do the sex pistols still tour

SEX PISTOLS: North American Tour Dates Announced

Punk rock legends SEX PISTOLS will embark on a two-week tour of North America in late August/early September.

The band's original line-up — John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten , vocals), Steve Jones (guitar), Paul Cook (drums) and Glen Matlock (bass) — will visit a mix of amphitheaters, clubs and concert halls, and will conclude the tour with a Sept. 7 set at the San Diego Street Scene festival.

SEX PISTOLS split in 1978 after a final performance at San Francisco Winterland Ballroom, by which time Sid Vicious had replaced Matlock on bass. Vicious died of a heroin overdose in 1979.

The original line-up reformed for the "Filthy Lucre" tour of the U.K. in 1996 and also reunited last summer to play a London show as a rebuttal to Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee celebrations.

SEX PISTOLS tour dates (subject to change):

Aug. 20 - Boston, MA - FleetBoston Pavilion Aug. 21 - Wantagh, NY - Jones Beach Theatre Aug. 23 - Atlantic City, NJ - Trump Marina Aug. 24 - Washington, DC - 9:30 Club Aug. 25 - Toronto, Ontario - Molson Amphitheatre Aug. 27 - Cleveland, OH - Scene Pavilion Aug. 28 - Detroit, MI - Cobo Arena Aug. 29 - Chicago, IL - Aragon Ballroom Aug. 31 - Englewood, CO - Fiddler's Green Amphitheater Sep. 03 - San Francisco, CA - The Warfield Sep. 05 - Las Vegas, NV - The Joint, Hard Rock Hotel Sep. 06 - Los Angeles, CA - Greek Theatre Sep. 07 - San Diego, CA - San Diego Street Scene

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Sex Pistols in America: A Brief, Raucous History of the Punk Icons’ Doomed U.S. Tour

The brief 1978 run was marked by musical incompetence, audience antagonism and physical altercations — with occasional flashes of raw punk brilliance.

By Steve Knopper

Steve Knopper

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Renowned in the U.K. for tearing down rock ‘n’ roll and reinventing it as something thrilling, profane and unpredictable, the Sex Pistols arrived in the U.S. on Jan. 3, 1978, for a tour — not of major cities like New York and Los Angeles but run-down ballrooms throughout the South. The tour was doomed — bassist Sid Vicious had a drug problem, and the band’s label, Warner Bros., had to put up a $1 million bond in order to secure two-week visas.

Thus began a spectacle, “deep in enemy territory” — as tour manager Noel Monk put it in his 1990 memoir 12 Days On the Road: The Sex Pistols in America — of out-of-tune instruments, grumpy Johnny Rotten tirades and band-vs.-audience spitting and jeering that transformed into physical violence and, every now and then, moments of greatness . Two dates were canceled and seven went on, including the biggest, an ill-fated finale at Bill Graham ‘s Winterland Ballroom.

To mark the release of FX’s new Sex Pistols series Pistol , now streaming on Hulu, below is a summary of the band’s U.S. tour during that mythically brief period.

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Jan. 5, Great SouthEast Music Hall, Atlanta. Located in a former shopping mall above a bowling alley, the 523-capacity Great SouthEast Music Hall Emporium & Performing Arts Exchange Inc emulated the Bottom of the Barrel club in Union, N.J., booking punk bands like the Restraints, Angelust and the Nasty Bucks, one of whose members occasionally performed in trash bags. Pistols tickets, as one of the club’s managers, Sharon Powell , later told Mick O’Shea in 2018’s The Sex Pistols Invade America: The Fateful U.S. Tour, January 1978 , were marked with a hole-punch and safety pin, hand-stamped, “numbered, and had to be checked out of the safe.”

Sex Pistols Aim to Give Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee a Touch of Punk

Local fire marshals showed up to the gig due to the press attention, says Powell, and “every single person was counted whose head went through that door.” She adds that more press — from the Village Voice ’s Robert Christgau to TV reporters from all three networks — showed up than paying fans. “They were pretty much as you would expect punkers to behave: radically punkish with sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll,” says Powell, who today owns an Atlanta entertainment company called Swirl Girl Productions. “On stage, they actually, honest to God, were fairly professional. I’ve had worse trouble on stage with bands than we had with them.” The Great SouthEast Music Hall moved to another location later in 1978, then closed for good after two Arlo Guthrie shows the following year.

Jan. 6, Taliesyn Ballroom, Memphis. Razed in 1979 in favor of a Taco Bell, according to The Sex Pistols Invade America , the 725-capacity Taliesyn was what one fan called “a lovely old mansion originally built for debutante coming-out parties and wedding receptions.” Years of high-school graduation and fraternity parties, though, meant it “always smell[ed] a little like vomit.”

Promoters oversold the show, and fire marshals showed up to tell the late promoter Bob Kelley to restrict the overage and leave 200 unlucky fans out on the cold Memphis streets. (Kelley was said to have undercut the marshals by escorting certain ticketholders to the back entrance, through the kitchen.) Many in the crowd had shown up looking to spit, fight and generally raise hell, but halfway through the loud, screechy concert, the Pistols had driven half the crowd away. “You’ve really done something, in my opinion,” the late producer Jim Dickinson , who attended, said in 2017 , “especially in Memphis, where people will basically watch anything — paint dry, or dogs fight, or whatever.”

Jan. 8, Randy’s Rodeo, San Antonio, Texas. Randy’s Rodeo started out as a bowling alley on a “ two-lane, no-shoulder paved road .” It turned into a 2,200-person concert venue when soil problems made the ground shift and the bowling lanes uneven.

Billing itself as “the finest western dance hall and night club in San Antonio,” Randy’s Rodeo drew roughly 1,200 people for the Pistols show — a couple hundred punk fans, plus locals and metalheads. “It was instant mayhem,” Jesse Sublett of The Violators told the Austin Chronicle in 2003. “Cups, beer cans, food, trash, spit flew toward the stage. The sound was loud, extremely lo-fi, but the band was tight — for about 10 seconds.” The show was mostly famous for Vicious screaming a homophobic slur at the crowd — “You cowboys are all a bunch of fucking f—–s!” — and hitting an attendee with his bass.

Racism on the Road: The Oral History of Black Artists Touring in the Segregated South

Jan. 9, Kingfish Club, Baton Rouge, La. Another club in a shopping mall, the 1,000-capacity Kingfish took the nickname of former Louisiana Sen. Huey Long and made space for bands who were somewhere between playing bars and arenas., “It looked to us like there was a crying need for such a place,” said one of the owners, Robert Day , in The Sex Pistols Invade America .

The Pistols show, “mostly made up of rubberneckers and jock-types looking for trouble,” as an attendee told O’Shea, included many journalists and a few handfuls of New Orleans punk rockers. The show became infamous due to Vicious allegedly receiving sexual favors onstage from a member of the audience, although accounts differ on whether that occurred.

Jan. 10, Longhorn Ballroom, Dallas. A Dallas millionaire landowner, O.L. Nelms , built this kitschy club in 1950; an early marquee above a 21-foot longhorn statue reads, “America’s Finest Western Ballroom.” Western-swing hero Bob Wills was an early host of the 1,900-capacity club, which had a barbecue restaurant and, over the years, would promote Loretta Lynn , Willie Nelson , George Jones , B.B. King , Nat King Cole and Al Green . Wills gave up his lease in 1958, and another country singer, Dewey Groom, took it over, partnering briefly with Jack Ruby, who gained infamy in 1963 for shooting Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV

Groom’s daughter, Saran Knight , took the call from an agent about the Pistols and agreed to hold the date. The club sold beer in plastic cups, “due to fear of people either cutting themselves or others,” Knight told O’Shea. “Unfortunately, the punk rock band was not favored by their audience of 800,” the now-closed ballroom’s website reports . “They made headlines when a woman head-butted band member Sid Vicious after he taunted the crowd.”

Jan. 11, Cain’s Ballroom, Tulsa. Larry Shaeffer , a Jimi Hendrix fanatic who named his Tulsa company Little Wing Productions, had no idea who the Sex Pistols were until friends alerted him that they were touring the U.S. “There were seven shows, and I had No. 6, which was the last good show,” he says. “The agent cold-called me and said, ‘Do you want a date on these guys?’ I said, ‘Heck, yeah.'” They negotiated a $1,000 band fee, until the agent called later and requested $1,500, prompting Shaeffer to raise ticket prices from $2.50 to $3.50 — crossing out the old price with a Sharpie and ensuring decades of collectors’ items .

The club’s capacity was 1,500, and Shaeffer recalls selling 800 tickets. “There was a small segment of pseudo-punk guys, musicians and a lot of regular straights who would come to a Jerry Jeff Walker show,” he says. “It was a mixed crowd, but it wasn’t an edgy crowd.” Although Shaeffer detected a mass of undercover cops at the show, one attendee told O’Shea the band was “blazing hot,” avoiding on-stage sexual favors and head-butting for loud, fast rock ‘n’ roll.

Jan. 14, Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco. The late San Francisco promoter Bill Graham agreed to a Sex Pistols date at his 5,400-person Winterland, renowned for legendary concerts by The Who , Hendrix and the Grateful Dead , after he called manager Malcolm McLaren and requested a show. Tickets cost $5, and one member of the Avengers, an opening act, would claim to O’Shea that the Sex Pistols made just $66 out of the $2,800 in door receipts. Local reviews were mostly positive, and Graham, in his 1992 memoir Bill Graham Presents , recalled it as “pure raw hard core energy” — although Rolling Stone would later say, “The sound was absolutely atrocious, and Johnny Rotten’s voice started to give out.”

After the last number, a cover of The Stooges ‘ “No Fun,” Rotten ended the show, tour and the Pistols’ career with this line: “Ah-ha-ha, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night.”

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Sex Pistols

What happened to the members of the Sex Pistols?

28 October 2023, 08:00 | Updated: 14 November 2023, 12:25

The punk pioneers were the subject of a recent biopic by Danny Boyle but what were the reasons for them breaking up in January 1978? And what happened next?

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Sex Pistols were one of the most influential British bands of all time. Their confrontational music took classic garage rock and dressed it up with socially-relevant lyrics and a lo-fi style. Their brief and brilliant career was the subject of a 2022 biopic by Trainspotting man Danny Boyle - PISTOL .

Watch the official trailer for Pistol

They imploded spectacularly in January of 1978, resulting in bitter comments from frontman Johnny Rotten aka John Lydon , and a major court case between the singer and controversial manager Malcolm McLaren .

After achieving notoriety in the UK across the summer of 1977, McLaren decided to launch the Pistols to the American public by sending them off on a tour that led them around some of decidedly “non-punk” parts of the country.

READ MORE: 10 famous songs that were censored or banned

The Pistols were to kick off in Pennsylvania just after Christmas ’77, taking in Chicago and Cleveland before heading South to Atlanta, Memphis and San Antonio, Texas.

This was a calculated ploy for two reasons: firstly, McLaren wanted to avoid the glare of publicity that would have surrounded a showcase in New York or Los Angeles.

Secondly, the prospect of sending a group of uncultured, uncouth, weird-looking young Londoners into the land of cowboys, rodeos and racial tension was irresistible to the manager, who was always on the lookout for a controversial angle.

What could possibly go wrong? Well, everything.

Sex Pistols At Randy's Rodeo-New York-Sid Hits Guy With Bass.

US authorities didn’t want to give the hell-raising anarchists work permits at first, so initial dates for the tour were cancelled, meaning the tour started on 5th January 1978 at the Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta, Georgia. The seven remaining dates were to climax with a show at San Francisco’s legendary Winterland Ballroom, home of the hippy music scene of the 60s.

The dates involved the band and crew travelling across the United States in a bus in the middle of winter. Singer Johnny Rotten contracted the flu. Bassist Sid Vicious was struggling with a serious heroin addiction and there was plenty of temptation on the road. Tension was high and violence was never far away. Everyone hated each other.

Rotten's resentment of McLaren only intensified after he was told of the band’s plans after the tour finished in San Francisco on 14th January. They were due to travel to Rio de Janeiro to make a record with "Great Train Robber" Ronnie Biggs.

READ MORE: John Lydon recalls "thrill" of being a football hooligan

For Rotten, isolated from his bandmates, alienated from his friend Vicious and treated as a commodity by his manager, it was the last straw. The idea was tacky and tasteless.

The singer knew that the Winterland Ballroom was the end of the road. The Pistols encored with a cover of the Stooges’ classic No Fun and ended with Rotten mocking the audience, laughing: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

What did the Sex Pistols play at their final show with Sid Vicious?

Sex Pistols live at the Winterland Ballroom, San Francisco, 14th January 1978

• God Save The Queen
• I Wanna Be Me
• Belsen Was A Gas
• Holidays In The Sun
• No Feelings
• Pretty Vacant
• Anarchy In The UK
• Encore: No Fun (cover of the Stooges song)

The Sex Pistols - No Fun - 1/14/1978 - Winterland (Official)

He later wrote in his autobiography: “It was a ridiculous farce. The whole thing was a joke at that point.”

Now completely disillusioned with McLaren and with drummer Paul Cook and guitarist Steve Jones siding with the boss, Rotten had only one option: he jumped ship. He managed to scrape together enough money to fly to New York, where he announced the Sex Pistols had split.

This was news to Malcolm McLaren, who was in Rio jollying it up with Cook and Jones and Ronnie Biggs. Sid Vicious had disappeared, winding up in hospital in New York in a very bad condition.

READ MORE: Did Nirvana 'copy' Sex Pistols' Never Mind The Bollocks album title with their Nevermind album?

Public Image Limited - Public Image (Official Video)

What happened to John Lydon after the Sex Pistols?

Rotten now reverted to his real name John Lydon and was thrown a lifeline by Richard Branson, the head of the band’s label, Virgin. Brandon flew Lydon to Jamaica to schmooze the singer and introduce him to some of his favourite reggae stars.

