The most notorious Pistol won't attend the ceremony, of course, although his specter will loom large: Almost 27 years after the death of troubled bass player Sid Vicious (initially recruited to replace songwriter Matlock, allegedly booted for being a fan of the Beatles), the image of the lanky youth notorious for his cartoonish depravity, drug-abuse and violence, which became the sartorial prototype for punk rock, still dwarfs the band's actual accomplishments.
Though gloriously jarring in its time, the Sex Pistols' lone studio album, 1977's Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols, sounds relatively conventional today in comparison to the countless legions of acolytes. Rife with Steve Jones' signature beefy guitar riffs and Rotten's venomous social commentary, Never Mind The Bollocks is rightly hailed as a classic that helped shake rock'n'roll out of its shaggy doldrums, re-inserting a palpable whiff of danger and defiance into an art-form grown shallow and pompous. Never mind the narrow mores of tongue-clicking punk rock puriststhe Sex Pistols have more than earned their place in the Hall of Fame. Respect is due.