Submission

"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. An article in a local paper warned people not to buy this "faulty" issue and advised them to wait for the 12 track issue that was about to be pressed. The article also had a quote from Virgin in London, which said that all production and sale had been stopped, but some copies had unfortunately leaked out through their export company. This issue had a blank back cover and matrix numbers A-1 and B-1.

The twelve-track UK version began appearing in early November 1977.

As a result of the track listing confusion, several variants of the UK back sleeve exist: completely blank, omitting "Submission", including "Submission", and a misprint including "Belsen Was a Gas" and omitting several other tracks, based on artwork for an earlier rejected track listing.