in mind that it's the soundtrack to a movie that was mostly about Malcolm McLaren and only tangentially concerned the great band he managed. Only eight of the twenty-four songs on The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle feature the same band as on Never Mind The Bollocks, and most of those capture them stomping through covers in the studio, sometimes to impressive effect (Johnny Rotten sounds positively feral on the Who's "Substitute" and the whole band tears into "(I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone" with malicious glee) and sometimes not (Rotten reveals he doesn't know the words to either Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" or Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner," and the band's familiarity isn't much greater). A live take of the Pistols roaring through "Belsen Was a Gas" is exciting, but sounds as if Rotten and the rest of the band were traveling in very different directions, and it's not hard to imagine why he quit the group after the show. Steve Jones and Paul Cook offer up a few tunes of their own, which lack the danger of the cuts with Rotten but confirm they were the backbone …