“Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” These were the immortal words of Johnny Rotten at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco, January 14, 1978. That was the night he walked away from the Sex Pistols in disgust, endeavored to file a lengthy lawsuit against the Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, became John Lydon again and began a decades-long alienation from his bandmates — the guitarist Steve Jones, bassist Glen Matlock and drummer Paul Cook — that, broken briefly by reunion tours in the 1990s and 2000s, continues to this day.
“John got lead singer disease the moment his boat race got in the papers,” says Matlock, 68, who left the band in February 1977. That came three months after Lydon and Jones went on Bill Grundy’s Today show, swore on live television and went from unknown rockers to tabloid bêtes noires overnight. “I was getting all this shit from John and Malcolm. I heard they tried out Sid [Vicious] on bass, and I only hung in there because I was getting my wages. So I left. Then Malcolm sent a telegram to the NME, saying he sacked me because I liked the Beatles.”
The departure of Matlock and the arrival of Sid Vicious, the nightmare child of the hippy generation, sowed the seeds for the Sex Pistols’ demise. And it was cemented by their short, nasty and violent tour of the US, the concert recordings of which are being released as official albums for the first time.
“It was exciting to come to the States because we had only seen it on TV shows,” 69-year-old Jones says. He’s speaking from his home in Los Angeles, where he has lived since the early Eighties. “But we arrived in New York with our egos flying around everywhere. It got worse from there.”
One of McLaren’s not-so-great ideas was to have the band tour working-class joints in the American South, where they were guaranteed to go down terribly and Vicious, by then a heroin addict, could play his role of Mr. Punk to the hilt. “It ended up being the ruin of the band, the nail in the coffin,” Cook, 68, says. “The whole tour was chaos from start to finish.”
It certainly was. At a January 6 concert at the Taliesyn Ballroom in Memphis, local police roughed up people waiting in the queue. At Randy’s Rodeo in San Antonio two days later, Vicious announced: “You cowboys are all a bunch of faggots,” before swiping at an offended cowboy with his bass guitar. He missed, hitting a PR representative from Warner Music in the face instead.
“Sid almost killed the guy,” Cook says of the Randy’s Rodeo gig. “Meanwhile, the audience was throwing everything from bottles to rats to pig’s ears at the stage. They had read about us being British devils, come to destroy their country, so they thought it was what they were meant to do.”
“I’m trying to think. Were there any good moments?” Jones asks himself, still sounding traumatized at the memory. “We were all sick of Malcolm’s crazy publicity stunts … Me and Cooky travelled by plane while John and Sid were on the bus, which caused tension … We were fighting all the time … No, there were none.”
By the time of the US tour the Pistols had split into factions: childhood friends Cook and Jones on one side, McLaren in the middle, and the formerly united Lydon and Vicious no longer talking to each other. Warner Bros had put up a $1 million insurance surety against the band’s behavior as a condition of their previously denied US entry visas, so it hired a couple of Vietnam vets as security guards to keep an eye on them. The vets decided that their duties included beating up Vicious whenever he got out of hand.
“Their main job was to stop Sid from getting high,” Jones says. “One time, these guys from High Times magazine wanted to get Sid some dope and film him shooting up. The bodyguards put a stop to that, much to Sid’s disappointment.”
Cook says: “They were great big burly guys with beards. We spent most of our time trying to escape them. They had these cattle prods, and they thought it was really funny to zap Sid with them. He was going berserk.”
Meanwhile, American fans interpreted punk in their own naive way. “There were a few kids that were hip to it, but they weren’t like the original punks in England who were really stylish,” Jones says. “They would have the safety pin through the nose — and long hair. I felt bad for them actually.”
McLaren’s determination to make the Sex Pistols’ US tour as much of a circus as possible meant that any concerns about musical accomplishment — and the Pistols were a great rock’n’roll band, as their 1977 album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols proves — went out of the window. Instead it became a social experiment, with McLaren taking a handful of working-class kids, encouraging them to be as badly behaved as possible, slipping a few horror stories to the press and standing back from a safe distance to watch the fireworks.
“Malcolm played us up as the ultimate bad boys,” Jones remembers. “‘They bite the heads off chickens. They throw up everywhere.’ All that shit.”
Cook adds: “By the US tour we were already public enemy number one. We were thrown into the lion’s den and it was a pretty dark time. And people think Malcolm controlled us, which is ridiculous; nobody could control what happened with the Pistols. It gives me the horrors even now, to be honest.”
Cook points out that tension between band members was inevitable, given the circumstances they were thrust into. In the summer of 1977 Lydon and Cook were beaten up, the former in a razor attack outside a pub in Highbury, north London, the latter by a gang of Teddy boys in Shepherds Bush. The tabloids treated the Sex Pistols as the greatest story in rock’n’roll rebellion since the Rolling Stones urinated against a garage forecourt in 1965. McLaren poured all the band’s money into his disastrous film The Great Rock’n’Roll Swindle.Throw in the combustible Vicious, aka 20-year-old Simon John Ritchie, and you can see why it fell apart.
