Sex Pistol Glen Matlock on Bowie, Blondie and Ex-Pistol John Lydon | Music | Entertainment | EUROtoday

After the final present of Iggy Pop’s 1979 US tour, his pal David Bowie provided to present the band a raise to New York’s Mudd Club in his Lincoln Continental govt stretch limousine. “We piled into his limo, and it was such a tight squeeze I had to sit on Bowie’s knee,” former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock recollects. “I noticed small paintings hanging up inside. ‘Hang about,’ I said, ‘Isn’t that a Picasso?’ Bowie said yeah. I said ‘Well, you’re a flash ****’ and he laughed. The other one was a Matisse.”

When Iggy first launched them, Bowie had quipped, “Oh, the noble savage.” Insulted, bassist Glen, 69, retorted, “Your mics didn’t half come in handy…” and defined that the Pistols famously light-fingered guitarist Steve Jones had stolen Bowie’s gear from his 1973 Hammersmith Odeon present, together with cymbals, a bass amplifier, and Bowie’s private microphone. “The bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar,” he added, quoting the star’s personal lyrics. Bowie bristled however the pair ultimately made up within the wings of a Talking Heads present, additionally in Manhattan. “He knew all the songs and sang them in his best David Bowie voice,” Glen tells me. “I told him I’d loved his Low album and the single from it, Be My Wife. He said ‘The Laughing Gnome sold more than that’. He wasn’t up himself, he was genuinely interested in what you had to say.”

Contrary to all expectations – particularly theirs – the Sex Pistols are nonetheless going robust 50 years after their first shambolic stay present on November 6, 1975. “We’re supposed to be touring America but Steve went to watch Chelsea play Fulham, slipped and broke his hand in three places and we’ve had to postpone it,” Glen explains. “We’ve played fifty shows this year.” They’re old-age punks now. Jones is 70, drummer Paul Cook is 69. Singer Frank Carter, ex-Gallows, is the child of the band at 41. Only John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, is lacking. “There’s no way back for John,” Glen says bluntly. “He’s has painted himself into a corner, over politics and Trump.” Lydon, additionally 70, famously instructed the Sunday Express Review that “Trump is the Sex Pistols of politics” earlier this yr.

The Pistols’ electrifying early years are celebrated in new Sky Arts documentary, I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol (additionally the title of his 1990 memoir and subsequent one-man present which Glen took to the Edinburgh Festival in 2014). “It gives me a chance to tell my side of the story,” he says. “The premier was last night at the Barbican – it was weird watching yourself thinking I wish I’d had me Barnet trimmed.” The movie options classic footage and all-new interviews, together with luminaries like Cook & Jones, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, Billy Idol and the late Wayne Kramer (of The MC5), plus Alex McDowell who booked the Pistols’ first ever headlining gig on the Central School Of Art on November 7 1975 (and who went on to be the manufacturing designer on Tim Burton’s Charlie & The Chocolate Factory).

Punk rock hit the music enterprise like an ice bucket problem. Why? “There was a death of stuff that meant anything to kids. All the great bands – Roxy Music, The Faces, Mott The Hoople, Bowie’s Spiders From Mars – had gone to the States or just gone. Some pub rock bands were good – Doctor Feelgood and Kilburn & The High Road – but progressive rock was the dominant force and it was horrendous. People wanted change.”

Punk’s first flame burned brightly however briefly. The spotlight, says Glen, was headlining the 100 Club’s two-day Punk Festival in September 1976. “It was rammed but it was still only about 400 people. Our greatest gig was Finsbury Park when we reformed in 1996, we had 36,000 there. Afterwards we came backstage to find Liam Gallagher going through our drinks, trying to nick a bottle of whisky. “The only trouble was I’d made the mistake of watching Spinal Tap the night before – where their bassist Derek Smalls got stuck in an alien pod – and we had to burst in stage through a thick screen of paper with our ‘filthy lucre’ backdrop, I had visions of the same thing happening to me…”

When the Pistols performed Japan that yr the promoter laid on two days in a luxurious ryokan lodge by a lake on Hokkaido – a far cry from Kensal Green, London NW10, the place solely youngster Glen had grown up. His father was a store steward at a manufacturing facility making milk floats. He describes his upbring as “pretty working-class” and brightened up by QPR and Jamaican ska. “We were just down the road from Ladbrooke Grove. In the summer you’d just hear Laurel Aitken and bluebeat, it was kind of cool. My mum and dad went into big band music which I thought it was a bit cheesy at the time, but now when I listen to Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Glenn Miller it’s pretty cool. The first record I ever played were my uncle’s 78s – Elvis and Little Richard. I bought a LP at Rock On Records in Portobello Road because it looked similar, and it was The Faces’ second album, Long Player, a real door opener for me.”