Lydon formed the more experimental Public Image Ltd. This was “post-punk” and the band’s first single, Public Image, was a rant by Lydon against his former manager: “You never listen to word that I said / You only seen me for the clothes that I wear"

PiL released eight albums between 1978 and 1992: Public Image (First Issue, 1978); Metal Box (1979); The Flowers Of Romance (1981); This Is What You Want... This Is What You Get (1984); Album (1986); Happy? (1987); 9 (1989) and That What Is Not (1992).

After Public Image went on hiatus, Lydon tried a solo career, appeared on Leftfield's 1995 track Open Up and then did the unthinkable: he appeared with the reunited Sex Pistols for a series of shows in 1996, featuring original bassist Glen Matlock - for a reunion.

The high-profile "Filthy Lucre" tour saw the original line-up get back together at London's Finsbury Park, and there was a further reunion for the Queen's Golden Jubilee in 2002. Their last outing was a series of festival shows in 2008, including one last date at London's Hammersmith Apollo.

After the Pistols reunion petered out, Lydon reformed Public Image in 2009 and the band have performed together ever since, with 2023 seeing PiL unsuccessfully compete to represent Ireland in Eurovision.

Alongside Lydon's career as a TV personality, he also had a brief attempt at acting, starring alongside Harvey Keitel in the 1983 movie Copkiller and appearing in 2000's The Independent.

What happened to Sid Vicious after the Sex Pistols?

After shooting the famous "My Way" scene for the Pistols movie The Great Rock And Roll Swindle, Vicious - real name John Simon Ritchie - made a bid for solo stardom under the watchful eye of his manager/partner Nancy Spungen.

After performing several shows at the New York club Max's Kansas City, Sid and Nancy slid into the depths of the NYC drug scene. On 11th October 1978, Nancy was found dead at their room at the Chelsea Hotel, having been stabbed with a hunting knife. Sid was arrested for the crime, although the bassist's account of the evening was confused.

On 2nd February 1979, having just been released from rehab as part of his bail conditions, Vicious died from an accidental heroin overdose. He was 21 years old.

What happened to Steve Jones after the Sex Pistols?

After working on the film The Great Rock And Roll Swindle, both guitarist Jones and drummer Paul Cook turned against Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, who had been using their money to finance the movie. The duo then formed a short-lived band called The Professionals, but Jones went on to become a guest guitarist with many different artists, including Siouxsie & The Banshees, Adam Ant, Billy Idol, Thin Lizzy and even Bob Dylan. Jones also formed a band with Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum of Guns N'Roses in 1996 called Neurotic Outsiders.

In 2004, the musician began a successful career in radio with the show Jonesy's Jukebox, and has spent much of the past 20 years hosting shows in the US and UK.

2023 saw Jones collaborate with fellow Pistol Paul Cook on the band Generation Sex, which also featured Billy Idol and Tony James from Generation X. The supergroup played a number of shows across the summer, including a spot at Glastonbury.

What happened to Paul Cook after the Sex Pistols?

Cook and Jones were responsible for some of the Pistols tracks on the Great Rock And Roll Swindle film soundtrack - the drummer sang vocals on Silly Thing on the album.

After a couple of years in The Professionals, Cook worked with the group Bananarama and produced their debut single Aie a Mwana. Between 1984 and 1989, Cook was in the band Chiefs Of Relief with former Adam And The Ants and Bow Wow Wow musician Matthew Ashman. In the 90s, Cook worked with Edwyn Collins, playing on his hit A Girl Like You, and Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen.

After the Sex Pistols reunion came and went, Paul Cook joined another veteran punk act Subway Sect, and briefly reformed The Professionals, minus Steve Jones. Jones and Cook are currently in the punk supergroup Generation Sex (see above).

What happened to Glen Matlock after the Sex Pistols?

After Matlock left the Sex Pistols in February 1977, he formed the band Rich Kids with future Ultravox star Midge Ure. The bassist played in the bands The Spectres, Hot Club, The Philistines, The Flying Padovanis, Slinky Vagabond, The International Swingers plus the punk supergroup Dead Men Walking.

Matlock has also made guest appearances with Primal Scream, Blondie, The Faces, Iggy Pop and The Damned, plus he was, of course, part of the reunited Sex Pistols on their Filthy Lucre tour and beyond.

2023 saw Matlock release his seventh album with The Philistines, titled Consequences Coming, which he claimed concerned Brexit, the Trump Presidency and beyond.

What happened to manager Malcolm McLaren after the Sex Pistols?

After losing control of the Great Rock And Roll Swindle film in 1979, McLaren walked away from the band. He tried his hand at managing other artists - he controversially split Adam And The Ants to form Bow Wow Wow, but Adam Ant went on to greater success without McLaren. He also unsuccessfully tried to launch Boy George's career before the Culture Club days.

After his management career floundered, McLaren reinvented himself as a musician, forging a successful solo career with hits like Buffalo Girls (an early example of hip hop scratching skills to make the UK charts), Double Dutch (which introduced the skipping craze to the UK) and a reinterpretation of the opera Madame Butterfly, which made the Top 20 in 1984.

After a high profile court case which saw the members of the Sex Pistols regain the rights to the band name and music, McLaren concentrated on TV and film work, which included the Channel 4 show The Ghosts Of Oxford Street (1991) and would curate the occasional fashion and art exhibition.

Malcolm McLaren died on 8th April 2010 from the cancer peritoneal mesotheliom. He was 64.

Now it seems like the Sex Pistols are finally over for good - a lawsuit between Lydon and the rest of the band over the use of the Pistols' music in the new Danny Boyle biopic seems to have laid the pioneering punk outfit to rest.

PISTOL: trailer, photos, cast and how to watch

How to listen, all the ways you can listen to radio x, more on sex pistols, sex pistols are "over once and for all" following new lawsuit, pistol: how to watch the sex pistols series, john lydon labels sex pistols bandmates "greedy, selfish, nasty f***s".

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Why the Sex Pistols Still Matter After All These Years

The Sex Pistols ' influence on rock and metal is illustrated to dramatic effect this month in a new limited series portraying the band's rise.

Did you know of the group's importance? Get ready to dive in with FX's Pistol , all episodes streaming May 31st, only on Hulu .

That makes now a perfect time to reflect on why the pioneering English punk rock band still matters.

After all, the Sex Pistols helped birth alternative rock while embodying the U.K. punk movement of the 1970s. And they didn't just impact music — the Pistols also heavily shaped fashion with a "punk" look that was always part of their appeal.

FX's Pistol - Official Trailer

But their career was short, at least their initial run from 1975 to 1978 was, and they only released one studio album. Still, that effort, 1977's  Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols , is considered one of the greatest albums of all time, as evidenced in music rankings from Rolling Stone and Time .

It contains signature Sex Pistols songs such as "Anarchy in the U.K.," "God Save the Queen" and "Holidays in the Sun." Not to mention deep cuts such as "Problems" and "Bodies." (Every song's essentially a banger, and this is an album that came out 45 years ago.)

In FX's  Pistol , guitarist Steve Jones is portrayed by Toby Wallace ( Babyteeth , INXS: Never Tear Us Apart ), with the band filled out by  Anson Boon ( 1917 ,  Shadowplay ), Jacob Slater, Christian Lees ( Sun Records ) and, as late bassist Sid Vicious, Louis Partridge ( Enola Holmes ). Maisie Williams ( Game of Thrones ) plays Jordan, a punk fashionista who befriended the band in London.

The setting is a crucial part of the Pistols' story. It bred the style they so actively displayed. But the Sex Pistols epitomized anarchy, making it more than fitting they went up in a blaze after three years. Yet their mark was left on music. The group's members went on to do many other things, and the Pistols briefly reunited a few times since. But the fury around their original '70s crusade can't be duplicated.

What else is there to know about the Sex Pistols? Continue below through some of the main reasons the band is still so important today.

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Sex Pistols reunion would be ‘like riding a bike’ says bassist Glen Matlock

Glen Matlock says getting back on stage with John Lydon, Steve Jones and Paul Cook would feel natural... despite years of rancour

Glen Matlock with the Sex Pistols in 1976: A press conference with fellow Sex Pistols John Lydon, Steve Jones and Paul Cook, the day after the Bill Grundy Show. Image: Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo

It’s almost 50 years since the Sex Pistols exploded as part of the punk scene of 70s London, and almost 15 years since they’ve played live – but original bassist Glen Matlock says getting back on stage with John Lydon, Steve Jones and Paul Cook would feel natural.

“If the Sex Pistols ever play together again, which looks very unlikely, it will be like riding a bike,” he told The Big Issue, as part of an exclusive interview for the Letter To My Younger Self series.

“We all like playing with each other. We keep in contact. I saw Steve in LA when I was there with Blondie, Paul invited me to do a few numbers with The Professionals before Christmas. And I did like when John said: ‘While we may not be the best of friends, we are certainly not the worst of enemies.’ Now, whether that is still the case… but I like to think so.”

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Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, is currently busy preparing for his bid to represent Ireland in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest with his post-Pistols band Public Image Ltd (the Irish representative being set to be decided on February 3) and Matlock is busy with his own album. But a Sex Pistols reunion faces problems beyond scheduling.

Matlock and Lydon have long had a fractious relationship. In 1977, just before the release of the band’s debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols , the acrimony between the pair led to Matlock being replaced by Sid Vicious.

“I was only 20 when I left the Pistols. Maybe I should have stood my ground more, but I was young and I’d already been approached by record companies saying we’d be interested in what you come up with. So I formed Rich Kids with Steve New, a fantastic guitarist who’s sadly no longer around, and Rusty Egan, who was a great drummer,” said Matlock.

Rich Kids had a UK hit with the single Rich Kids in 1978, and Matlock went on to play with artists including Blondie , Iggy Pop, The Damned and The Faces. He’s also released his own music and his latest album Consequences Coming is out on April 23.

The Sex Pistols have never quite left him, though. He’s previously reunited with the band for the 1996 Filthy Lucre Tour, the 2002 concert to commemorate the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II, their 2003 North American Piss Off Tour, and their 2007–08 UK and Europe Combine Harvester Tour.

That’s not to say relations have mellowed through the years. As recently as last year, Lydon called the rest of the band “dead wood”, telling The Sun , “None of these fucks would have a career but for me.”

But Matlock says Lydon would never have had the band’s signature rallying cries – Anarchy In The UK and God Save The Queen – without him.  

“I get fed up with talk of who did what in the Sex Pistols. But Anarchy In The UK is my musical contribution and John’s lyric – I just wish he still stood by the words. Same with God Save The Queen . My role in life has been as a tunesmith. I enabled John to say what he wanted by having a catchy tune,” he said.

“Now I’ve got a bit to say myself on my new record. The first single is called Head on a Stick . And that’s what I’d like to see, metaphorically, for the people who’ve led us up the garden path so openly and brazenly – Gove, Johnson, Sunak, Iain Duncan Smith. Personally, I think a lot of people should be done for treason. People are furious and quite rightly so. I have been for a while.”

Read more from Glen Matlock in the full Letter To My Younger Self interview, in The Big Issue from Monday, January 30.

Glen Matlock’s new album Consequences Coming is out on April 23. The single Head on a Stick is out now. He plays at Nell’s in London on February 17. glenmatlock.co.uk

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The Sex Pistols Riotous 1978 Tour Through the U.S. South: Watch/Hear Concerts in Dallas, Memphis, Tulsa & More

in Music | September 23rd, 2019 3 Comments

The Sex Pis­tols “start­ed out as an elab­o­rate Sit­u­a­tion­ist -inspired per­for­mance art piece dreamed up by mega­lo­ma­ni­ac man­ag­er  Mal­colm McLaren ,” wrote Jonathan Crow in a post here at Open Cul­ture about one of the band’s sto­ried, dis­as­trous final shows in Dal­las of 1978. After begin­ning as the cre­ation of McLaren and part­ner Vivi­enne West­wood, how­ev­er, they “evolved beyond just being a stunt.”

The state­ment is objec­tive­ly true by music his­to­ry stan­dards. The band’s ear­li­est gigs were direct­ly respon­si­ble for almost every major band that took British punk in sub­se­quent post-punk, goth, new wave, dub, etc. direc­tions, includ­ing the Buz­zcocks, Siouxsie and the Ban­shees, The Clash, Joy Divi­sion, Wire, and too many oth­ers to list.

Lat­er came the huge­ly influ­en­tial post-punk of John Lydon’s (for­mer­ly Rot­ten) own project, Pub­lic Image Lim­it­ed, which reflect­ed his seri­ous inter­est in mak­ing exper­i­men­tal, cere­bral, music with oblique lyrics deriv­ing as much from sym­bol­ist poet­ry as the “deep sim­mer­ing well of cul­tur­al dis­con­tent” he’d tapped into with the Pis­tols.

Lydon retired the char­ac­ter of John­ny Rot­ten when the band broke up at the end of their first and last U.S. tour, famous­ly end­ing things at San Francisco’s Win­ter­land Ball­room  by sneer­ing “ever get the feel­ing you’ve been cheated?”—a bit­ter com­ment on the band’s col­lapse, its very exis­tence, and a press and audi­ence will­ing to buy the act. No mat­ter how influ­en­tial they may have been, the Sex Pis­tols’ archi­tects always main­tained they were a cyn­i­cal prank to the end.

The “one-time hip­pie haven of the Win­ter­land in San Fran­cis­co,” as Ulti­mate Clas­sic Rock describes it , may have been the per­fect venue for their demise, a final screw you to the self-sat­is­fied 60s rock cul­ture Rot­ten loathed. But it was their tour through Atlanta, Mem­phis, San Anto­nio, Baton Rouge, Tul­sa and the for­mer­ly Jack Ruby-owned Long­horn Ball­room in Dal­las that made the most press, just as McLaren had designed it to do, book­ing coun­try & west­ern venues express­ly to pro­voke, enrage, and scan­dal­ize.