By the time the Pistols reached San Francisco they were an American scandal and a ticking time bomb. “I thought someone was going to get killed,” Cook says. Someone almost did: Vicious overdosed in a drug house in Haight-Ashbury and Cook rushed over to see the bassist on the floor, surrounded by paramedics. The next day, Lydon suggested to Cook and Jones that they get rid of McLaren and carry on without him. Instead they joined McLaren in Los Angeles, from where they took a plane to Rio and made the novelty punk single No One Is Innocent with the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs.
“By that point I wanted to run away from it all,” Jones says. “I remember going to a restaurant in LA, a lobster and steak house called the Palm on Santa Monica Boulevard, with Malcolm and Cooky, when Malcolm said, ‘Quick, throw some of them lobsters around.’ We were going, ‘We just want to f***ing eat, for f***’s sake! It was done.”
Nonetheless, Jones says he generally took McLaren’s side, having fallen under his wing in 1974 after being caught stealing from McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s Kings Road boutique, Sex. “He used to take me to all these art parties, and being a herbert from Shepherds Bush I found them fascinating. He was a father figure to me, really. I liked John, in the early days at least, but we didn’t hang out. I think he resented that.”
Cook recalls meeting Lydon and Jones in a hotel in San Francisco after the Winterland gig, where they all agreed that it couldn’t go on. “My feeling was that we would have a few months off, reconvene, and take it from there,” he says. “Obviously it didn’t work out that way.”
Instead, Lydon announced the break up of the Sex Pistols in January 1978, having flown to New York to visit Vicious, who was in hospital after overdosing on methadone. Broke, he called Richard Branson and asked for the money for the airfare back to London, where he duly formed Public Image Limited and instituted legal proceedings against McLaren. Just over a year later, Vicious was dead of a heroin overdose. He was 21.
“Back then I didn’t understand any of the legal or financial implications,” Jones says. “I was young and stupid, and you know how many times bands get turned over, right? Most are happy to be making music and being in the spotlight. Who knows where the money went? Some of it went into the film, some of it went into Malcolm’s pocket, and in hindsight [suing McLaren] was a great move by John because everything got reverted back to the band.”
After the Sex Pistols collapsed, Jones’s life fell off a cliff. He had been sexually abused at age ten by his stepfather and spent much of his schooldays in juvenile detention centers, so he says the band gave him a sense of belonging, however chaotic it was.
“Not to get all soft and that but I had an empty feeling as a kid, a need to fill a hole. There had always been a need to do something, so it made sense after the Pistols that I gravitated towards smack. I sold everything I had. I even sold my flat in West Hampstead. I did [the post-Pistols band] the Professionals with Cooky, but my heart weren’t in it. I just wanted to get high.”
Given the historic bad blood between them, it is remarkable that the four original Sex Pistols got back together in 1996, although by calling their reunion the Filthy Lucre Tour they made their motivations clear. “It was great to start with,” Cook says. “We could sound how we wanted to, we were playing proper concerts, everyone was getting on all right. We were a band again. It all broke down in the end, of course.”
Describing the typical Pistols trajectory, Jones says: “Me, Glen and Cooky get along like a regular band. Then John starts stirring the pot and it gets ugly.” Is being on a tour bus with Lydon a challenge? “To say the least. I do love John, and we created something special there for a minute, but if you want to keep the ball rolling you just have to suck it up. By the last time we played together, in 2008, I thought, ‘I’m too old for this shit.’ That’s why I like it this time. There’s none of that.”
This brings us to the present incarnation of the Sex Pistols, with 40-year-old Frank Carter as frontman. “It’s karaoke. That’s all it will ever be,” Lydon says of the line-up. But in a review, Mark Beaumont declared that Carter, formerly of the equally punky band Gallows, “revitalized the band, making the anger, disgust and insurrection relevant to a century with less future than ever”. Jones says he and the other original members feel like they are driving a steam train on stage, stoking the fire frantically and trying to keep up as Carter lets rip. Cook says the gigs have reminded him of the early days of the Pistols, before the madness took over.
“I know people are moaning that it’s not the Pistols without John, but Frank has been a breath of fresh air,” Cook says. “Me and Steve grew up on T. Rex, Bowie, the Faces and Alice Cooper; John liked everything from reggae to Captain Beefheart, and all we wanted was to be a great band.”
Now, I say to Cook, people do realize the Sex Pistols are a great band. He lets out a sigh. It sounds like it has been maturing for more than 40 years. “Took a long time, though, didn’t it?”
Will Hodgkinson is the chief rock-and-pop critic for The Times of London and contributes to Mojo magazine
