On Dec. 3, 1976, the four were offered a last-minute replacement appearance on a live, early-evening British TV show called "Today." They were accompanied by four friends, one of them Siouxsie Sioux, later of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Goaded by a vacuous, possibly drunk host, Grundy (who among other things seemed to be hitting on Sioux), Rotten muttered the word "shit" under his breath. Catching it, Grundy bored in, and the show disintegrated in a hail of obscenity. The incident put the Sex Pistols on the cover of the nation's tabloids for days. The new movie takes its name from the headline that filled the front page of the next day's Daily Mirror. EMI pulled the "Anarchy" single. "From [then] on, they were a total spectacle," writes Savage in "England's Dreaming."

Shortly after this came Rotten's one management triumph, an amusingly Pyrrhic one. He hated Matlock, the bass player who'd composed the band's key early songs but who Rotten contended wanted to turn the band into the Bay City Rollers. "If he looks like an asshole and talks like an asshole then he's an asshole" is Rotten's unrepentant epitaph for him in "The Filth and the Fury." (Still, Matlock returned to play guitars on the band's only studio album and eventually played in the Pistols' 1996 reunion tour.) Rotten's candidate to replace Matlock was his best friend, a lost child who lacked musical skills, any significant experience playing in a band and, in a touching footnote, apparently even a real name. (He told friends he didn't know if it was Simon Ritchie or John Beverly.)

Sid Vicious was an aimless, violent figure on the scene. Cook and Jones didn't like him, but Rotten's insistence won out. In his autobiography, Rotten admits that he didn't appreciate the Pandora's box he was opening. His mother may have: "What kind of wicked reasons have you got behind that?" she sighed.

Their second single was "God Save the Queen," released, after a short, scandal-filled and profitable weeklong contretemps with A&M Records, by Virgin. The band rented a boat to cruise up the Thames during Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee in July 1977. The single was banned from the radio but still became a bestseller. On the charts of the time, there is a blank where the song should be -- an Orwellian image that a generation of British music fans would find indelible. In November, the only album to be released during the band's career together, "Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols," came out. Police literally tore down record-store displays across the country. One store owner was taken to court merely for displaying the album cover. (He was found not guilty -- "reluctantly," the judge said from the bench.) A concert tour was a debacle as dates were canceled as fast as McLaren could book them.

In retrospect these events may seem merely like planned outrages by McLaren, but the evidence suggests that these were extremes he hadn't contemplated; he was by all accounts paralyzed after the Grundy affair. The chaos is part of rock legend now, but it created genuine pressures on a band of young men almost all of whom had grown up under unfortunate circumstances and none of whom, really, had the ambitions or strength of character most people who try to become rock stars have at their disposal. The press was insatiable; it was becoming dangerous for band members to venture out in public; and Rotten, at least, endured both a razor attack and a destructive police raid on his apartment.

Part of McLaren's maniacal plan was to establish the lead singer as a poet of sorts, and isolated from the prole backing musicians. Rotten's stories from the time are almost tearfully funny. He would be invited to swell parties, only to have McLaren turn him away from the door. At the same time, he was watching his best friend whirl into a vortex of trouble. Vicious' girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, her mother later wrote, was developmentally disabled and in some sort of pain almost from the day she was born. By the time she met up with the Sex Pistols she was a nightmare of an American suburban expatriate turned prostitute and drug dealer. She was screechy and demanding; to those who would listen, and those who wouldn't, she would take the unique aesthetic position that Vicious was the real talent in the band. At one point McLaren kidnapped her and tried to send her back to America with a one-way ticket. He got her as far as the airport; Vicious never forgave him.

The band capped its British performing career with a benefit for striking firemen on Christmas Day, 1977. In January they went to America and played shows in Atlanta; Baton Rouge, La.; Memphis, Tenn.; Dallas; San Antonio, Texas; Tulsa, Okla.; and San Francisco. Rotten and Vicious were eventually relegated to a bus, even as McLaren, Cook and Jones flew. The band's final show, at San Francisco's cavernous Winterland, ended with Rotten's most famous line: "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" The band broke up the next day without anyone really saying so. Rotten says he was left in San Francisco with $20 in his pocket. Cook and Jones went back into obscurity; Rotten to modern-rock hemidemistardom with his band, Public Image Ltd.; McLaren to another few decades of intermittently successful attention-getting.

Sid Vicious went to hell: He apparently stabbed Spungen during a druggy fight in their apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in New York on Oct. 11, 1978; she dragged herself to the bathroom and bled to death. Vicious spent the next few months in and out of jails and (after a suicide attempt) hospitals; his last stint was in Riker's Island, a notoriously dangerous New York jail. It could not have presented hospitable surroundings for a scrawny and insolent British punk rocker going through heroin withdrawal. He died of an overdose the night he was let out on bail, Feb. 1, 1979.

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