You have to hand it to them. The Sex Pistols, I mean. They’ve been ‘n’ gone ‘n’ got more publicity than any rock group since the Stones lifted their legs against those petrol pumps. More, probably, and just for saying naughty words on television. Front pages, concerts cancelled, the good ladies of EMI refusing to even touch their single in the packaging department —“Yuk!”. And, most amazing of all, free commercials! The News of the World, world’s biggest selling newspaper, has been advertising its no-holds-barred-or -unphotoed expose of punk rock with a thirty second clip of Johnny Rotten and the boys playing the only four notes they know. It’s the only punk rock most kids in Britain have ever heard or seen and if the Pistols can’t make it as the new Rollers after this lot, then they deserve to be squelched to death by the combined forces of *the Respectable Women of Britain, Inc.

One thing the Pistols may not have realized yet though is that the UK, of which they are such concerned citizens, is actually a town in the mid-west of the US of A. I don’t suppose many of you CREEM readers knew that either and I only just found out myself. But once you do know it becomes obvious. Not a very big town admittedly, hard to find on the map and fading now, a once prosperous industrial city become a brake wasteland, but I’ve been Doing Research, like a proper rock journalist, and it turns out that Britain, Michigan, was established by the CIA in 1880. Since then we’ve been used for various nefarious CIA purposes—splitting the atom, breeding the Beatles, the setting for Upstairs Downstairs, most recently as an Awful Example of the Effects of Socialism (you gotta believe the American Dream, see?). I know this all sounds a bit far-fetched, but consider the evidence: