Mandi was on board the
time-and-a-half train today, so I had a fairly easy morning of breakfast and a
little bit of catching up in the office. I’d arranged to meet Mandi in town but
didn’t want to take Jack because it would restrict us when it came to shopping
and stopping somewhere for a drink. I took Jack over the park for an hour to tire
him out (and empty him of course) and made my way to town to meet Mandi for two
o’clock. After a bacon cob and a cuppa we did a bit of shopping and had a
general Saturday meander around town.
I was interested to see this
poster in the Victoria Centre branch of Pulp. It is obviously a homage to the
Sex Pistols album Never Mind The Bollocks, (Pulp
sell music related t-shirts and merchandise), but it is a little disappointing that
the shop (or possibly Victoria Centre) didn’t see fit to display the word ‘bollocks’,
especially when you consider how this particular piece of punk history took
place right here in Nottingham. According to punk rock butter salesman John
Lydon, the phrase is working class slang for ‘stop talking nonsense’ or
whatever. The Metropolitan Police were already going around London threatening
branches of Virgin Records (RIP) under the 1899 Indecent Advertisements Act if
they didn’t remove the offending posters from their windows. Chris Seale was
the manager of the Nottingham branch of Virgin Records who was arrested for
continuing to display the title, (I wonder where he is now) and Richard Branson
covered Seale’s legal costs and brought in John Mortimer the renowned barrister
and author of Rumpole of the Bailey to fight
the Virgin corner. It was on the 24th November 1977 that the case
was heard at Nottingham Magistrates Court, during which Mortimer rang rings
around everyone. He cited police discrimination and asked why The Guardian wasn’t
on trial for displaying the word in newspaper stories relating to the case.
Eventually, he proved that the word ‘bollocks’ was an Old English word
originally referring to a priest, and that the band were using the word as an
expression of nonsense. With that historic legal fracas taking place in
Nottingham, it would have been fun to see what would have happened if Pulp had
displayed the actual word instead of a censored version.
===
My daily blog can be delivered straight to your Kindle
for 99p a month (link)
Any money donated to the PayPal account above will be
put to good creative use, find out more here.