Young Matlock cherished Rudyard Kipling, the Kinks, Hancock’s Half Hour, Round The Horne and Anthony Newley – one other connecting level with Bowie. He was a sixth-former at St Clements Danes Grammar School when Malcolm Mclaren employed him to work Saturday shifts in Let It Rock – the Kings Road store he owned with Vivienne Westwood later rebranded as Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die earlier than turning into SEX – punk rock’s nucleus. “Originally it was brothel creepers, Teds and a rock’n’roll jukebox – anything to not be a hippy.” He met fellow Faces followers Steve and Paul there. “I’m proud that the 25 people who hung around Malcolm’s shop all went on to do something of consequence. Jamie Reid, Siouxsie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde…”

The Pistols’ stay look on ITV’s Today in December 1976, when tipsy host Bill Grundy provoked them into swearing, modified every little thing. Chaos and council bans ensued. “We’d already been on the front pages of the music papers but now all of Fleet Street was chasing us. It was funny to begin with, but we were going round the country not being out to play. That was a bit boring. Then Malcolm turned it into a cartoon strip…I was still being offered gigs by promoters but when I’d tell Malcolm, he’d say ‘You’re banned’ – a bit of dishonesty.”

Glen had co-written ten of their first songs, together with the 2 Top Ten hits Pretty Vacant and God Save The Queen, (he tailored the bassline for the previous from Abba’s SOS and the intro to Anarchy In The UK from the opening to ITV’s Sunday Night on the London Palladium). But inside relationships had been fractious. “Me and John were like chalk and cheese. John thought it was him versus me Steve and Paul. It wasn’t, it was a triumvirate – him, me, and Steve and Paul…” And John wished to herald his pal Sid Vicious, who couldn’t play. Danny Boyle’s Pistol TV collection repeated McLaren’s lie that he’d fired Glen. Untrue. Matlock left of his personal volition in February 1977, with Malcolm then opportunistically claiming that he’d been thrown out for being too eager on Paul McCartney. Two weeks later McLaren tracked him right down to the Blue Posts pub in Central London to say Sid wasn’t working and would he come again. Glen’s reply is unprintable.

He shaped the Rich Kids with Midge Ure, Rusty Egan and Steve New that March and notched three hit singles earlier than splitting in 1979. Not longer after, he joined Iggy’s band. Seeing their 6000-strong New York Palladium viewers dressed like horror movie werewolves, ghouls and gargoyles threw him. Talk about Never Mind The Warlocks… “I didn’t know about Halloween, so to me it looked crazy. Afterwards Iggy introduced me to Debbie Harry, who was dressed as a witch. She kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t wash it for a week.”

In 2022 he was at house making a risotto when the telephone rang. “It was [Blondie drummer] Clem Burke saying it wasn’t working with their bass player, was I interested.’ I said, ‘When? A couple of months’ time?’ He said next week… Of course I did it.” Glen and Clem, who died this yr, had been buddies since assembly at a 1978 charity gig. He was additionally pals with the late Faces’ keyboardist Ian McLagan. “In 2010, Ian told me Yes had asked him to play. He said, ‘Why the f*** would I want to play with Yes? I like songs with a beginning, a middle and an end.’ I asked what he wanted to do. He said, ‘Reform The Faces’…” And they did, with Mick Hucknall standing in for Rod Stewart and Glen changing Ronnie Lane on bass. “I said don’t worry, I know these songs backwards…it’s just forwards I have a problem with.”

Glen shouldn’t be your common tabloid folks demon. He’s good and sober, with a dry wit, and relaxes by going to artwork galleries and watching tragedies at Loftus Road. His grownup sons Sam and Louis are musicians, with Louis doubling because the Pistols’ stage supervisor. “It was him who suggested we get Frank in.”

Matlock nonetheless seethes about Boris Johnson not agreeing a post-Brexit freedom of motion deal for musicians with the EU. “Young bands used to be able to get in a van and play gigs around Europe breaking even by selling merch. When I toured with Iggy, the Human League pretty much did that. You can’t do it anymore. It’s tragic.”

Glen lives in Maida Vale, with a framed poster for Tony Hancock’s movie The Rebel hanging subsequent to early Pistols gig posters. He recollects them showing on Dutch TV present Disco Circus in January 1977 performing Anarchy In The UK accompanied (on the producer’s insistence) by juggling dwarfs. The band may even report an album subsequent yr, which might be their first correct studio album since Never Mind The Bollocks, launched in October 1977. “I’ve got ideas for songs…we have to have a conversation, but we’ll definitely gig. “No other band I’ve been in eclipses the Pistols. It’s a double-edged sword. I see myself as a songwriter but I’ve been a Sex Pistol or an ex-Pistol all my life. “No matter how much you try and do other things, it is always there.”

*Glen Matlock’s documentary, I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol, airs on Sky Arts on November 8. His newest ebook Triggers: A Life In Music was printed in 2023.