Rot­ten had more com­pli­cat­ed feel­ings about what would become a series of vio­lent spec­ta­cles. He seemed half in on the joke, and half hop­ing that “real peo­ple” out­side of coastal cities would become real fans. “We’re play­ing these cities because these are the peo­ple who will either accept us or hate us,” he said at the time. “They’re not as pre­ten­tious as they are in New York.”

He main­tained in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy that McLaren had also fore­seen the U.S. tour as savvy mar­ket­ing. “It wasn’t a ques­tion of throw­ing the band to the wolves when we chose to just play the South…. We felt that if we were ever going to be tak­en seri­ous­ly in Amer­i­ca, it would be from a base we built down south. The cow­boys seemed to take it for the joke it was meant to be. We weren’t there to destroy their way of life or any­thing like that.”

Of course, he must have seen the U.S. press accuse the band of doing just that before their arrival—corrupting the youth, etc. Did he real­ly hope for a warmer wel­come from “the cow­boys”? Was it all the glo­ri­ous train wreck every­one thinks it was? Reports from eye­wit­ness­es vary wide­ly, as Alt­press and The Dal­las Morn­ing News point out, with some express­ing seri­ous dis­ap­point­ment and oth­ers awe. Noel Monk’s book 12 Days on the Road  describes “out­ra­geous behav­ior, and con­certs that fre­quent­ly degen­er­at­ed into near-riots.”

You can see for your­self what those unprece­dent­ed, at the time, shows looked and sound­ed like in the record­ings here from the entire sev­en-city run . (Begun after a can­celled Decem­ber 1977 gig in Pitts­burgh). At the top we have “Anar­chy in the U.K.” from the Jan­u­ary 1978 tour open­er in Atlanta; then audio of the entire show in Mem­phis days lat­er; film from Randy’s Rodeo in San Anto­nio (in which Sid Vicious hits a fan with his bass); audio of the Baton Rouge con­cert; film of the entire per­for­mance at the Long­horn; film from Cain’s Ball­room in Tul­sa, OK, with audio from the Win­ter­land finale, and, final­ly, the Win­ter­land itself.

After their flame-out in the first month of 1978, and Sid’s alleged mur­der of Nan­cy Spun­geon and his over­dose and death, John Lydon “claimed the Pis­tols had ‘killed’ rock and roll,” notes the site Randy’s Rodeo (named for the riotous Texas show fur­ther up). The whole tour “was a per­verse, provoca­tive joke.” McLaren’s “intent was not to sell tick­ets, but to incite con­tro­ver­sy and may­hem.” The band, frac­tious, burned out, and eager to escape McLaren’s machi­na­tions, would have been more than hap­py to make some mon­ey for their trou­ble. Ever get the feel­ing you’ve been cheat­ed?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sex Pis­tols Play in Dal­las’ Long­horn Ball­room; Next Show Is Mer­le Hag­gard (1978)

Watch the Sex Pis­tols’ Very Last Con­cert (San Fran­cis­co, 1978)

Mal­colm McLaren: The Quest for Authen­tic Cre­ativ­i­ty

Josh Jones  is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at  @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Comments (3) |

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Comments (3), 3 comments so far.

It’s incred­i­ble now to think that they out­raged so many at the time. But they real­ly did.

Quite sim­ply the band! The most influ­en­tial ever: musi­cal­ly, fash­ion­ably, polit­i­cal­ly. Peri­od.

They may have been a slop­py band as far play­ing instru­ments, but THAT DIDN’T MATTER!. They had some unfor­get­table songs with songs & lyrics that were SO pri­mal (along w John­ny’s singing / per­for­mance, which amped the audi­ence mood over the top)! Even now if I hear “Anar­chy”, my heart pumps faster, I need to Move, my thoughts turn toward every offi­cial or gov­’t that has held me down over the Many years. It wakes me up Again! Would have been a per­fect time for them to have been Here & Now in the USA. With­out explo­sions like this in Any Art thru the ages peo­ple were becom­ing, then & now (2021) bland, stuck in a rut, repet­i­tive­ly liv­ing their lives with­out orig­i­nal thoughts of their own, just what they were told, day after d!ay after, numb­ing day The Sex Pis­tol­s’s music was not made to be ana­lyzed. It was made to go over the top, wake peo­ple up from their change­less no hope futures. And they got part of their attempt to “Wake the Mass­es” accom­plished. Peo­ple Did start real­iz­ing how their lives could be, not what they were told to do, but what They them­selves want­ed to do. But no one came for­ward to car­ry the momen­tum for­ward & far­ther. Some bril­liant music burst out from the punk atti­tude, but much of the scene was became fash­ion. God Bless the Sex Pis­tols! Who will car­ry the flag now?

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‘Pistol’: Separating Fact From Fiction in Danny Boyle’s New Sex Pistols Miniseries

• By Andy Greene

Andy Greene

The first attempt to dramatize the Sex Pistols saga came with the release of the Julien Temple’s movie The Great Rock and Roll Swindle in 1980, just two years after the band imploded. The farcical film tells the story from the perspective of manager Malcolm McLaren and is so cartoonish that parts of it are actually animated.

It was the start of a mini-industry of Sex Pistols retrospectives that told their story from every conceivable angle, including the Gary Oldman/Chloe Webb movie Sid and Nancy , the Julien Temple documentary The Filth and the Fury where he flips around The Great Rock and Roll Swindle by letting the band tell their own tale, and memoirs by original bassist Glen Matlock, guitarist Steve Jones, and frontman John Lydon. (We’re still waiting on drummer Paul Cook to write a book and complete the set. If you want a neutral perspective, the best place to turn is Jon Savage’s 1991 book England’s Dreaming .)

Danny Boyle’s new six-part limited series Pistol on FX is the latest attempt to head back to mid-Seventies London and see how the owner of a provocative clothing store unleashed a group of teenage misfits into a decrepit rock scene, and how they somehow made one of the best albums of the decade before imploding in spectacular fashion just two weeks into their first American tour.

The series is based on Jones’ book Lonely Boy and is framed around the guitarist, but Matlock, Cook, and the estate of Sid Vicious are all on board to various degrees. John Lydon, unsurprisingly, was not involved and even took his former bandmates to court in an unsuccessful effort to stop it. “It is so destructive to what the band is and so I fear that the whole project might be extremely negative,” he said. “How can anyone think that this can proceed without consulting me and deal with my personal life in this, and my issues in this, without any meaningful contact with me before the project is announced to the world. I don’t think there are even words that I can put forward to explain quite how disingenuous this is.”

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Lydon may be enraged that he’s not controlling Pistol and isn’t even the central figure, but he’d possibly be relieved to know that it sticks closer to the historical record than recent biopics about Queen , Elton John , and Mötley Crüe . But like all projects of this nature, it takes certain liberties with the truth, some small and some quite large. Here are eight of them.

1. Glen Matlock Enters The Story Too Soon Years before they were Sex Pistols, childhood friends Steve Jones and Paul Cook played together in rock group the Strand (later known as the Swankers) along with Wally Nightingale on guitar, Jim Mackin on organ, and Stephen Hayes (and later Del Noones) on bass. In Pistol, we first see them at the moment that Jones decides to change their name to the Swankers. Hayes, Mackin and Noones have been erased from the story, and Glen Matlock is already in the band. In reality, he didn’t enter the picture until Jones and Cook became close with McLaren and he suggested that Matlock, who worked the Saturday shift at his store Sex, might be a good fit.

2. Jones Wasn’t Arrested For Stealing Gear From a Hawkwind Concert By his own account, Steve Jones was an unrepentant thief in his youth. His most famous heist took place at the final Ziggy Stardust concert at London’s Hammersmith Odeon in July 1973 when he walked off with much of the band’s gear in an after-hours caper. (The incident forms the opening scene in Pistol .) But episode one of the series shows Jones getting busted while trying to steal the gear of Hawkwind (Lemmy Kilmister’s pre-Motörhead band) and getting brutally beaten by the police and hauled off to prison. And while he was arrested in the summer of 1974 and taken to the Ashford Remand Centre, he can’t even remember what it was for. “[That] is probably another example of my memory closing down when life gets too difficult,” he writes in Lonely Boy.

He was spared a lengthy prison sentence after McLaren told the judge that he was an upstanding member of society, but that is highly dramatized in Pistol when the McLaren character rushes into the court last second and spins out a ridiculous lie about Jones taking care of his ailing mother and enduring the death of his beloved Uncle Dickie.

3. Chrissie Hynde’s Role in Jones’ Private Life is Greatly Embellished Chrissie Hynde did work at Sex long before forming the Pretenders and she was around throughout the early days of the Sex Pistols, but Pistol casts her as a main character in the saga and an on-again/off-again love interest of Jones. “She was shocked when she saw it last week,” Jones told the New York Times. “But I do think it’s a good story. Even if it wasn’t as long as that, my relationship with her, I just think the way it’s been written makes it interesting. If you’re a train spotter, you’re going to hate it, because it’s not in the timeline, but whatever.”

For the train spotters, here’s how Jones talks about their fling in his book: “When Chrissie was working at the shop she’d shut the place down and we’d put Malcolm and Vivienne [Westwood]’s gospel of Sex into practice,” he wrote. “[Another time], I had her over a bathtub at a party.” In other words, they were friends from the Sex scene that had occasional flings, but it was nothing like the deep and long-lasting relationship seen in Pistol. She also worked at Sex for a relatively short period of time. In Pistol , it seems like she’s there for years.

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4. Hynde Didn’t Almost Marry Steve Jones The real-life Hynde faced numerous immigration issues during her time in England and was forced to return to her native Ohio at one point. That part of her story is skipped over in Pistol , but it does show her attempting to marry a member of the Sex Pistols to legally remain in England. In Pistol , she nearly weds Jones, but he vanishes at the last minute to have sex with Pauline, the mentally ill woman that inspired “Bodies.” Lydon steps in and agrees to marry her in his place, but he too ditches out shortly before they can go through with it.

What actually happened is that she asked Lydon to marry her first, but it was Sid Vicious that actually agreed to do it in exchange for two quid. (Jones played no role in any of this.) They gathered the necessary papers and nearly went through with it, but the registry office was closed that day for an extended holiday. “The next day wouldn’t work as Sid had to go to court for putting someone’s eye out with a glass,” Hynde wrote in her book Reckless: My Life as a Pretender . “You really couldn’t take him anywhere. So I never did marry Sid Vicious.”

5. Steve Jones Didn’t Fire Glen Matlock Glen Matlock left the Sex Pistols in early 1977, not long after the Bill Grundy interview made them notorious all over England. Over the years, the band justified the decision to fire him by saying that Matlock liked mainstream music too much, didn’t look enough like a true punk rocker, didn’t grow up on the streets like the rest of them, and that he found the message of “God Save The Queen” too radical. In Pistol, his character is seen having numerous fights with Lydon and chiding McLaren for not paying them enough. At a pub one night, McLaren urges Jones to fire him. Jones then takes Matlock into a bathroom and does just that.

As Matlock lays out in his book I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol, his departure from the band wasn’t nearly that sudden or unexpected. Lydon’s growing ego and bombastic behavior had been gnawing at him for months, and by the time of their tour of Holland in January 1977 he didn’t even want to stand on the same stage as the singer. “He was totally conceited, arrogant, and stroppy just for the sake of it,” he write. “I didn’t need it. I thought, ‘This is stupid, I’d had enough. I’ve really had enough.'”

He flew back to England and began putting together the band that became the Rick Kids. When he heard the Pistols were rehearsing with Sid Vicious, he said he barely cared. And when McLaren sat him down at a pub in February and told him his future in the band was looking pretty bleak, he claims he didn’t protest much. “Malcolm, I’m just not interested anymore,” he recalled saying. “I can’t be bothered if they’re rehearsing with someone else behind my back. I knew about it already, and although I don’t actually care, they should have said something to me. So let’s leave it at that…It’s come to a natural split. You lot and go off and do what you want.”

6. Sid Vicious Does Indeed Play at Least Some Bass on Never Mind The Bollocks In Pistol , the band records the entirety of Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols while Sid Vicious is recuperating from hepatitis in a hospital. Steve Jones handles all of the bass parts in his absence. When Vicious leave the hospital, he asks Jones if it’s too late to play on the album. “Don’t worry about that,” Jones says. “I took care of that for you. It sounds great.”

Vicious was indeed laid up with hepatitis during much of this time, and he was indeed an extremely unskilled bass player, but he was released from the hospital before they wrapped and he came to Wessex Sound Studios for the “Bodies” session. His work was so shoddy that producer Chris Thomas mixed it way down and had Jones play another bass track on top of it, but he’s technically on there somewhere. (There’s been a lot of subsequent confusion over the bass parts on Never Mind The Bollocks  since Lydon claimed in his first memoir that they brought in Matlock as a hired gun to play on it. There was indeed discussion of that, but it never happened. They cut “Anarchy In The UK” before he left the group, so he does play on that one song.)

7. Nancy Spungen’s Introduction To Sid Vicious Happened a Bit Differently In the fifth episode of Pistol , Nancy Spungen walks into a Sex Pistols concert at London’s Screen on the Green Cinema on April 3, 1977, finds herself transfixed with Sid Vicious, and introduces herself to him in a backstage men’s room. It’s the start of a very tumultuous relationship that eventually leads to her death at New York’s Chelsea Hotel the following year. Vicious was arrested for her murder, but the truth of what actually happened in that hotel room will likely never be known.

In real life, Lydon actually introduced the two of them, and it took place in March 1977 at Sid’s very first Sex Pistols show. “I thought it would end in disaster, but not in the way it turned out,” Lydon wrote in his second memoir, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored . “I thought he’d fuck her and go, ‘Ouch, what an ugly old bag!’ in the morning. But he liked the idea that she looked wasted and ruined.”

