A working-class lad from a north-west London neighbourhood gets off a bus on Kings Road in 1974 and the history of music changes. He is the son of a factory shop steward in those hot years of strikes, pickets and scabs, although he, Glen Matlock, wants to study art, like most of his idols. He remembers the cold at home in winter, the troubles to pay the electricity bill, the small radio hidden under the pillow to tune in at night to the Stones, the Yardbirds or the Kinks. He has already hallucinated with David Bowie in his conversion to Ziggy Stardust, with the rough rock of The Faces and Lou Reed. He bangs out a tenth-hand bass in his bedroom when the odd job he finds to pay for rare records allows him.
He goes to Kings Road because someone tells him that there is a different clothing store, halfway between fashion skinhead and the New York avant-garde, vintage but groundbreaking. Its owners are the radical designer Vivienne Westwood and her partner, Malcolm McLaren, a strange little red-haired man. Everything is too expensive for their pocket, but there is a vacancy and the job is his. In the shop, which will soon change its name to SEX, his main job is to keep an eye on a couple of juvenile delinquents who regularly try to rob it, Steve Jones and Paul Cook. As well as being skilled thieves, they have a rock band, but their bass player fails them. Matlock, Jones and Cook talk a little, discovering that they listen to the same groups. Matlock joins in. The Sex Pistols have just been born.
“We were kids, teenagers, trying to find our way in the world. We didn’t have much money, but we did have some contacts, and we wanted to do things. In a way it was natural, we sought each other out because we felt different from the people we had grown up with, who wanted a normal job, to do what was expected of them,” Matlock recalls, much later, at 68 years old, during an interview with EL PAÍS at the Hay Festival in Querétaro. He has come to present his autobiography, Triggers (Nine Eight Books2024, without translation into Spanish). He already has gray hair, a mustache, a black shirt unbuttoned to the chest and a pocket comb that he takes out to pose like John Travolta for photographs. The years go by but the cockiness remains intact.
The band begins to rehearse, but none of them can play very well. Not that it matters. In late 1970s London, the wind has changed direction, the music is electrified, everything before is rejected. There is something in the air that smells new, unused. “The old empire was crumbling. We were not going to be as malleable as the previous generation,” writes Matlock. The important thing is to have a different vision. They have one. Jones and Cook’s ease in stealing instruments from other people’s concerts—including one by Bowie—does the rest. McLaren, a lover of provocation with a situationist soul, becomes a kind of manager. One of his first orders is to expel singer Wally Nightingale, an unlucky kid who never manages to overcome his addictions and dies years later, too young.
The replacement is another of SEX’s scruffy hangers-on, John Lydon. His audition is at a bar. Lydon shows up wearing a T-shirt that says “I hate Pink Floyd (I hate Pink Floyd).” The credentials are clear. An Alice Cooper song on the jukebox, Lydon bellowing over it. Jones, to mark territory, teases the new guy by saying his teeth look rotten (rottenin English). And that’s where Johnny Rotten was born, one of the most influential and controversial singers of the 20th century. The group began playing in universities and poorly lit clubs in London’s Soho. Most of the musical composition falls to Matlock, the lyrics to Lydon. They need each other, but they distrust each other.
“The Kinks invented punk”
At that time McLaren travels between London and New York, where he also manages the New York Dolls during their downfall and dissolution, partly due to his fault. He connects two musical scenes thousands of miles apart but with much in common, which, in parallel and without listening to each other, are giving birth to a new bastard sound of rock and roll: punk. Thanks to McLaren, the Pistols are among the first in Europe to discover Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, Blondie, Talking Heads. “We were aware that something was happening in New York. The funny thing was that none of them had recorded an album. We had no idea what they sounded like, we had only seen a couple of photographs, but at that time we were already playing,” Matlock says.
One of the most endless and boring debates in punk is establishing who was the first band, the original sound. The big battle is usually fought between the Sex Pistols and the Ramones. “I was chatting to Steve Jones just before I came here and he said, ‘I’m really fed up with the whole Ramones inventing punk thing. We were punks in 1975,’ and we were. But they didn’t know about us either, so it was a happy coincidence. I think we both started at the same time, happily ignoring each other’s music, but I sensed something. In England, maybe we were the first. In America you could argue, but I always say that the first punk rock band, before the Pistols or the Ramones, was actually the Kinks,” the musician adds.
