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Rare Sex Pistols single goes for an insane amount on Discogs

January 8, 2018

Tourists are money… but so are record collectors, right? Maybe that's why this rare Sex Pistols vinyl single of “God Save The Queen” went for nearly $15,000 on Discogs—one of the site's most expensive sales of 2017.

Discogs has verified the sale of the 1977 Sex Pistols seven-inch on A&M Records for $14,690, and it now tops the list of the 30 most expensive records sold on the record-collecting database and marketplace for November. We'll assume the buyer was living by Johnny Rotten's in-song credo of “Don't be told what you want, don't be told what you need” when nabbing this thing. Contrary to Rotten's pessimistic yowl of “No future!” on “God Save The Queen,” however, there certainly was a future for this unwonted slab o' wax.

You see, before the Pistols' sole full-length Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols was issued by Virgin in October 1977, A&M eked out a few “God Save The Queen” singles (backed with “No Feeling”) in March of that year. It's practically unheard of to come across one today, hence the extraordinarily high value of the seven-inch. (To wit, the Sex Pistols basically jumped from one record label to the other during their brief but legendary late-'70s run—just listen to the band's industry kiss-off “EMI” for some insight.)

The Guardian lists the single as one of the rarest records in Britain. As the old fable goes, A&M is said to have pressed up around 25,000 copies of the disk in '77 before label founder (and jazz musician) Herb Alpert reportedly destroyed the Sex Pistols' recording contract just six days after signing them. Talk about a limited edition with a limited supply.

There's still no future—they definitely got that right—but who'd have guessed that England's punk-rock admonishment of filthy lucre would make for thousand-dollar collectibles almost a half-century later? Maybe we really are the flowers in the dustbin, the poison in the machine.