8. Jones, Hynde, and Paul Cook Didn’t Drug Nancy Spungen and Put Her on a Plane to America The addition of Nancy Spungen into the world of the Sex Pistols caused so much turmoil that Malcolm McLaren cooked up a scheme for his secretary, Sophie Richmond, to take her to Heathrow and force her on a plane back to America. “We didn’t get as far as Heathrow,” recalled Richmond in England’s Dreaming . “She was terrified of getting on a plane without drugs. It resulted in me and Nancy standing in the street arguing.”

Richmond called up McLaren and Pistols roadie John “Boogie” Tiberi to help her out. “When Nancy saw Malcolm and Boogie arrive she ran down the street,” recalled roadie Steve “Roadent” Conolly in England’s Dreaming . “The three of them followed and caught her … From twenty yards out I could see these four people all screaming at each other.” The plan was unsuccessful and Spungen remained in England.

But in Pistol, the trio of Jones, Hynde, and Paul Cook are sent by McLaren to give Spungen drugs and put her a plane. In this version of reality, they were successful and she actually left the country for a short time. But she came back just as the Sex Pistols were playing “God Save The Queen” on the Thames and has a tearful reunion with Vicious. It’s far more dramatic this way, but this isn’t how it happened.

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Capturing the Anarchy in the Sex Pistols

“Pistol,” a new mini-series directed by Danny Boyle, is based on a memoir by the punk band’s guitarist and founder, Steve Jones.

By Roslyn Sulcas

LONDON — “Are we doing any spitting?” asked a man in the crowd at the 100 Club , a small, red-walled underground space, redolent of spilled beer, cigarette smoke and a thousand lost nights, just off London’s Oxford Street.

Yes, there would be spitting. The club was the setting for an early Sex Pistols gig, which last June was being recreated for “ Pistol,” a six-part series about the British band, directed by Danny Boyle and streaming on Hulu in the United States and Disney+ in other territories, starting May 31.

The Sex Pistols were the “philosophers and the dress code” of the punk revolution, said Boyle, who seemed to be everywhere on set, talking to the extras about crowd behavior, checking cameras and peering intently at monitors as the actors performed the song “Bodies ” and the audience went wild.

“I tried to make the series in a way that was chaotic and true to the Pistols’ manifesto,” Boyle said in a recent interview. That meant taking an experimental approach to filming: “We would just run whole scenes, whole performances, without knowing if we had captured the ‘right’ shot or not. It’s everything you’ve been taught not to do.”

Thomas Brodie-Sangster, who plays Malcolm McLaren, the band’s manager, with virtuosic panache, said Boyle’s approach was unlike anything he had previously experienced on a set. “You felt, this could go wrong, but you could trust in Danny and dive in and experiment — very Sex Pistols!”

The result is a charged, visceral, Cubist portrait of the flamboyant rise and explosive fall of the Sex Pistols, whose brief existence from 1975 to 1978 made punk rock a worldwide phenomenon and whose anarchic songs (“ God Save the Queen ,” “Pretty Vacant”) became anthems for the disaffected.

The series, written by Craig Pearce, is based on the memoir “Tales of a Lonely Boy” by Steve Jones, the band’s guitarist. But Boyle said that although Jones’s story was “a wonderful way in,” he and Pearce had tried to paint a composite picture of the entire group, and the ’70s world from which it emerged. (The band originally comprised Jones, the singer John Lydon, known as Johnny Rotten, the drummer Paul Cook, and Glen Matlock on bass, replaced in 1977 by Sid Vicious.)

The first episode opens with a montage of archival footage: The Queen waving politely to the crowd; a scene from the slapstick “Carry On” movies; David Bowie performing; striking workers and garbage piled in the streets. When we meet Steve (Toby Wallace), he is busy stealing sound equipment from a Bowie gig. (The singer’s lipstick is still on the microphone.)

Steve and his bandmates are angry, bored, and “trying to scrape enough together for another pint,” he tells them as they discuss what their group should wear. “So, no suits?” asks the hapless Wally, who soon gets booted from the band.

“It’s hard to overestimate how class-ridden and moribund British society was for these guys,” said Pearce, who met Jones, Cook and other figures close to the band before writing most of the script in his native Australia during the first months of the pandemic.

“The promise of the Swinging Sixties didn’t deliver; rock ’n’ roll freedom didn’t happen for most kids,” Pearce said. “There was a feeling that if you were born into a certain class, you couldn’t escape. You had to accept what had been handed to you.”

Then, he said, came “this group of kids who said, you are sleepwalking through life.”

Boyle, he added, was always his “dream director” for the series. “We couldn’t believe it when he immediately said he wanted to do it.”

It turned out that Boyle couldn’t quite believe it either. “I am very music-driven, but I never imagined doing the Pistols,” he said. “I had followed John Lydon’s career closely, and the hostility he felt for the others wasn’t a secret.” But after reading Pearce’s script, Boyle immediately said yes.

“Which was ridiculous,” he said with a laugh, “since I didn’t even know if we would have the music, the most important thing.”

Lydon opposed both the use of the Sex Pistols’s music and the series itself , but eventually lost his court case when a judge ruled that the terms of a band agreement gave Cook and Jones a majority vote. Boyle said he had attempted to contact Lydon during the dispute. He added that he hoped the series would “reveal the genius and the humility” in the frontman.

Boyle said that while he did extensive reading and research, talking to everyone he could find who had been involved with the band, he ultimately trusted his intuition in formulating an approach to the series.

“I grew up in a similar working-class environment to Steve and these guys,” he said. “We are exactly the same age and I am a music obsessive. I had to explain to the actors what the 1970s were like; they just don’t recognize how little stimulation there was, how you waited all week for the lifeline of the New Musical Express to appear on a Thursday!”

Before filming began, the actors playing the band members spent two months in “band camp,” with a daily routine of music lessons, vocal coaching and movement practice. Sometimes Boyle would talk to them about the ’70s and show them footage. Then, led by Karl Hyde and Rick Smith from the British electronic music group Underworld, they would spend hours playing together.

Boyle said he had mostly avoided casting trained musicians. “I didn’t want anyone locked into an expertise,” he said, adding that Jacob Slater, who plays Cook, was an excellent guitarist, but had to learn drumming.

He also decided not to do any postproduction work on the music. “Like the Pistols, we just had to get up and, however imperfect we were, go for it,” said Sydney Chandler, who plays the American singer Chrissie Hynde. Chandler’s character is one of several memorable women in the series, alongside the designer Vivienne Westwood (Talulah Riley), Nancy Spungen (Emma Appleton) and the punk icon Jordan (Maisie Williams).

When it came to the band members, “we didn’t want to be tributes or caricatures,” said Anson Boon, who plays Lydon and, like his character, had never sung before. “The Pistols produced a raw, angry wall of sound and we wanted to capture that essence without trying to do an impression.”

Playing a character who is also a real person was intimidating but fascinating, said Wallace, who spent time with Jones before filming began. “We talked a lot about his family, then he gave me the first guitar lesson I really had.”

The series shows Steve’s unhappy childhood, which Wallace saw as central to Jones’s “anger and frustration,” he said, and led him to create “a band that represents the unrepresented.

Working on the series, Boyle said, had made him aware of the Pistols’ importance beyond music. “They were a bunch of working class guys who broke the order of things, more than the Beatles,” he said. “It was especially resonant in the U.K., where the way you were expected to behave was so entrenched.”

The Pistols, he added, gave their fans permission to do whatever they wanted, to waste their time however they wanted, to shape their own lives in a singular way.

“They gave a sense of purpose to purposelessness,” he said.

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Despite claims from New York, the Sex Pistols are the true originators of punk; no one else had their attitude, balls, or honesty. The Pistols were inspired by anger and poverty, not art and poetry. “An imitation from New York, you’re cheese and chalk…” There never was a punk movement. There was the Sex Pistols and there was the rest. The Sex Pistols ARE punk; the rest are “punk rock”. Big difference…

History is blatantly being re-written. Fabrications are constantly spouted that when The Ramones came to England in 1976 the Sex Pistols turned up at their first show at London, Roundhouse, and asked them how to form a band. On that very night – July 4th 1976 – the Sex Pistols played the Black Swan, Sheffield (over 260 kilometres away) and had regularly been playing live for over 8 months.

Over the years the Pistols have had to put up with these kind of lies and petty jealousies. There is always someone, somewhere, trying to undermine them. It just proves they were doing something right in the first place.

Sex Pistols…

In 1972 school-friends Steve Jones and Paul Cook decided to form a band originally named The Strand (later The Swankers) other friends such as Wally Nightingale, Jim Mackin, Stephen Hayes, and Del Noones would come and go over the next few years. Glen Matlock later joined in 1974. Disillusioned by the bloated progressive-rock and hippie music scene of the time, the fledgling band took their musical inspiration from the 60s mod and rock n roll of The Who and The Small Faces. However, it wouldn’t be until 1975 and the arrival of John Lydon (later rechristened John Rotten) that the band took on a whole new level and became the Sex Pistols. Steve Jones had spotted someone who looked “a bit different” in Malcolm McLaren’s clothes shop. Bernie Rhodes, one of McLaren’s associates, spotted the same guy on London’s Kings Road; complete with hacked green hair and a homemade “I HATE Pink Floyd” T-shirt. Sacrilege at the time.

Malcolm McLaren – who had become the band’s (mis)manager by this time – persuaded the reluctant and cynical John Lydon to audition in his shop. Miming to Alice Cooper’s “Eighteen” in front of a jukebox, Lydon launched into a series of self-mocking fits, hunches, and dances, while the others fell about laughing. However, deep down they knew they had found their man, someone who could help vocalize their thoughts. Lydon was an individual of the highest order. He looked and sounded like no one else on earth, and due to a childhood bout of meningitis, he had a stare that would kill! The perfect front-man, apart from the fact he couldn’t sing. But what did that matter, when he had something to say… The Sex Pistols soon started rehearsing, with Lydon (soon to be dubbed Rotten on account of his decaying teeth) providing the lyrics, and Matlock and/or Jones providing the music. One look at this mixture of madmen and working class delinquents told you they weren’t going to be just any other band.

Having made their live debut as quickly as November 1975, by early 1976 the band began playing live more regularly; playing anywhere that would take them. This was a time where your haircut and clothes could get you into serious trouble. With their unique look and sound, the Sex Pistols were such a bolt out of the blue that they would often find themselves in physical danger. They would regularly have to fight their way to their van after having the plug pulled on them. However, they soon started to attract a following of like-minded souls, some of whom were later nicknamed the “Bromley Contingent”, and would include the likes of Susan Dallion (aka Siouxsie Sioux) and William Broad (aka Billy Idol). Everywhere the Pistols would play, the majority of the audience just didn’t ‘get it’. They thought the band couldn’t play, John couldn’t sing and they looked awful. But there was a small percentage of the crowd they got through to. The Sex Pistols affected everyone they saw, whether it was a positive or negative reaction. They always got a reaction.

It wasn’t long before they came to the attention of record companies; the ever-ambitious Sex Pistols together with Malcolm McLaren’s entrepreneurial (aka blagging) skills had no intention of signing to a small label. They wanted the biggest and best. EMI eventually won the war. The band signed for £40,000 on October 8th 1976. A recent composition penned by Rotten was set to be their debut single, ‘ Anarchy in the UK ‘! Like his stage presence, Rotten wasn’t scared of saying, or doing, anything. He was more than happy to sow seeds of discontent. ‘Anarchy in the UK’ was eventually released November 26th, 1976; much to the bewilderment of the mainstream music press.

Around this time tensions between Matlock and Rotten came to boiling point. They were the proverbial “Chalk and Cheese”. Matlock was steeped in rock and roll tradition, while Rotten clearly wasn’t. Glen officially left by “mutual consent” in February 1977, with McLaren then claiming he was sacked because, “He liked the Beatles.” Matlock would later team-up with the band for the 1996 ‘Filthy Lucre’ World Tour.

Steve and Paul had been friends for years, and John saw his chance to balance things by bringing in his old friend John Simon Ritchie/Beverley, aka Sid Vicious . Sid already got on with Steve and Paul, and probably fitted the bands image better than Matlock. Sid was one of the earliest Pistols fans; he loved the band, and couldn’t wait to join. Despite being practically unable to play bass.

A&M Records became the Pistols’ new label, and their next single was to be ‘ God Save The Queen ‘, John Rotten’s alternative National Anthem. To announce the A&M deal, the band staged a mock signing outside Buckingham Palace. However, after a drunken celebration at the A&M offices – and probably a mixture of cold feet – the band soon found themselves without a record deal yet again. Only ten days after they signed to A&M, the Sex Pistols were sacked. Finding them £75,000 richer in the process.

The next record company headhunt ended with them signing to Richard Branson’s Virgin Records in May 1977. Just in time for the Queen’s 25th Silver Jubilee. The nation was gripped by Royal fever. The Queen was a national treasure. Everyone loved her, everyone except the Sex Pistols. Or did they? “We love our Queen…”

The release of ‘God Save The Queen’ sent shockwaves up and down the country. The band also had a perfect collaboration with Jamie Reid on artwork. This was Britain 1977 long before Diana, Fergie, Edward and the likes had exposed the Monarchy for what they were. No one had ever spoken up so publicly about them. The nation was up in arms. Government Members of Parliament even called for the band to be hung at London’s Traitors’ Gate!

While many “punks” and perhaps even the odd journalist, might have supported the Sex Pistols’ rallying cry against the Monarchy, only the Sex Pistols themselves had to fight it head on. John Rotten and producer Chris Thomas were violently attacked by “supporters” of the Queen; with John being slashed several times. Paul Cook was also set upon with an iron bar. It was war!

