Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren owned a store called SEX that sold outrageous clothing and various fetish items. As such, it was the most natural thing in the world for him to ask the band he managed to write a song about bondage and sadomasochism.
The backdrop for the song request was very different, though. McLaren was – incredibly enough, and somewhat uncharacteristically – on an errand of peace.
Lead singer John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) and original bass player Glen Matlock were not seeing eye to eye. “Right from the off, things got really harsh between Glen and me,” Lydon writes in his 2014 autobiography. “It shouldn’t have got that way, but when Glen dug his heels in, it was very difficult to deal with him.”
One day, Lydon and Matlock showed up at the band’s rehearsal room in Camden, to find that their bandmates Steve Jones (guitar) and Paul Cook (drums) didn’t show up. Malcolm McLaren decided to kill two birds with one stone: he wanted Lydon and Matlock to mend their fences, so to speak, and why not write new songs while they were at it? His answer to both of these goals was to take them to the pub, give them some drinking money, and leave them to it.
“Malcolm had this notion that Glen was ‘the musician,’” Lydon continues. “He also must’ve identified something positive in what I was doing, because one day he took the two of us to the pub to patch it up and write songs together. Legend has it he gave us twenty quid to spend, but we were smarter than that – we wanted twenty quid each. Then he went off and left us to our own devices. We giggled. We were on the same plane at that point – there was a moment of truce. Although we were really bad enemies, the commonality was, ‘What’s that one about?’”
The two of them ended up having a great evening. They knew they had to work something out, because as Lydon said: “If there was going to be any progress in the band, it would have to be coming from us. It wasn’t going to come through Malcolm and his alliance, because that was a dead end intellectually. And on this evening, Glen and I really got on with each other.”
One thing that bonded them was their common disdain for McLaren – and especially the song idea suggestion that he dropped to Matlock on his way out. Matlock must have looked funny when he returned to Lydon, who wondered what was going on.
Glen Matlock remembered that exchange when he talked to Songfacts in 2018: “’What’s he got to say for himself?’ ‘Oh, he has an idea that we write a song.’ ‘What about?’ ‘He had a title – Submission.’ And John went, ‘What? All about domination and all that sort of stuff? I’m not having that.’ “
Lydon: “On his way out, Malcolm had said, ‘I’ll give you some ideas – submissive, as in the bondage theme, if we could have that kind of topic?’ Me being me, I took it literally for a laugh and then put a twist in it. I called it Submission, but the line went, ‘I’m on a submarine mission for you, baby!’ Anybody who suggests things to me, I’ll sneer, but I’ll see a possibility in it. And off we went.”
“We sat down,” Matlock told Songfacts, “and I can’t remember which one said, ‘What about a submarine mission?’ So, we traded line for line and wrote the song there and then. Then, I went home that night and worked out the music.”
Of course, everybody knew right away why McLaren wanted a song about submission. Lydon said, “We knew full well what he was doing, trying to use us to flog his new S&M line in the shop. They’d ousted the Teddy boy stuff and gone into the full perv – from two people, Malcolm and Vivienne, who were eyeing the world of perversion like the odd couple from Tring. It was just a means to an end – they weren’t actually part of a pervert scene. They were observers, then praising themselves that they were somehow manipulating the wonderful world of fetish, when really they were just floggers – clothes floggers. They’d always be on the wrong end of a whip, and we knew full well they wouldn’t like what we came up with.”
They could have dismissed the idea outright, but the desire to take the mickey out of McLaren won the day and they went to work. Matlock and Lydon both have fond memories of composing the song. Trading lines back and forth over a pint, and arriving at something that worked while also being a big middle finger to McLaren, felt very satisfying to them.
I’m on a submarine mission for you, baby
Feel the way you were going
I picked you up on my TV screen
Feel your undercurrent flowingSubmission
I’m going down, down, dragging me down
Submission
I can’t tell you what I’ve found
The next time the band reconvened for rehearsal, the song was ready. Matlock: “The next time we rehearsed, I said, ‘Look, we have this idea. It goes like this…’ And it went like that, and that was it really.”
So, how well did McLaren like the song that they came up with? Nobody knows. He never acknowledged it, and may in fact never have checked out the finished result beyond its title.
“In fact, we never got a comment on what we wrote,” Lydon said in his autobiography. “There was no conversation at all with Malcolm and me. From the initial outburst and a sense of backing, to suddenly nothing. Just cut dead. And I suppose he eyed me somewhat as being a problem to his art-movement theories. His interpretation of the artistic leanings of the band – mine, or indeed anyone’s – were very different. I didn’t think we needed to try and skillfully craft an image. For me the words were creating that, and my own persona. I just expected the chaps to stand up, and they could be whatever they wanted to be themselves just so long as it was genuine and not crafted.”
Lydon later said this was the closest thing to a love song the Sex Pistols ever wrote. I always had a feeling there was something more carnal about it than that – specifically, such as ‘submitting’ to a woman’s request to perform cunnilingus. There is certainly a lot of contexts there that could be interpreted as a sexually excited woman – lines like “I feel the way you’re flowing,” on top of lines like “I’m going down, down,” as well as the term “submarine mission” itself being a simile for the act. The guy in the song does not come across as the most experienced at it, given the passage “You’ve got me pretty deep baby, I can’t figure out your watery love, I gotta solve your mystery.” Who knows? By all means, take these comments tongue-in-cheek and with a few grains of salt, but if the shoe fits, you’re halfway there, or something like that. ‘Love song’ indeed.
Sadly, Submission did not turn out to be the start of a more ongoing creative partnership between Lydon and Matlock. In his autobiography, Lydon wrote: “That night in the pub, Glen and I both understood that we had to amalgamate our two different perspectives without concessions into something even better than either one of us had conceived independently. I think we did that, and I know I wanted more of that, and I know Glen wanted more of that, but again these other issues kept creeping in.”
Submission was an obvious candidate for their one and only album Never Mind the Bollocks… Here’s the Sex Pistols, released in October 1977. The song was credited to the whole group, as they did for every song on the album, although it mainly came from Matlock and Lydon.
The song would even get a 1977 single release, but only in France. The album track New York filled the b-side.
A demo recording of Submission emerged on a demos collection titled Spunk. Initially released as a bootleg in 1977 based on the recordings that McLaren was shopping around to get them a record contract, the band eventually took control of them and released them properly. These demos were mostly recorded in the band’s rehearsal place in Tin Pan Alley in Denmark Street, London. Matlock and Jones lived in the flat upstairs, with the rehearsal room itself being downstairs. This enabled them to leave all the gear set up, and their sound guy Dave Goodman was able to record a lot of live demos on his Revox tape recorder.
In an interview with Songfacts, Matlock revealed that Jones played a somewhat unusual device on their demo of Submission: “He played a kettle by a microphone, to make the bubbling noises. There’s a good picture of him doing that, somewhere.”
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