Glen Matlock's documentary I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol was on TV last week. It came out last year, based on Matlock's book of the same name and is very much the Glen Matlock side of the SexPistols story. Glen seems like a nice person, reflective and a music lover, fired up by an introduction to the bass guitar and a love The Faces in the mid- 70s. Various people pop up to support Glen- Clem Burke, Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Billy Idol, Cheetah Chrome and Wayne Kramer all make frequent appearances. The film traces the formation and rise of the Pistols, from Glen getting a job at Malcolm and Vivienne's shop Sex on the King's Road and meeting Steve and Paul through the shop, forming the band (originally with Wally Nightingale, who was later dropped in favour of John Lydon/ Johnny Rotten) and learning to play and write together. Things change when John Lydon joins and the story, which as Steve Jones says at the start of the film 'has been told a million fuckin' times', takes a familiar run through punk, bans, the jubilee, the scandal, the filth and the fury, Bill Grundy, EMI, A&M, cancelled gigs and all that.
Glen talks about his role in writing the songs that became the band's repertoire. He describes sitting in a pub and taking a melody line from an ABBA song playing on the pub's jukebox and writing Pretty Vacant from it. Jones wrote some words, later adapted by Lydon who took great glee in pronouncing vacant as two words, 'va- cunt'.
Glen also tells how he wrote the main riff for Anarchy In The UK on the bass guitar and took it in to Jones and Cook, and that Lydon then added the words, everything falling into place. As you'd expect the details of Glen's sacking from the band are central to the film. Paul Cook admits that he and Steve Jones could have stood up for Glen and didn't. Lydon was threatened by the make up of the band- he always felt a step removed from the other three. Cook and Jones were long term friends and a tight unit. Lydon needed an ally in the band and Sid Vicious was maneuvered in to do be that person- Glen had to go. Glen was supposedly sacked for liking The Beatles, a line McLaren came up with but in reality it was Lydon's paranoia and band politics. Jones and Cook knew that there wouldn't be a band without Lydon.
Lydon is absent from the documentary apart from in archive footage- there's no new interview material from him and he's very much split from the Matlock, Jones, Cook version of the Sex Pistols currently playing with Frank Turner on vocals. Lydon's appearance and performance, his stare and stance, his vocal delivery and lyrics, made the Pistols into something else entirely but in no way does John look like he was ever an easy person to be in a band with. The lifespan of the Sex Pistols was always going to be short and when Lydon got Sid in on bass it was the beginning of the end- Sid's lack of ability, his heroin addiction and the US tour proved too much for all of them. Lydon, or Rotten, inadvertently destroyed the band from within.
Glen talks very openly and a little ruefully about it all and says he made friends with Sid, offered to teach him the basslines and made a big point of showing Lydon that he bore no ill will about his sacking. The end section of the film has him looking round the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas (yes, such a thing exists and yes in such a place) and noting that they don't have a photo of the band with him in it on display. He clearly still feels a bit written out of the story. The film shows some post- Pistols Glen, The Rich Kids and other ventures, but weirdly doesn't really mention the 1996 re- union or subsequent ones at all, where Glen was reintroduced into the band and to his rightful place as co- songwriter and bass player with the Sex Pistols.
Few, if any, bands have had such an impact on popular culture and with just one single album, a mere twelve songs. The world of 1977, the jubilee and swearing on television, councils cancelling gigs by a group who said 'shit' and 'fucking rotter' on early evening TV, seems so far away in some ways- a world where swearing on TV was actually shocking and had real life repercussions. The violence they faced was extreme and the relationship with Malcolm an obvious source of tension. Malcolm and Lydon presented their versions of events in the years after- now Matlock (and Jones) have given theirs. An entire punk scene spun off from the Pistols, in the UK and the US, thousands of bands forming over the ensuing years directly inspired by the Sex Pistols, by their sound, their image, their attitude, and that slim catalogue of songs.
I went back to listen to Never Mind The Bollocks, to see what if any power it still holds. Hearing it again was a thrill- the sheer attack and energy of the songs, the power of Steve Jones' Les Paul, a wall of guitars, firing away is undeniable. Lydon is a one off, a complete presence, sneering and speak- singing his way across the album, from album opener Holidays In The Sun to E.M.I forty minutes later.
Matlock was actually asked to return to the studio to record the basslines for Bollocks when it became apparent Sid wasn't up to the task. He wanted payment in advance and when it didn't appear, he didn't go. The only song on Never Mind The Bollocks to include Glen playing on it is Anarchy In The UK. The rest of the bass parts were done by Jones. Bodies and Holidays In The Sun were written after Glen had left. Of all the songs on the album, Bodies is perhaps the most extreme, Lydon's lyrics about abortion and mental health issues and his anguished howl of the chorus, 'Bodies/ I'm not an animal', and the verse 'Fuck this and fuck that/ Fuck it all the fuck out/ She don't want a baby that looks like that/ I don't want a baby that looks like that', still shocking. Away from the pantomime, the who did what and why, the safety pins and the monarchy, Bodies is a visceral, uncompromising portrayal of Pauline, a Sex Pistols fan, 'who lived in a tree'. Meanwhile Steve Jones sounds like an explosion in a buzzsaw factory.