Undeterred, the Pistols went onto release hit singles ‘ Pretty Vacant ‘ (July 2nd) and ‘ Holidays in the Sun ‘ (October 15th). October 28th 1977 saw the release of the Sex Pistols’ one and only true album ‘ Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols ‘, (that’s Bollocks not BULLOCKS guys!). Pre-release orders were so high it immediately charted at Number 1. Now considered one of the greatest albums ever, ‘NMTB’ towered above all the other thinly recorded “punk-rock” records of the time, the blistering guitars and scathing vocals inspired a generation to “Do It For Themselves.” A record that would often be imitated but never surpassed…

On the album’s release, more controversy surrounded the band when police took exception to its title being displayed in a shop window. The band were charged with the obscure Indecent Advertising Act of 1889! “Bollocks” is a slang name for testicles; however, the Pistols’ lawyer proved that it was actually derived from a nickname for clergymen. Bollocks was legal!

Internal bickering in and around the band had reached a high point by this time, but rather than dealing with the unrest in the camp, McLaren distanced himself from the band, especially Rotten. However, there was to be one last hurrah in Huddersfield, England on Christmas Day 1977. The Pistols volunteered to play two shows for families of striking firemen: a matinee show for the kids and an evening show for the adults. The kids loved the Pistols, they weren’t interested in the media hype – like the band – they only wanted to have fun. The band gave out presents; John was in charge of food duties, ending up in a huge ‘Bugsy Malone’ style pie-fight with the kids! (It’s not quite the band considered “subversive” by British intelligence (MI5) or the picture painted by the tabloid media, is it?).

A U.S. tour was arranged for January 1978. Initially the band were refused entry to the States due to their criminal records, however, their visa problems were eventually sorted with the band only having to cancel two shows from the tour. The Pistols being the Pistols, they decided not to play big American cities. Instead they opted to play a short series of dates in the Deep South of the country, in a selection of country & western venues throughout the likes of Memphis, Atlanta and Dallas. These shows were probably the straw that broke the camel’s back. The pressure of touring, along with the mixture of in-fighting – together with McLaren’s unwillingness to deal with the band as human beings – came to a head. Sid’s ever-increasing drug problem – and the fact he was the only person on the planet who couldn’t see the irony in him being called Vicious – didn’t help the animosity between the group either.

Sid Vicious’ destructive relationship with his junkie girlfriend Nancy Spungen finally hit rock bottom on October 12th, 1978, when she was found murdered in their New York hotel room. Sid was the main suspect. Whether he did it or not is still highly debatable. However, Vicious would never get the chance to clear his name as he fatally overdosed on February 2nd, 1979-most likely by accident-a day after his release on bail from New York’s Rikers Island Prison. Unfortunately, aged just 21, Sid Vicious ended up just another sex, drugs and rock and roll cliche. Everything he would have hated…

Post-Winterland, Rotten washed his hands of the Sex Pistols and moved on. Jones, Cook and Vicious kept the Sex Pistols name, releasing a series of singles between 1978-80 for use in McLaren’s new ‘movie’ version of the Pistols story, ‘The Great Rock n Roll Swindle’. A story of how he allegedly manufactured the group and manipulated them to his wishes. A story that, somewhat bizarrely, would be wildly believed by large sections of the media. After winning back control of the band from McLaren in a drawn out court case, the band members got their chance to readdress the balance in the acclaimed 2000 Sex Pistols documentary ‘ The Filth and the Fury ‘. As John stated, “Only the fakes survive…”

After countless rumors, 1996 finally saw the original band return to play live again on the ‘Filthy Lucre’ World Tour. The perfect antidote for the sickly Britpop of the time. The Sex Pistols would play almost as many gigs on this tour as they ever played in the 70s. Despite being largely ignored or slighted by the press, the tour was a huge success with the band playing to an audience eager to see a legend that thousands had claimed to have seen; but in truth never had.

With the band’s return to the public eye, British TV’s bland ‘Top of the Pops’ show – which had banned the Pistols in the 70s – requested they play on the show. The Pistols duly agreed, always willing to expose hypocrisy; while getting a platform to promote themselves. The band always understood the need for promotion; the Pistols never bought into the pointless small-minded punk-rock ethic of bands’ scared to push themselves in fear of “selling out”. The Pistols always wanted to be the best at what they did. There’s no point in playing to a handful of people if you’re capable of playing to thousands…

Having played a unique 25th Silver Jubilee celebration show in July 2002 at London’s Crystal Palace Sports Centre, the band decided to follow it up in the States by headlining the ‘KROQ Inland Invasion Festival’. Where they were supported by the likes of Offspring, Blink 182 and Bad Religion. It spoke volumes that the Sex Pistols would be headlining above such popular acts, while their British contemporaries such as The Damned and Buzzcocks were much further down the bill.

By popular demand 2003 would see the Sex Pistols return again, this time for an eventful North American tour. By setting up the tour themselves without the interference or “support” of a record company, MTV or the music press, the Sex Pistols proved-yet again-if you want something done properly, do it yourself. Never scared to confront the real issues of the day, a planned trip to Baghdad to play for the Iraqi people (not troops) was also offered in 2003, only to see red-tape scupper the project.

After years of being fashionably ignored by the Rock and Roll Hall of Shame the Pistols were inducted without their consent in 2006. The band sent a handwritten letter in their absence stating their (many) reasons for not attending. They were no monkeys for anonymous record industry judges. And they certainly weren’t going to pay for the so-called privilege. CongraDulations.

2007 saw the Sex Pistols return to the recording studio for the first time in nearly 30 years to re-record two of their best known tracks for use in the ‘Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock’ video game. Unable to locate the original multi-track masters for ‘Anarchy in the UK’ & ‘Pretty Vacant’ – John Lydon (aka Rotten), Steve Jones (guitar) & Paul Cook (drums), along with original producer Chris Thomas – entered the studio in summer 2007 to re-record the tracks for use in the game.

The Guitar Hero recordings prompted further live shows. The 2007 ‘Holidays in the Sun’ shows featured 5 now legendary sold-out night’s at London Brixton Academy, plus Arena shows in Manchester and Glasgow. It was followed in 2008 by the ‘Combine Harvester Tour’ over 30 dates including headlining various European Festivals..

Anniversaries come and go but they are largely meaningless. ‘Never Mind The Bollocks, here’s The Sex Pistols’ is not. The album is just as powerful and fresh now as it was 30 years ago. It’s an album that has inspired countless musicians and individuals worldwide since its original release in October 1977. And an album that will continue to inspire – forever.

One of the Pistols greatest achievements is they brought an alternative. People didn’t realize just how bad things were until the Sex Pistols showed them…

Picture Credits: (Top to Bottom) EMI promo pic, Bravo magazine, Germany 1976 © unknown Bill Grundy, Today Show 1976: The Filth and the Fury film © Sex Pistols Residuals GSTQ “Banned” Press Advert June 1977 © courtesy Virgin Records Sex Pistols in Hyde park, London, 1977 © unknown Sex Pistols ‘Filthy Lucre’ promo pic 1996 © unknown Brixton Academy November 2007 (photo: David Wainwright) © Sex Pistols Residuals 2007

Virgin Records Sex Pistols Biography, May 1977

Scroll down for additional pages… (6 pages) (apologies for any of their errors)

Virgin Records Sex Pistols Biography, May 1977 © courtesy Virgin Records 1977

Why the Sex Pistols Still Matter

Their first single was in 1976. They disbanded in 1978. But in that short amount of time, the Sex Pistols would change music and fashion forever. On the eve of the Danny Boyle-directed FX series Pistol, writer Caryn Rose explains the band's enduring influence.

The Sex Pistols didn't invent punk rock. That honor goes to American upstarts at CBGB. But the Pistols deserve—and accept—the blame for bringing it to the ’burbs. When a teen turns up with spiky hair, a dog collar,and a leather jacket, the response is “What are you, the Sex Pistols?” It’s a generic term now, like Xerox or Kleenex. The band blazed that trail. With flamethrowers.

The Pistols’ anti-establishment attitudes sprouted from their working-class upbringing. Steve Jones was a prolific thief who claims to have walked off with David Bowie’s equipment and used it to start the band. Paul Cook was bound for the electrical trades. In the early seventies, the two childhood friends frequented a London clothing store called Let It Rock. Its owners, designers Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, saw fashion as a method of individual expression and cultural disruption,and they helped position the Pistols for just that. They also found bandmates. John Lydon—soon to be Johnny Rotten—caught McLaren’s eye because Lydon was wearing a Pink Floyd tee over which he had emblazoned I HATE in ballpoint pen. Westwood noticed John Simon Ritchie—who would become Sid Vicious—among the parade of shop customers. He couldn’t play bass, but he looked the part: pale and lost, with a padlock-fastened dog chain around his neck.

The true genius of McLaren, who became the Pistols’ manager, was using the band to prank the music industry. They burned through three record labels in less than a year. Shortly after the release of their first single, “Anarchy in the U. K.,” in 1976, they appeared on Thames TV’s Today . The host goaded them into uttering a number of swear words—“You dirty fucker,” Jones called him—that were broadcast into sitting rooms across England. The most famous headline the next day read THE FILTH AND THE FURY! Police shut down the few live shows local governments didn’t ban. “It was open fucking season on anyone who looked like a Sex Pistol,” Jones wrote in his memoir, Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol , on which the new Danny Boyle–directed FX series Pistol is based. Their arrival on U. S. soil led the nightly news. Suddenly, every high school kid and their parents knew about punk. Guidance counselors asked students whether they wanted to cut their chests with razor blades—a favorite move of Sid’s—when all they wanted to do was listen to the songs.

And that’s what people tend to forget about the Pistols:The music was fantastic. “Anarchy,” “God Save the Queen,”and “Pretty Vacant” are anthems. Naysayers gripe that the band couldn’t play their instruments. The music was loud,the lyrics brutal, and the vocal delivery aggressive. But the same was true for the first Led Zeppelin album. The instrumentation wasn’t avant-garde; Jones and Cook idolized the Faces and the Who. There were even guitar solos. Forty-five years later, nothing on Never Mind the Bollocks sounds dated.

The Pistols disintegrated in 1978, before they could become a parody. Capitalism absorbed their legacy, smoothing over its rougher edges and morphing it into new genres like pop punk, emo, alternative rock, and grunge.Now you can go to a mall and buy the dog collar Sid Vicious wore, because the Pistols bulldozed their way into suburbia all those years ago. Even so, the band members continued to fuck with the establishment. When they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, they refused the award, instead sending a hand-written note that read: “We’re not coming. Your [sic] not paying attention.”

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Sex Pistols in America, 1978

A fabled tale of excess, personality clashes, and managerial manipulation, the Sex Pistols’ seven U.S. shows in January 1978 reward revisiting even at so many decades’ distance.

The Sex Pistols’ 1978 U.S. tour looks like attempted homicide. Malcolm McClaren, the band’s 31 year old manager, was hungry for the photogenic controversy that might arise if — instead of playing America’s liberal cities — he sent the world’s most controversial group to country ‘n’ western venues across the Deep South. This was less than ten years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and yet, relying on stereotypes of Bible Belt religiosity and conservatism, McClaren wanted to acquire audiences who might protest, attack the band, maybe even riot if he was lucky!

From the perspective of 2020, the level of callous disregard for his 20-to-22 year old charges is pretty breath-taking. Even on home turf McClaren knew the band’s reputation made them a lightning rod for violence. Back in June, frontman John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), was stabbed in the hand and knee, and had his face slashed; drummer Paul Cook was attacked by a gang wielding iron bars; then Lydon was assaulted again outside a night club. All Sex Pistols’ management learned was this was a trusty approach for the acquisition of press coverage. If it occurred to him that his strategy for the U.S. could wind up getting someone seriously injured, it was of only passing concern.

The band — Lydon, Cook, Steve Jones (guitarist), Sid Vicious (bassist) — went along with it. Suffering from both the naivety and the idealism of youth, they agreed to put themselves at an unknown level of risk for obscure rewards. The tour itinerary perhaps felt reminiscent of Sex Pistols’ parochial rambles around the U.K. where — after starting off playing London colleges, then the minor club circuit — the band strayed way off the beaten path into small towns like Whitby, Dunstable, Cleethorpes, Penzance, Keighley, Cromer. There was some method to the madness: Sex Pistols’ notoriety short-circuited the traditional route to legend status because few people ever saw them play.

McClaren was also relying on the band’s ability to make the law enforcement community a co-conspirator in the stoking of publicity. In a single year, Sex Pistols had been ordered to leave Guernsey after one night ; their celebration on a boat in the Thames was halted ; their first album wound up in court charged with obscenity; and Lydon and Vicious had been arrested in separate drug busts — all of which was deemed a manageable cost of doing business. These were bizarre lessons to draw from Sex Pistols’ experiences in late 1976 through 1977 and only made sense if no one really cared about being a real band anymore.

Sex Pistols had certainly started out with genuine intentions. The arrival of Lydon in August 1975 made the band a functioning entity able to rehearse. Playing their first gig on Thursday November 6, they were industrious with as many as ten shows under their belts by Wednesday December 10. At that first show they played a set of rough covers and just two originals — ‘Did You No Wrong’ and ‘Seventeen’ — impressively pulling together three more — ‘Pretty Vacant’, ‘Submission’, and ‘New York’ — by end of the month. From then on song-writing proceeded steadily, if unspectacularly, with set-lists beefed up by as many as half-a-dozen covers. Going by their live appearances, ‘Problems’ appeared on February 14; ‘Satellite’ and ‘No Feelings’ on April 3; ‘I Wanna Be Me’ and little-known improvised noise opener ‘Flowers Of Romance’ entered the set on June 29; ‘Anarchy In The UK’ debuted on July 20; ‘Liar’ appeared on August 14; ‘God Save The Queen’ by December 6…

But Sex Pistols’ September-October tour would be their last moment of calm. An already flammable reputation was ignited on December 1 by the appearance with Bill Grundy on the Today show . 17 of their 24 December dates were canceled and they were hounded across Britain by press and protestors; signed on October 8, they were dumped by EMI in early January; Glenn Matlock left the band in February and they had to start teaching Vicious the bass; they signed to A&M on March 10 and were dumped within the week; signed with Virgin in mid-May. After a short run of shows in The Netherlands ending on January 7, the band only played another three times before mid-July.

