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SONGFABLE · 1977

Submission

SEX PISTOLS · 1977

TL;DR: "Submission" is the Sex Pistols' inside joke at their own manager's expense — Malcolm McLaren ordered a kinky bondage anthem to promote his fetish boutique, and Johnny Rotten and Glen Matlock deliberately misread the title as "sub-mission," writing a dreamy, almost romantic song about a submarine voyage into the depths of a mysterious woman instead.
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The Prank Hiding in Plain Sight

Here is the thing almost nobody notices when they first hear "Submission": it is the only Sex Pistols song that was written as an act of rebellion against the Sex Pistols' own management. Every other track on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols aims its fury outward — at the Queen, at record labels, at abortion-clinic hypocrisy, at boredom itself. "Submission" aims its mischief inward, at the man who supposedly invented punk rock as a marketing scheme: Malcolm McLaren.

The story, confirmed over the years by both John Lydon (Johnny Rotten) and bassist Glen Matlock, goes like this. McLaren, who ran the King's Road fetish-wear shop SEX with designer Vivienne Westwood, wanted a song that would double as an advertisement for the boutique's rubber-and-leather aesthetic. He reportedly handed the band the title "Submission" and expected something suitably depraved about bondage and domination — shock value he could monetize.

Rotten and Matlock thought this was pathetic. So they took the word apart. Sub. Mission. A mission in a submarine. They went off — by some accounts to a pub, armed with money McLaren had given them to go write — and came back with a song about diving beneath the surface of the sea, or perhaps beneath the surface of a woman the narrator cannot figure out. McLaren reportedly hated it. Which, of course, was the point. The most anti-authoritarian band in Britain had just demonstrated that their anti-authoritarianism applied to everyone, including the Svengali who claimed to have built them.

London, 1976: A Band Assembled in a Sex Shop

To understand why this prank matters, you have to understand how strange the Sex Pistols' origin really was. This was not four friends forming a band in a garage. McLaren had managed the New York Dolls in their dying days, came back to London buzzing with ideas about rock-and-roll as confrontational theatre, and essentially cast the Sex Pistols the way a director casts a play. Steve Jones and Paul Cook were working-class West London kids who hung around the shop. Glen Matlock worked the till there on Saturdays. John Lydon was recruited after he was spotted on the King's Road wearing a Pink Floyd T-shirt with the words "I HATE" scrawled above the band's name — he auditioned by miming to Alice Cooper's "I'm Eighteen" in front of the shop jukebox.

For British readers, the geography here is part of the legend. The King's Road in Chelsea, SEX at number 430, the rehearsal space on Denmark Street — London's old Tin Pan Alley — where the band lived in squalor and where Lydon's graffiti caricatures of his bandmates survive on the walls to this day (the building is now Grade II listed, partly because of that graffiti, a delicious irony for a band that wanted to burn history down). "Submission" was written in this world, in 1976, before the band had a record deal, before the infamous sweary Bill Grundy TV interview in December of that year turned them into national folk devils overnight.

For American readers, there is a transatlantic thread worth pulling. McLaren's whole concept was soaked in New York — the Dolls' trashy glamour, Richard Hell's ripped shirts and spiked hair, the CBGB scene he had witnessed firsthand. And "Submission" itself is the most American-sounding song in the Pistols' catalogue: slower, swampier, built on a hypnotic groove that owes an obvious debt to the Doors and to the Stooges' narcotic churn. Lydon has said the song's atmosphere drew on the kind of brooding psychedelia and Captain Beefheart strangeness he actually loved, music far weirder than punk's official year-zero mythology ever admitted.

The song was recorded during the Never Mind the Bollocks sessions in 1977 with producer Chris Thomas — a man whose CV included work with the Beatles and Pink Floyd, another fact that punctures punk's amateur-hour myth. An earlier, looser version from the 1976 demo sessions with Dave Goodman also circulates, and in early UK pressings of the album "Submission" was famously included as a one-sided 7-inch single tucked into the sleeve, because the track listing had been finalized before the band insisted the song belonged on the record. Owning one of those original pressings with the bonus single is now a collector's holy grail.

What the Song Is Actually About

Strip away the backstory and what remains is genuinely one of the most interesting lyrics Rotten ever wrote — precisely because it is not a rant.

