The lyrics refer to "
God Save the Queen", by beginning each verse "God save...", followed by many, often unsavoury, characters, starting with the Sex Pistols themselves. There are references to
Bill Grundy, the television host who had caused controversy two years earlier when Steve Jones swore on his live show, egged on by Grundy, as well as
Martin Bormann and "
Nazis on the run". Notorious child murderers
Myra Hindley and
Ian Brady are mentioned (with Hindley's surname mispronounced "Hind-ley"), along with politicians and the police (referred to as "pigs"),
Idi Amin, and finally Biggs himself. The chorus goes, "Ronnie Biggs was doing time, until he done a bunk, now he says he's seen the light, and he's sold his soul for punk." (In UK slang, to "bunk", or "do a bunk", is to leave without permission; most frequently used to indicate skipping school or work, here it refers to Biggs' escape from the
HM Prison Wandsworth and the UK.) The final lines of the last verse are "God save the
Good Samaritan and God save the worthless creep". Associating all the characters together, both good and bad (including themselves) while claiming that "no one is innocent" is exemplary of the
nihilistic attitude of the Sex Pistols. In an interview in the
Daily Mirror around the time the record was released, drummer Paul Cook said that "god should save everyone, even evil people". Bormann, prankishly pictured as the band's uniformed bass player on the 12-inch pressing, is also mentioned in Biggs's recording of the earlier Pistols song "
Belsen Was a Gas", another song which makes light of
The Holocaust ("No One Is Innocent", while calling Brady "horrible", dismisses the Nazis as "they wasn't being wicked/it was their idea of fun"). Fleeing prosecution for
war crimes following
World War II, Bormann was for years thought to have escaped, like Biggs, to
Brazil. The title of the song was originally supposed to be "
Cosh the Driver", a reference to the near-fatal beating that the train driver had suffered in Biggs's robbery years before.
Virgin Records vetoed the idea, and the song eventually appeared as "
No One Is Innocent (A Punk Prayer by Ronnie Biggs)". On the 12-inch pressing, the title became "
The Biggest Blow", but subsequent releases on albums reverted to the original title. The song reached number seven on the UK singles chart, and appears on the albums ''
The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (1979) and Flogging a Dead Horse'' (1980). The double A-side of the 7-inch and the B-side of the 12-inch pressings was
Sid Vicious's rendition of
Claude François,
Jacques Revaux and
Paul Anka's "
My Way". == Recording sessions==