After writing ‘E.M.I.’ with Matlock somewhere in January 1977, Sex Pistols were overwhelmed by events and essentially over as a creative entity. At least they managed to end the tedium and repetitive sessions and get Never Mind The Bollocks recorded in fits and starts between March and August. The final year of the band would see only two new songs emerge: ‘Holidays In The Sun’ whipped together in April-June, then a revived song from a former band of Vicious’ called ‘Belsen Was A Gas’ which was rehearsed in September. Nothing is predestined, but by the time the band hit America and Lydon was trying to persuade them to attempt a new song in soundcheck, to accompany his lyrics under the name ‘Religion’, no one wanted to know.

Banned, sacked, assaulted, arrested, protested, shell-shocked, and fed-up — Sex Pistols had had sufficient drama in a single year to last other artists a lifelong career. And on a personal level it was just getting worse. Vicious had become a heroin addict, the rest of the band had more than a casual penchant for various drugs, the Lydon/Vicious versus Cook/Jones axis of the band had split again with Vicious aligning with his girlfriend and dealer Nancy Spungen. In the background, McClaren was both a focus of annoyance, and busy maintaining his position by spreading lies and gossip to poison the air between the band still further.

The tour was a predictable mess from the start: the four shows scheduled from December 29 to January 3 had to be canceled because the band’s criminal records caused Visa issues. These shows would have been in Homestead, Pennsylvania; Chicago, Illinois; Cleveland, Ohio; and Alexandria, Virginia — which makes the claim of a ‘southern strategy’ look like retrospective justification for the silliness of the remaining week-and-a-half tour program. On the other hand, the intention to play a 600 capacity venue in Chicago — when this and San Francisco were the largest cities on the tour — looks like an attempt to guarantee a riot. The desired publicity had an effect too in that the Holiday Inn chain pre-emptively declined the band.

The frayed logic of the tour was on full display when contemplating Winterland. Prior to their departure for the U.S., Sex Pistols had never played for a crowd of more than a few hundred. Now, a mere week after touchdown, they were going to scale up to a 5,400 capacity venue. One could maybe credit a ramshackle attempt to prepare the band, with venue capacity stepping up from 500 in Atlanta, to 700-800 in Baton Rouge and Memphis, to 1,800-2,200 at the other three venues…Except the original tour schedule would have thrown them on in front of 2,000 attendees a night (with the exception of Chicago). It’s more likely an absence of mid-sized venues, rather than managerial benevolence, that gave Sex Pistols some vague hope of acclimatising.

Meanwhile Sid Vicious came undone. It’s hard not to feel a degree of pity for a young man, battling heroin addiction, being challenged to live up to his stage name again and again. There’s a ‘boys don’t cry’ sadness to his actions as he becomes the focus of so much violence and stays dry-eyed trying to prove he could take it, daring people to do their worst. This doesn’t make him any less stupid or indiscriminately violent — he embraced his role with self-destructive gusto. In Atlanta he headed to the hospital after slitting his wrist with a letter opener; he wrote ‘Gimme A Fix’ across his chest (rumours state he cut it in with a razor but there’s no sign of it by Winterland which makes that unlikely); in Memphis he disappeared again — another hospital visit plus a knife wound to his arm; in Dallas he assaults a photographer and security before being beaten by his own bodyguard; before Winterland he stuck a steak knife into his hand when accosted while eating a meal, then after the show he OD’ed in a shooting gallery on the corner of Haight and Ashbury.

McClaren busied himself making things worse. There’s suspicion that he gave Vicious money for heroin, and he relentlessly egged on Vicious’ worst instincts while refusing to get his hands dirty by intervening to look after Vicious either. He also put Jones and Cook on planes between venues — though the two of them behaved so badly on a flight from Tulsa that they were banned by American Airlines — while Vicious and Lydon continued on the bus which felt like favouritism to band members already used to being wound up. There was also resentment of apparent favouritism in the matter of which hotels or motels band members would wind up staying at. By the time of San Francisco, the band knew their shows in Finland weren’t going ahead, there was a grim rumour stirred by McClaren that Charles Manson would produce their next album from prison, now the hairbrained whim of flying to Rio De Janeiro to meet with the Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs.

The one thing that remained undimmed, however, was the innate talent within the band. Steve Jones is comparable to Ron Asheton in terms of having such a colossal, immediately recognisable, and oft-underrated guitar technique. Similarly, Lydon sounds simultaneously incandescent, hilarious, and thoroughly pissed off at every show — a quintessential frontman. The Sex Pistols in America are reminiscent of the Terminator in the finale of the 1984 film: stripped down, falling apart, still relentless and unstoppable. There are audio recordings, and even video, of quite a substantial quantity of the tour and they remain fascinating documents of that rarest of things in the music business — genuine unpredictability.

January 5, 1978: The Great Southeast Music Hall — Atlanta, Georgia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSjK7y9ztTI

In front of an audience of 500 primarily made up of journalists, the bating and the technical issues kick-off from the very first minute. Jones’ guitar cuts out, feeds back, and requires interminable pauses for tuning throughout the show. The solo on ‘God Save The Queen’ is perfunctory, the drums are a methodical clattering din, then the guitar cuts out during ‘I Wanna Be Me’ while ‘Seventeen’ has a false start. At times Lydon’s vocals run headlong into the slightly panicked rush of the other instruments, everything coexisting rather than coalescing, he seems to be straining to keep up. Vicious’ bass seems to have been turned down, at its loudest it’s a dull clumping in the background of a song — occasional cussing (and the cracking line “this one’s about you, it’s called ‘Problems’”) is the biggest impression he makes. “That’s God that is and he don’t like us,” Lydon announces while — to his credit — trying to cover for the band’s issues. Things stabilise from ‘New York’ onward — ‘Bodies’ is pure exuberant nastiness including an incongruous ‘step up’ where the anti-harmonising of Vicious and Jones backs Lydon’s pleas — but then the guitar dies again during ‘Submission’, returning beset by feedback. At their best, there are moments like the solo on ‘Holidays In The Sun’ which is like sheet metal tearing, or the final pairing of ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Anarchy In The UK’ which sounds like gaskets exploding somewhere inside Chernobyl. There’s no way the band could have lived up to their reputation but instead they stooped down and undermined it by the simple virtue of being just another band, albeit one that was undeniably above average.

Finest Rotten-isms of the Evening:

“Now. We came to dance. What did you come for?”

“See the fine upstanding young men Britain is chucking out these days? Just never join an army.”

“Aren’t we the worst thing you’ve ever seen?”

January 6: Taliesyn Ballroom — Memphis, Tennessee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLOJcuP930U

The audio source for Memphis is in such wonderfully dissolute condition that the sound from the stage is a thick fug, splintered moments penetrating consciousness through sheer volume while an incoherent blizzard pushes and shoves. Ironically, in that light, at the start of ‘I Wanna Be Me’ Lydon asks for more monitors because “I can’t hear myself! Hello, ‘ello, ‘ello…” Most songs become untamed cyclones that twist and whirl through the speakers. The show itself further stoked Sex Pistols’ reputation for chaotic events with the police sending investigators to Atlanta to check on reports of the band having live or simulated sex on stage, the fire department telling the crowd outside that the show had been oversold and was cancelled, a small riot among the couple of hundred attendees who couldn’t get in and began smashing windows, and the band getting on stage substantially late. Hammering rhythm is the most visible feature throughout with most songs on the tape compressed down to a juddering roar. Lydon’s vocals would feel at home in the poesia sonora scene. The tape seems to cut or pause at points so there’s barely any visible conversation with the audience, which perhaps contributes to the sense of pace and a band back on track after a bad first show, except a good portion of the audience walked out — amusing in light of the battle outside to get in.

“I’m not here for your entertainment, you’re here for my entertainment.”

J anuary 8, 1978: Randy’s Rodeo — San Antonio, Texas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSxf50yG8fU&t=894s

Near constant whistling and hassle, San Antonio was the kind of nastiness that must have sent McClaren into raptures. Vicious shouting “you cowboys are all faggots!” hardly helped matters and likely served to increase the hail of material hitting the band and the accompanying verbal goading. What’s tragic is it’s one of the few gigs where Vicious’ bass work seems coherent and things are moving forward with intent…For a grand total of four songs. Then Vicious yells, “you faggot fucker!” hauls his bass strap off, inverts the guitar and chops it down into the crowd just missing his intended target — Brian Faltin who attended specifically to protest and provoke the band. Billowing clouds of bass-heavy pulse reduce Lydon’s voice to a scratchy edging with one’s memory of songs filling in the indistinctness of the lyrics, then the second half of the tape he’s suddenly more audible while the instrumental clarity disintegrates. The drum sound is remarkably separated with the cymbals a lightning clash of static, while everything else is a distant rumble. The marching beat that opens ‘Holidays In The Sun’ is gloriously leaden and it’s the most straightforward moments, like Lydon’s screaming during ‘Belsen Was A Gas’ that penetrate.

Sid bass incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXCvQDCc0Zc

“I see we’ve got a lot of real men out there tonight…”

“Oh dear, Sid’s guitar fell off!”

January 9, 1978: Kingfish Club — Baton Rouge, Louisiana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_UdGtCXkxs

A sub-1,000 venue formerly part of a grocery store, the atmosphere at the Kingfish Club is hostile with audience members screaming “fuck you!” and “throw something at them!” Normally live albums are a grotesque way of fleecing fans into paying for inferior copycats of studio tracks, by contrast, this bootleg quality studio recording buries you somewhere in the crowd with blown out walls of overdriven electricity billowing on all sides. It’s wonderful seeing the rough outline of a well-known song still visible but cracked and pulled apart. The band are on a high all night despite the usual rain of coins and object hitting the stage (and the band), indeed Lydon ad-libs less because there’s so little dead time between songs. Cook shows himself to be the powerful and stolidly dependable core of the band, while Jones is feeling secure enough he can toy with feedback on the outro of ‘Seventeen’. The bass-heavy recording even flatters Vicious on songs like ‘New York’ where there’s no audible indication of the attempt by one fan to give him an on-stage blowjob and he keep stolidly strumming. Lydon is deluged by the band’s raw power, working hard to be heard amid the torrent smacking down on the audience. ‘Belsen Was A Gas’, for all its bad taste, shares a military precision and thuggish pummelling with ‘Holidays In The Sun’ which makes one wonder what the post-Matlock Sex Pistols could have done if they’d made it through January 1978.

“I’ve had it with coins!”

“This song is by an old hippie…” (The Stooges ‘No Fun’ follows)

“That’s all because I’m too lazy to do anymore. Good night.”

January 10, 1978: Longhorn Ballroom — Dallas, Texas

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gq3Q8uFJMRs

Another ugly atmosphere awaited in Dallas with the venue owner (whose most notable predecessor was Jack Ruby) trying to cancel — Warner Bros. sternly warned him they would sue — while the police kept a SWAT unit on standby. The night is all about Vicious. Suffering withdrawal and woozily drunk, he drifts about the stage oblivious to his bandmates’ glares. Jones has another night of guitar trouble — he breaks a string early, there’s a plethora of errors, and his usual chunky power is subdued — and he’s increasingly antagonised by Vicious. During ‘Bodies’ he has to stop playing to storm across and plug Vicious’ bass back in, he shouts at Vicious during ‘Belsen Was A Gas’, then resorts to his mic, “Look what you’re doing, not at them!” Every time the band come close to achieving momentum something derails it. After ‘Holidays In The Sun’ Vicious is sucker-punched in the nose and, in their disgust for Vicious, this is the only time Jones (“See the wanker fall over? Big tough Sid falls over!”) and Lydon (“Look at that, a living circus!”) seem to acknowledge one another or agree at any point in the tour. For the next 25 minutes Vicious looks like he’s wearing lipstick, is pink-tinted down to the waist, and engages in spitting contests back-and-forth with the audience. There’s a resurgence as the band rallies on ‘Bodies’ — Jones’ finest solo of the night with Lydon skanking in the middle of the stage — before audience-winning runs at set stalwarts ‘Pretty Vacant’ and ‘Anarchy In The UK’. For the encore, Vicious, whose face is so blood-spattered it looks like warpaint — is flicking V’s while being tailed onto the stage by a minder. ‘No Fun’ looks like finishing the night on a raucous high then suddenly a visibly angry Jones is launching himself at someone in the audience with his guitar and gets at least a shove in before bouncers intervene. The rest of the gig plays out with a man-mountain stood squarely at centre-stage monitoring the crowd and, even after the song ends, Vicious is in a shoving match with security who are simultaneously handling the crowd and him.

(For the full audio including the opening numbers missing from the video check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMq26X3RaK0 )

“Any more free gifts?”

“I see that we have a whole section of the silent majority over there”

January 12, 1978: Cain’s Ballroom — Tulsa, Oklahoma

Unfortunately, only a single minute of audio from the Tulsa show has surfaced along with a few minutes of visuals from the film D.O.A. A Rite Of Passage which is as much focused on the religious protests taking place outside and the police presence both in the parking lot and inside. The venue now has a framed portion of the green room wall with a hole supposed punched by Vicious. The opening band, Bliss, was essentially there because the owner of the venue wanted to give his friends exposure, not because they were simpatico with Sex Pistols — they apparently played the ‘William Tell Overture’ as part of their set. On the day of the show, the ticket price increased because, unsurprisingly given the ridiculous logistics and barely viable sizes of the venues, the band needed more cash. Apparently Lydon started the show by asking: “all you rednecks have come to see the circus?” But then the show itself was apparently tight — a shame it hasn’t survived.