On December 1, 1976, Freddie Mercury has to cancel an interview in Thames TV with Bill Grundy, an old-school journalist with no desire to work that night. The last-minute replacement is the Pistols, who show up half-drunk and with an entourage of poorly dressed and worse-looking teenage punks. Grundy smells blood, provokes the punks. Within seconds, Rotten says shit (shit) twice live on puritanical British television and Jones calls Grundy dirty old man, dirty bastard, dirty fucker, fucking rotter (dirty old man, dirty bastard, dirty cunt, fucking rotten). All words strictly forbidden. Grundy’s career dies with that programme. The Sex Pistols’ career explodes.
“Everything changed dramatically when we did the famous show. We went from the pages of music magazines to the front page of all the national news,” Matlock recalls. The next day, the Daily Mirror The band opens its edition with a photo of the Pistols and the iconic headline: “The filth and the fury.” The rest of the major newspapers have similar headlines. There is a new public enemy in the country. The record company EMI breaks the contract it has just signed with them, but it is nothing more than a thorn in their side. McLaren steps forward and takes advantage of the scandal. Their faces are everywhere. In a few days they sell more than 50,000 copies of their first single, Anarchy in the UK.
Matlock begins to see strange behaviour in his bandmates that reminds him of when Nightingale was fired. He senses what is coming. Rotten, with McLaren’s support, is trying to oust him from the Sex Pistols to put in his place his friend John Ritchie, who history will remember as Sid Vicious. A misfit who has no idea what to do with a bass in his hands, but looks good in a leather jacket and fits better with McLaren’s aesthetic delusions. Matlock decides to leave the group. “After we did the Bill Grundy show and John’s face appeared in the papers, the dynamic of the band changed, he became very stubborn. There was something about him that I didn’t like, but I couldn’t quite understand why. I think looking back he never seemed sincere to me, and now that he walks around with a baseball cap on, he’s not a very good band member, but he’s not a very good band member, and … MAGA [Make America Great Again, el lema de campaña de los seguidores del ultraderechista Donald Trump en EE UU] and by supporting Brexit, he has confirmed my suspicions.”
“Sid Vicious was a nice idiot, but he could sing”
In 1977, they released their only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Matlock never recorded it, but the music for almost all the songs was his. That year the group went on their first tour of the United States. It would be their last. They couldn’t stand each other, drugs took over. They split up and each went their own way. Sid Vicious died in 1979 of an overdose in New York. “It was like watching a train slowly derail,” says Matlock. A few months earlier his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, died in a room at the Chelsea Hotel. Sid was accused of her murder, although the night was murky and no one was sure what happened. Many years later, books were written and documentaries were shot trying to figure out what happened. No one succeeded. It is the great unsolved mystery of punk rock.
When Matlock left the Pistols, he formed another group, Rich Kids, which had some success in England. He held a grudge against McLaren, who spread the idea in the press that the rest of the band had decided to kick him out because he liked the Beatles too much, forbidden fruit for a punk. With Sid Vicious, however, he did not have the antagonistic relationship that everyone assumes. “Sid was my neighbour, he lived around the corner and we saw each other every day in the pub. It was very strange sitting together pretending to be enemies when we were like… You know, he didn’t seem like the best guy in the world, but he wasn’t that bad. I thought he was a nice idiot. But he could sing.”
Over the years there are comings and goings, legal disputes over the rights to the songs. Matlock never stops playing on his own. He will be bassist for Iggy Pop, Johnny Thunders, Primal Scream, Blondie. In 1996, the Pistols go on their first reunion tour, with Matlock back on the four strings, “basically because the money at stake was an offer we couldn’t refuse.” More tours will follow in 2002 and 2007, but tensions between Matlock, Jones and Cook with Rotten grow. “When John and I met he was a great and interesting guy. But something changed. It was a shame because at the beginning we had a very real chemistry. He was very good on stage and wrote great songs, but you don’t want to be on tour in the back of a van with someone like him.” In fact, Rotten traveled and slept separately from his companions.
McLaren died in 2010. Decades earlier, in one of his usual jokeshad claimed that the Sex Pistols were a setup of his own design. In the accounts of the survivors, the manager is the bad guy. “I don’t think he was the villain, I think he was a very interesting person and we had a very symbiotic relationship. He may have used us, but we used him too.” The Pistols have returned to the stage this year with another singer, Frank Carter. Next year they will go on a world tour. “It’s nice to be in a successful band, but all I really wanted to do when I started was work as a musician, and I’ve never stopped,” says Matlock. They were local kids who only wanted to play in a rock band and they stumbled upon a new sound that shook up the 20th century.
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