The song's narrator is on a journey downward, into deep water, following a woman he describes as something like an undertow: a force pulling him below the surface against his will, or maybe with his complete cooperation — he honestly cannot tell. He keeps circling the idea that he is trying to investigate her, to chart her depths the way a submarine charts the ocean floor, and he keeps failing. The deeper he goes, the less he understands. There is talk of drowning, but it does not sound like a complaint. It sounds like surrender — which is the joke folded inside the joke. Rotten dodged McLaren's demand for a song about sexual submission and then wrote a song that is about submission after all: not the leather-and-handcuffs kind, but the older, scarier kind, where you give yourself over to another person's mystery and accept you will never fully map it.

That double meaning is what elevates the track from a prank to a piece of writing. The submarine is desire. The ocean is another human being's interior life. The mission fails, and the failure is the point. For a 20-year-old who built his public persona on sneering invulnerability, it is a startlingly vulnerable lyric — the only moment on Never Mind the Bollocks where Rotten sounds genuinely fascinated by someone rather than disgusted by them.

Musically, the band leans into the water imagery. The tempo drops to a sway. Jones's guitar churns instead of slashes. Rotten punctuates the verses with little sonar-ping noises and bubbling vocal sounds — half silly, half eerie — as if the song itself were submerged. On an album engineered as a wall of flame-thrower guitars, "Submission" is the one track that breathes, which is exactly why many longtime fans quietly name it their favorite.

The Legacy: Proof That Punk Was Never Just Noise

"Submission" occupies a peculiar place in punk history because it undermines two myths at once.

First, the myth that McLaren was the puppet-master and the band were his marionettes. McLaren spent years claiming, most elaborately in the 1980 film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, that the Sex Pistols were his art project — that he had orchestrated everything. "Submission" is documentary evidence to the contrary: the one time he handed the band an explicit creative directive, they ridiculed it to his face and shipped the result on the album anyway. Julien Temple's 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury, which retells the story from the band's side, treats episodes like this as the heart of the matter — the band, not the manager, made the music.

Second, the myth that punk meant three chords and shouting. "Submission" is moody, mid-tempo, metaphor-driven, and built on a groove. It points directly toward what Lydon did next: Public Image Ltd, the dub-soaked, bass-heavy post-punk project he founded in 1978 after walking off stage in San Francisco asking the audience whether they ever got the feeling they had been cheated. Listen to "Submission" and then early PiL, and the lineage is unmistakable. The song is the hinge between punk and post-punk hiding inside punk's most famous album.

The album around it, of course, became a monument. Never Mind the Bollocks was banned from major British retailers over the word "bollocks," prompting an actual obscenity trial in Nottingham in 1977 — which the defense won, partly by calling a linguistics expert who testified the word's history reached back to clergymen and meant, roughly, "nonsense." The record went to number one in the UK anyway. In the US it crawled to a modest chart position but detonated slowly and permanently, inspiring everyone from the hardcore kids of Southern California to Kurt Cobain, who routinely placed it among the records that made Nirvana possible. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the Sex Pistols in 2006; Lydon refused to attend, calling the museum a piss stain in a handwritten note. Of course he did.

Why It Still Resonates

Nearly fifty years on, "Submission" endures for a reason that has nothing to do with nostalgia: it is a perfect parable about creative work under management.

Anyone who has ever been handed a cynical brief by a boss — write the ad, hit the trend, give the algorithm what it wants — knows the choice the Pistols faced in that pub in 1976. You can comply. You can refuse and get fired. Or you can do the third thing: take the assignment, twist it until it means something you actually care about, and hand it back with a straight face. "Submission" is the third thing, executed flawlessly. It is malicious compliance as art form, and in an era when so much culture is commissioned by brands and platforms, that move feels more relevant than ever.

It also endures because the lyric's central image refuses to age. Songs about lust date quickly; songs about the unknowability of another person do not. The figure of the lover as deep water — beautiful, dark, unmappable, slightly dangerous to enter — is as old as myth, and Rotten's submarine conceit gives it a strange industrial-age melancholy. Plenty of listeners have spent decades with this song without ever learning the McLaren backstory, and it works for them anyway, as a slow, hypnotic meditation on being pulled under by someone you cannot decode.

And finally, it endures as the Sex Pistols' best-kept secret. "God Save the Queen" and "Anarchy in the U.K." belong to the history books now — taught, quoted, sampled, defanged by familiarity. "Submission" still feels like contraband passed between fans: the weird one, the deep cut, the track you put on for someone who thinks they already know what the Sex Pistols sound like, just to watch their expression change.

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