January 14, 1978: Winterland — San Francisco, California

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBVDSz5Qd6g

Winterland was neither the ultimate desecration of rock ‘n’ roll, nor the freak show anyone might have hoped for. Police patrols up and down the ticket lines outside, meticulous frisking by the security before entry, a DJ orchestrating audience participation in the form of swearing, and a screen projecting Sex Pistols’ quotes, it all heightened the drama of the night…Then the band walked on and sleepwalked through the show. A large space to fill given Sex Pistols’ impact came entirely from their unique stage presence, it was significantly harder to make a dent when the band were all sick. The flu subdued Jones; Vicious was smacked up (though as a consequence it’s actually the sprightliest he’d looked all tour); while Lydon was visibly exhausted and periodically wiped his nose or face on a spool of tissue or in the crook of his arm. The band were further hemmed in by professional staffing: bouncers led audience members out calmly across the stage, at one point in the encore a member of staff cleared things away from Vicious’ feet. A greater separation from the crowd confined the usual antagonism to a tsunami of nuts, bolts, coins, pantyhose, and spit. Sex Pistols were further plagued by technical issues with Jones breaking strings, his amplifiers cutting out altogether to suck the energy from ‘Bodies’ and ‘Liar’, while every pause was filled with interminable tuning. Possibly a deliberate act by snobby venue personnel, the PA was a mess and Lydon had to call out from the stage, “the monitors are completely off…Hello, they’ve just come back on.” This is the rare recording where the bass is genuinely audible and Vicious, while posing constantly, holds his own more than adequately. There’s a disconnect, however, between the sheer energy of the songs which carries the first half of the show, versus the descending arc in Lydon’s enthusiasm. The band’s figurehead on stage, his usual physical gyrations are suppressed, he clings to the microphone stand, or hangs an arm over it as if struggling to stay upright. ‘Problems’ seems to telegraph trouble and he sings much of it with his arms firmly crossed, maintaining his statue-still stance, his look of intense boredom, until well into the introduction of ‘Pretty Vacant’. For the encore, ‘No Fun’ becomes utterly pointed as Lydon essentially curls up into a ball and croaks out whatever’s left of his visibly shredded vocal chords. But then that moment of brilliance. It’s exceedingly rare an artist says anything from a stage that isn’t trite or uninteresting, few words spoken into a mic have had such resonance they’ve become legend: Lydon’s last words at Winterland are the rare exception and the perfect casual punctuation closing Sex Pistols’ wild ride.

(The soundcheck has also become available in recent years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GX-PZNig70 )

“If you can put up with that, you can put up with anything.”

“There’s not enough presents. You’ll have to throw up better things than that, this ain’t good enough…That’ll do. Can we have a couple of cameras?”

“I think it’s fun. Do you want your ears blown out some more?”

“Tell us, what’s it like to have bad taste?”

“Ah haha, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night.”

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2 thoughts on “sex pistols in america, 1978”.

I love reading about the Pistols. And you can almost see the logic of the American tour, but then it ended in the group not just breaking up, but splintering in enough bitter acrimony to last 20 years – so maybe it wasn’t the wisest brainstorm on McClaren’s part. Still it’s great fun to imagine what in the world the players were thinking. Have you ever been to Texas? To Baton Rouge? The audacity, the naivety, the gaul in conspiring to bring those kids to places like that is just mind melting.

I loved Lydon’s autobiography “Rotten” – so much fun. He’s such a character and quite a good writer. Steve Jones book is less exciting, but still interesting. I really enjoyed the “12 days in America” book as well. Gives a great sense of the chaos of that fantastic terrible idea that was the American tour. We here in Los Angeles were treated to many years of “Jonesey’s Jukebox” on terrestrial radio, all through the oughts (sp?), perhaps he’s still plugging away on the internet. He’s a wonderful DJ and a hilarious dude.

Bollocks was THE album. The Pistols may not have invented punk but that refined it to a razor point and injected the world. And to think this was all happening in THE 1970’s!

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'Pistol': Release Date, Cast, Trailer, and Everything You Need to Know

Anarchy may not be in the UK, but it is coming to FX with the new mini-series Pistol

Save the monarchy and anyone else scared of a little anti-establishment punk music because the infamous punk band The Sex Pistols is getting a revival in the FX Networks series Pistol . Comprised of vocalist Johnny Rotten , guitarist Steve Jones , drummer Paul Cook, and bassist Glen Matlock (who would later be replaced by the notorious Sid Vicious ), the Sex Pistols penned singles like “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the U.K.” They were known for their iconoclastic presence and for being at the forefront of the punk movement in not just the UK but all around the world. Inspired by Steve Jones’ memoir Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol released in 2016, the six-episode series directed by Academy Award winner Danny Boyle arrives on Hulu on May 31st.

Related: 'Pistol' Images Reveal First Look at Danny Boyle's Sex Pistols Series

Is There a Trailer for Pistol ?

A teaser for the series was released in early April. It features various shots of the band and affiliates calling for various forms of revolution. In the background, a drum roll gets progressively louder, along with the ring of distortion, all leading up to an intense-looking Johnny Rotten ( Anson Boon ) reciting the thesis of the short clip “One word: Destroy.”

A longer trailer was released in early May. The trailer starts off in a whimsical tone with a female voiceover narrating, "England's terribly boring, nothing ever changes," over scenes of high society, saccharine pop music artists, the Queen, and boring park life. These contrast with the trash heaps of flaming garbage and broken down automobiles that signify the blue-collar reality from which the Sex Pistols emerged. “We’re invisible, we’re pissed off, we’re bored, so maybe that should be our image.”

Dialogue from guitarist Steve Jones ( Toby Wallace ) highlights the central idea of the trailer when he states in an interview "Actually we're not into music, we're into chaos." The actors do their part in portraying the punk image by donning greasy spiked hair, leather jackets with safety pins, and grabbing their crotches through too-tight leather trousers. The trailer conveys the restless, subversive, high octane, and chaotic aspects of the band's meteoric rise to fame, with thrashing guitars, screaming faces, and punk fashion to match. Danny Boyle’s cinematography in both the teaser and the longer trailer employs an altered footage effect that attempts to capture the film quality of the ’70s, which gives the video as being of the period. The trailer is very interested in portraying the raw, youthful ethos of a band whose mission was to “kick this country awake if it kills us.”

When is Pistol Coming Out?

Pistol premieres on May 31st, 2022. All six episodes in the series will release on the same day. U.S. audiences can tune in on Hulu via FX , while fans in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore can stream using Disney Plus via Star.

Who Is in Pistol?

Pistol sports a cast of fresh young talent, reflecting the youth-led punk culture that the series is depicting. The members of the Sex Pistols will be made up of Toby Wallace ( Babyteeth ) as Steve Jones, Anson Boon ( 1917 ) as Johnny Rotten, Christian Lees ( The Phantom of the Open ) as Glen Matlock, Louis Partridge ( Enola Holmes ) as Sid Vicious, and relative newcomer Jacob Slater as Paul Cook. These young actors will be tasked with capturing the energy of the initial band members, which will be a stiff challenge.

Luckily, they will not have to do it alone. They will be accompanied by a range of actors that some may be familiar with. Two of the most prominent names are Game of Thrones alumni, Maisie Williams , as fashion revolutionary, and Sex Pistols affiliate Pamela Rooke AKA Jordan Mooney; and Thomas Brodie-Sangster as the band's manager and impresario Malcolm MacLaren . Another fantasy drama alum, Emma Appleton , known for her role as Princess Renfri in Netflix’s The Witcher , will play Sid Vicious’ infamous girlfriend Nancy Spungen . Sydney Chandler will also star in the series as Steve Jones' on and off love interest and lead singer of The Pretenders , Chrissie Hynde .

Related: How the Gritty Visual Language of ‘Trainspotting’ Pushes Viewers to "Choose Life"

What is the Background Behind Pistol?

Pistol is a six-episode series from FX . Although there have been different media about the Pistols, what separates the series is that it is inspired largely by Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir released in 2016. Titled Lonely Boy: Tales From a Sex Pistol , The memoir chronicles the early stages of the Sex Pistols, starting with the formation of Kutie Jones and his Sex Pistols. The memoir gives an insider perspective on some of the most iconic events in the Sex Pistols timeline, including their relationship with entrepreneur Malcolm MacLaren and fashion trailblazer Vivienne Westwood .

At its helm is series creator Craig Pearce , who co-wrote the screenplays for Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby , both known for their visual splendor as well as this summer's Elvis , which will also be directed by Baz Luhrmann . Danny Boyle is directing the series, he may best be known for his work on Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire , the latter of which earned him an Acadamy Award for Best Director. Despite working on a broad range of genres, Boyle is known for visually striking visuals, infusing pop culture into his work, and an in-your-face, fast-paced style that should accentuate a series such as Pistol . In a statement upon the series’ announcement, Boyle noted that it will depict:

“the detonation point for British street culture, where ordinary young people had the stage and vented their fury and their fashion…”

What Is Pistol About?

According to the official synopsis:

"Pistol is a six-episode limited series about a rock and roll revolution. The furious, raging storm at the center of this revolution are the Sex Pistols — and at the center of this series is Sex Pistols’ founding member and guitarist, Steve Jones. Jones’ hilarious, emotional and at times heart-breaking journey guides us through a kaleidoscopic telling of three of the most epic, chaotic, and mucus-spattered years in the history of music. Based on Jones’ memoir Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, this is the story of a band of spotty, noisy, working-class kids with ‘no future, who shook the boring, corrupt Establishment to its core, threatened to bring down the government and changed music and culture forever."

Pistol Ending, Explained: Why Did the Sex Pistols Break Up?

‘Pistol’ delves into the English punk rock scene of the 1970s and follows the rise and fall of one of its most iconic bands — Sex Pistols. Based on the memoirs of the band’s guitarist and founder, Steve Jones, the FX miniseries narrates in gritty detail what went on behind the scenes of the explosive and short-lived music group. Eclectic characters, like the band’s eccentric and smooth-talking manager, Malcolm, and the mysterious Pauline, make the story all the more intriguing. Near the end, the band struggles to stay together because of its members’ differing personalities and rebellious attitudes. So how do things turn out? Let’s take a closer look and the ending of ‘Pistol’ and see what happens to the iconic punk rock band. SPOILERS AHEAD.

Pistol Recap

The narrative opens with Steve Jones, the street smart lead singer of a band called The Swankers. Inspired by the likes of David Bowie and constantly arguing about whether The Beatles are any good, the band plays with its identity while trying to get noticed in the British rock scene. Steve also has a habit of nicking musical equipment from music venues and proudly claims to have stolen a microphone with Bowie’s lipstick still on it.

While trying to steal some clothes for an upcoming gig, Steve runs into Malcolm, who runs an avant-garde fashion shop called SEX with his partner. Malcolm is highly vocal about his anti-establishment beliefs, and Steve realizes that the smooth-talking store owner would make for a good manager. Once onboard, Malcolm quickly makes changes to the band and introduces Johnny Lydon (later renamed Johnny Rotten on account of his teeth and attitude) as the lead singer. Steve then spends a few days in a haze of drugs and sleep deprivation as he struggles to learn the guitar. The name of the band is also changed to Sex Pistols.

As the band gets popular in the underground scene, we get glimpses of Steve’s troubled childhood, where he was abused by his father. Various characters join the Sex Pistols’ widening circle, including the controversial fashion icon Jordan and the troubled Pauline . Soon, arguments between Johnny and the bassist, Glen, result in the latter getting fired from the band. Malcolm also subtly manipulates Steve into firing Glen . The replacement bassist, Sid Vicious, is a friend of Johnny’s and brings an entirely new form of chaos into the band.

Pistol Ending: Why Did Sex Pistols Break Up?

Sid Vicious soon becomes obsessed with a woman named Nancy, who is a diagnosed schizophrenic. With her, his use of heroin increases, and his erratic behavior leads to arguments with Steve. In these circumstances, the band embarks on a turbulent US tour, with Sid overdosing on the flight back to London . He survives but is soon devastated by the gruesome death of Nancy.

Sid is arrested for Nancy’s murder and subsequently dies of an overdose. When Malcolm attempts to use Sid and Nancy’s deaths as a marketing ploy, Steve realizes just how self-centered the manager is. He subsequently leaves Malcolm and shares one last conversation with Johnny, telling the latter how he was right not to trust Malcolm. The series closes with glimpses of the band in a happier time when they performed at a Christmas party.

The ending sees the band undergo a sudden and steep downward spiral. It is especially tragic that the group begins breaking up even as they become increasingly popular. In fact, the show’s final episode opens with Malcolm saying that he must destroy the Sex Pistols. According to the manager, they have become too famous, making the band inaccessible and going against Malcolm’s philosophy of unfiltered inclusion.

However, it is not because of the manager that the band falls apart. Instead, the group implodes because of its fiery members. Despite Malcolm’s self-righteous claims about the band becoming too famous, he is more than happy to encash their fame and profit from it. However, this also leads to Steve finally realizing just how self-serving Malcolm’s actions are. Steve is unable to stand up to Malcolm ever since the latter speaks on his behalf in court and helps him avoid imprisonment. Seeing the manager trying to use a band member and his girlfriend’s death as a marketing ploy is the last straw, and Steve finally parts ways with Malcolm.

In a way, Steve and Malcolm form the foundation of the band, and their going separate ways spells the end of the Sex Pistols. Earlier, Johnny also gives Steve an ultimatum, asking the latter to choose between him and Malcolm. When Steve picks Malcolm over Johnny, the singer leaves the band. Thus, by the time Steve and Malcolm part ways, Johnny is already out of the picture. Since Steve and Johnny only collaborate because Malcolm constantly pushes them together, without the manager, there is no hope of the singer and guitarist carrying on the band together.

