Submission (4:17)

“Submission” is a song performed by Sex Pistols which appears on the album Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols. It was written by Steve Jones, Glen Matlock, Paul Cook and Johnny Rotten.

The original UK album (Virgin V2086) contained only eleven tracks, before the group changed their mind and decided to include “Submission”.

However, Virgin had already pre-emptively produced stampers for the eleven-track version, and by early October 1977 had already pressed 1,000 copies. Rather than scrap these, Virgin released them anyway, initially as promos, then commercially, as an attempt to counteract a sudden flood of imports from France, where a twelve-track version of the album (including “Submission”) had been released in mid-October by Barclay Records.

In response to this, Virgin also brought forward the album’s intended UK release date by a week, and instead of waiting for the twelve-track album to be mastered, issued further copies of the eleven-track album (reportedly 50,000 copies, although some collectors now dispute these official figures as on the high side). Most of these copies included a poster and “Submission” as a freebie single.

Some of the initial 11-track copies were privately imported to Sweden and sold for a few weeks at a record shop in Stockholm. The poster and “Submission” were not included at this stage.