When Johnny meets Steve in the final moments of the series, he starts their conversation by saying that this is the last time they’re talking. Though they share (a rare) memory of the band sharing happier times, it is clear that neither of them plans on carrying on the Sex Pistols.

What Happened to Malcolm McLaren and the Members of Sex Pistols?

The series, just like the band it centers on, ends quite abruptly, leaving the fates of the band’s members and its manager unclear. As various members walk away or are fired, the story stops following them. Even in the final scene, where Steve and Johnny share memories of their times together, it remains unclear what either of them plans to do next. However, the real-life band members on which the show’s central characters are based actually continued playing music or became involved in various projects after the Sex Pistols disbanded.

Steve Jones ultimately moved to Los Angeles and even played in a couple of Sex Pistols reunion tours in 1996 and the 2000s. He also features in shows like ‘Californication’ and hosts his own radio talk show called ‘Jonesy’s Jukebox.’

Meanwhile, Johnny Rotten changed his name back to John Lydon and formed the post-punk band Public Image Ltd. The band’s debut single appeared on the UK Top Ten list, and PiL has since released multiple studio albums. Lydon also sued Malcolm McLaren’s company, Glitterbest, for a number of claims, including non-payment of royalties, unfair contractual obligations, and damages.

The drummer, Paul Cook, continued his musical career with a punk rock band called The Professionals. He still lives in England with his wife and daughter. Meanwhile, Glen Matlock, who was fired from the band, rejoined the group in later years between 1996–2001, 2002–2003, and 2007–2008. He also continued his career as a solo musician and still collaborates with other musicians. In 2022, he played with Blondie on her UK and US tours.

After parting ways with Steve and the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren actually performed as a solo artist himself, focussing on hip hop and world music, and later, funk and disco. McLaren was quite successful as a musician, and his first album, Duck Rock, was certified silver in the UK. After breaking up with Vivienne Westwood, he spent a number of years living in Hollywood. He passed away in 2010 in a hospital in Switzerland after battling peritoneal mesothelioma.

Read More:  Is Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones Bisexual or Straight?

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Pistol: episodes, cast and everything we know about the Sex Pistols limited TV series

The Sex Pistols are getting a six-episode limited series from Danny Boyle.

Legends of the punk rock era, the English band Sex Pistols are getting their own limited TV series from Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle, simply titled Pistol . The series is now available across various broadcasters and streaming services, including Hulu and Disney Plus .

The Sex Pistols have been featured in TV shows and movies before, most notably in 1986’s Sid & Nancy , where Gary Oldman played the band’s bassist Sid Vicious. However, the movie was primarily focused on the titular couples relationship. The band also got the documentary treatment in 2000’s The Filth and the Fury . Pistol , however, will be based on one of the band member’s own telling of their journey, guitarist Steve Jones.

Here is everything you need to know about Pistol .

When is the Pistol release date?

Pistol is available as of May 31. For US audiences, the limited series will be available on Hulu, while it will stream on Disney Plus in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. All six episodes are available immediately.

Star Plus is slated to carry Pistol in Latin America and other Disney Plus territories, but a release date has not yet been set for those regions.

What is the plot of Pistol?

Based on Steve Jones’ 2017 memoir, Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol , Pistol details the rock and roll revolution that the band was a part of in the 1970s.

The Sex Pistols caused a major stir when they broke out in the 1970s with songs like "Anarchy in the UK," "Holiday in the Sun," "Pretty Vacant" and "God Save the Queen." This series will look at the experience of the band and their impact from the perspective of one of its members.

Here is the official synopsis:

" Pistol is a six-episode limited series about a rock and roll revolution. The furious, raging storm at the center of this revolution are the Sex Pistols — and at the center of this series is Sex Pistols’ founding member and guitarist, Steve Jones. Jones’ hilarious, emotional and at times heart-breaking journey guides us through a kaleidoscopic telling of three of the most epic, chaotic and mucus-spattered years in the history of music. Based on Jones’ memoir Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol , this is the story of a band of spotty, noisy, working-class kids with ‘no future, who shook the boring, corrupt Establishment to its core, threatened to bring down the government and changed music and culture forever."

Pistol episodes

Here is the synopses for all episodes of the Pistol limited series:

Pistol episode 1, "Track 1: The Cloak of Invisibility" "Steve Jones convinces Malcolm McLaren to manage The Swankers, but he discovers that his 'Cloak of Invisibility' can't protect him from the gaze of the audience."

Pistol episode 2, "Track 2: Rotten" "As Steve tries to learn guitar in five days, Johnny Rotten arrives on the scene, leading to the birth of the Sex Pistols."

Pistol episode 3, "Track 3: Bodies" "Steve and Chrissie Hynde begin making more than just music, while the Pistols cause anarchy in the UK and Johnny Rotten finds inspiration in a grieving young woman."

Pistol episode 4, "Track 4: Pretty Vaaayc**t" "The band shock the nation out of its torpor. The media frenzy causes their egos to explode. Malcolm blackmails Steve into replacing Glen Matlock with Sid Vicious as bassist."

Pistol episode 5, "Track 5: Nancy and Sid" "Sid becomes increasingly lost to heroin and violence as his relationship with Nancy heats up. A plan to get rid of Nancy goes awry during a riverboat stunt at the Queen's Jubilee."

Pistol episode 6, "Track 6: Who Killed Bambi?" "Malcolm believes the Sex Pistols have become too much like a rock band. Johnny leaves the group and is replaced by Sid as lead singer. Sid is suspected of murdering Nancy in New York City."

Who is in the Pistol cast?

Taking center stage in Pistol are of course the actors playing the members of Sex Pistols. They are Toby Wallace ( Baby Teeth ) as Steve Jones, Anson Boon ( 1917 ) as John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, Christian Lees ( The Phantom of the Open ) as Glen Matlock, Louis Partridge ( Enola Holmes ) as Sid Vicious and Jacob Slater as Paul Cook.

Pistol is also going to feature some Game of Thrones veterans, as Maisie Williams is on board to play punk icon Jordan and Thomas Brodie-Sangster is playing Malcolm McLaren.

Other cast members include Emma Appleton ( The Witcher ) as Nancy Spungen, Sydney Chandler ( Don’t Worry Darling ) as Chrissie Hynde, Talulah Riley ( Westworld ) as Vivienne Westwood and Dylan Llewellyn ( Derry Girls ) as Wally Nightingale.

Who is the Pistol director?

As mentioned, Danny Boyle is directing all six episodes of Pistol . Boyle is best known for his Oscar-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire and his breakout movie Trainspotting . Some of his other credits include 28 Days Later , 127 Hours and Steve Jobs . He’s also dabbled in some big TV projects in recent years, including directing multiple episodes of the limited series Trust , the pilot episode of Babylon and the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympics.

The rest of the creative team for Pistol includes Craig Pearce ( Moulin Rouge! , Elvis ), who created the series, as well as Frank Cottrell Bryce ( Goodbye Christopher Robin , Doctor Who ), who co-wrote the episodes.

Is there a Pistol trailer?

The first Pistols trailer has one thing in mind, "destroy." It's just a quick tease for what's in store, but check it right directly below:

Another Pistol teaser trailer is also now available. Give it look below:

Hulu also shared a teaser trailer as part of National Streaming Day:

Prepare to be shocked and outraged. Stream all episodes of #PistolFX on May 31. #StreamingDay #DisneyBundle pic.twitter.com/JfbXaysVQW May 20, 2022

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Michael Balderston is a DC-based entertainment and assistant managing editor for What to Watch, who has previously written about the TV and movies with TV Technology, Awards Circuit and regional publications. Spending most of his time watching new movies at the theater or classics on TCM, some of Michael's favorite movies include Casablanca , Moulin Rouge! , Silence of the Lambs , Children of Men , One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Star Wars . On the TV side he enjoys Only Murders in the Building, Yellowstone, The Boys, Game of Thrones and is always up for a Seinfeld rerun. Follow on Letterboxd .

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Sex Pistols

In the beginning (of punk) there was chaos...and its name was The Sex Pistols. 1977 saw the band at their peak with the banned 'God Save The Queen' more...

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Past Events

Here are the most recent UK tour dates we had listed for Sex Pistols. Were you there?

• Sep 02 2008 London, Eventim Apollo Sex Pistols
• Aug 03 2008 Loch Lomond, Balloch Country Park Idlewild, Sex Pistols, Ocean Colour Scene, The Complete Stone Roses, Doug Walker The Complete Stone Roses (Tribute)
• Jun 14 2008 Newport, Festival Site Sex Pistols, Ian Brown (1), Iggy and the Stooges, The Zutons, The Enemy, Kate Nash, Amy Macdonald, One Night Only, Black Stone Cherry Iggy & The Stooges…
• Jun 11 2008 O2 Academy Birmingham Sex Pistols
• Nov 17 2007 Manchester, The AO Arena Sex Pistols

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Mat Osman: ‘I wanted to write about a dirty, dangerous, working-class London’

The Suede bassist and author on writing without a safety net, terrifying himself for his next novel and which of the Thursday Murder Club books – by his brother Richard – he likes best

M at Osman is, along with Brett Anderson , a founding and current member of the band Suede, and the author of two novels. The Ruins , published in 2020, is a modern murder mystery about estranged brothers. His latest, The Ghost Theatre , is set in Elizabethan London and tells the tale of the Blackfriars Boys, a real life Elizabethan theatre troupe made up of children who were often snatched from the streets to act in popular plays of the day. They are joined by Shay, a young female “Aviscultan”; a worshipper of the birds that she communes with as she scales the city’s rooftops on the run from her enemies. The book has been widely praised and the Guardian picked it as one of its novels of 2023. Osman is the older brother of TV presenter and fellow novelist Richard Osman and lives in north-west London..

It isn’t the kind of book you imagine a musician would write… I really hope that’s true. My first novel was about a musician, about brothers and stuff and it drew from [my] experience. [With The Ghost Theatre ] I was really aware that I wanted to write something without a safety net, where I had to make it all up. Because I want to be a writer, not a musician who has written a book.

Where did the idea come from? I came across a story about a kid who got kidnapped for the stage in 1601. All sorts of children were stolen off the street to perform. Everyone in London went to the theatre, it was the entertainment and these kids were incredibly famous, performing for the Queen. But at the same time they were basically property. They were bought and sold and pimped out. I just wanted to know what that would feel like. That’s how it started. But about halfway through, it just turned into an adventure story, a kind of historical romp, which I hadn’t really meant to write.

Where did Shay and her bird worshipping community come from? From, as many things do, a conversation on a tour bus. Just talking about the religions that have worshipped animals: cats, bulls that kind of thing. There doesn’t seem to have been one that worshiped birds. It seemed strange to me, because they seem very worshippable. You know, they live in the heavens, they’re ineffable. They’re beautiful and cruel. And we don’t really understand them. I mean, they make perfect gods.

The book is something of a love letter to London. You were brought up in Haywards Heath – what was your first experience of the city? The first time I came to London was with a friend and his dad to see Simple Minds. It must have been at Hammersmith [Odeon] because I can remember coming over Hammersmith Bridge. I was in love with London before I ever got here to be honest. I mean, I devoured anything [to do with it]. The Sex Pistols, the Jam – I already had a kind of musical London in my head. I’ve lived here for 35 years now and I still absolutely love it. But I wanted to write about a real London, a dirty, dangerous, working-class London. You know, I was the posh one in Suede , because my mum was a teacher. When we started here no one had any money, not a single band I knew… it was kind of a working-class pursuit, an ordinary person’s pursuit. And that doesn’t exist any more. It really doesn’t.

Can you recommend other books by musicians? There’s a guy called John Darnielle . An incredibly talented man who fronts an American band called the Mountain Goats, who are great. He’s written a couple of books, Wolf in White Van and Universal Harvester , which are both absolutely brilliant. Universal Harvester – if anyone reading this is from Netflix or Amazon – is like a brilliantly adult Stranger Things and should be made into a film or TV programme immediately.

Which authors do you always return to? Michael Chabon , also Michel Faber and Iain Banks, who made me feel like I could be a writer because, in terms of style, nothing’s off limits. I love writers who overspill the boundaries, whose ideas are too big for one genre. It’s one of the things I find frustrating about publishing – these little boxes you get put in. I didn’t want The Ghost Theatre to be [classed as] historical fiction. It’s just fiction that happens to be set in that time.

What’s your next book about? A tech billionaire and his staff trapped in a bunker after the apocalypse. I’ve spent the past six months terrifying myself, looking at these underground bunkers that everyone who has a stake in our future is building.

Your brother Richard is also , famously , an author. Which is your favourite of his Thursday Murder Club books? The last one [ The Last Devil to Die ]. I mean, I like them all. It’s not the kind of thing that I would normally read but the minute I read the first sentence of the first one – he sent it to me six months before it was published – it was just like: ‘OK, he knows what he’s doing.’ But the last one I thought was really nice. The descriptions of dementia and coping with it were brilliantly done. Really sad but not sentimental – it’s a hard thing to do.

He has said that your books are dark with a touch of mainstream while his are the opposite. Do you agree? Yes, totally. It’s always been the way. When we were growing up he was into Saturday night TV and golf and snooker – he’s always loved the mainstream. It’s not an affectation. He has mainstream taste, whereas I was always kind of obsessed with anything that was cool. That’s why most people form a band. It’s not for the reasons that are really important to me now – that sense of community, touching people. It was because, you know, I wasn’t very cool and I wanted to be.

Why are the Osmans so successful? I really have no idea. Every now and then the pair of us do marvel at it because I think if you’d met us at about 15, you’d have thought, well… good luck to those two!

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