{"id":248205,"date":"2025-11-06T22:54:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-06T22:54:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/248205\/"},"modified":"2025-11-06T22:54:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-06T22:54:13","slug":"i-hastened-sid-viciouss-demise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/248205\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I hastened Sid Vicious\u2019s demise\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is one of the most famous stories in rock\u2019n\u2019roll: that in February 1977 Glen Matlock was thrown out of the Sex Pistols for liking the Beatles. It is also not true.<\/p>\n

\u201cMalcolm McLaren was covering his back,\u201d the bassist says of his former manager\u2019s telegram to the NME, in which Matlock\u2019s love of the Fab Four was proclaimed. We\u2019re in his basement flat in Maida Vale, where a skull painting by Damien Hirst hangs on a wall, a present from the artist in exchange for Matlock signing his copy of the Pistols\u2019s only album, Never Mind the Bollocks. On another wall is a poster for the first Pistols concert in Moscow, in 2008. \u201cI left because I was on a hiding to nothing, especially with John [Lydon], who wanted his mate Sid Vicious in. I\u2019d just turned 20, I was annoyed with Steve [Jones, guitar] and Paul [Cook, drums] for not standing up for me, and I thought: f*** \u2019em.\u201d<\/p>\n

A month after that infamous telegram, McLaren asked Matlock to rejoin the band. \u201cWe met in the Blue Posts in Soho and he said: \u2018It\u2019s not working out with Sid, would you come back in?\u2019 I replied, \u2018You sent that horrible telegram, which was a lie, so it\u2019s not happening.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Glen<\/p>\n

Matlock in 2019<\/p>\n

TINA KORHONEN<\/p>\n

Now Matlock has a chance to tell his side of the story. I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol, a documentary based on his 1990 memoir, reveals how the band that encapsulated the post-hippy nightmare of late Seventies Britain was a complicated beast. It all began when a 16-year-old Matlock \u2014 fresh from causing anarchy in a Bayswater department store (Whiteleys) after improperly loading money into a canister destined for the cashier\u2019s office \u2014 walked into Let It Rock, McLaren and Vivienne Westwood\u2019s Fifties-themed clothes shop on the Kings Road, in 1973.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the antithesis of everything going on in the UK at the time,\u201d says Matlock of Let It Rock, soon to change its name to Too Fast to Live, too Young to Die, then Sex, where it became ground zero for punk and the birthplace of the Pistols. \u201cI went in for some brothel creepers. I couldn\u2019t afford them so I asked for a job instead.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was in the era of mass strikes, mass inflation and IRA bombings, all of which fed into the Pistols. \u201cOne day at [Central] St Martins College, I was doing a photography project with these two Irish blokes on Charing Cross Road and they just disappeared. Turns out they\u2019d been collared by the police and spent two nights in the cells. They were art students! This kind of thing was going on all the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

The jukebox at Sex featured singles by mid-Sixties bands labelled \u201cgarage punk\u201d, including You\u2019re Gonna Miss Me by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators and Psychotic Reaction by the Count Five, nuggets of primeval brilliance amid the bloated excess of progressive rock. \u201cThen John [Lydon] came along, a second generation Irish bloke with a chip on his shoulder,\u201d Matlock says of the key event in the Pistols\u2019s origin story. \u201cHe was a Roman Catholic. You can only imagine what it was like for him to sing \u2018I am an Antichrist.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Black<\/p>\n

The Sex Pistols in 1976: Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Johnny Rotten and Matlock<\/p>\n

VANTAGE MEDIA\/ I WAS A TEENAGE SEX PISTOL PRODUCTION<\/p>\n

Once the Pistols coalesced into a proper band, with Lydon on vocals, Jones on guitar and Paul Cook on drums (the bespectacled guitarist Wally Nightingale having been dispensed with for not looking the part), Matlock abandoned his degree in fine art painting to be the band\u2019s bassist. Before he left the college he convinced the social secretary at Central St Martins to book his band as support for a concert by the pub rockers Bazooka Joe, on November 6, 1975. A blue plaque now marks the spot on Charing Cross Road where the Pistols\u2019s first concert took place.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Glen Matlock: I\u2019m not a big fan of Bob Dylan<\/a><\/p>\n

Life in the Pistols was fantastic in the early days, Matlock says. Tasked by McLaren with providing a manifesto, the band wrote Anarchy in the UK. \u201cBut when I came up with the chords I had the theme tune to Sunday Night at the London Palladium in my head.\u201d God Save the Queen, originally titled No Future, came from the idea that there was no future unless you made one for yourself: punk\u2019s DIY ethic in a nutshell. The problems only started after the famous Bill Grundy incident of December 1, 1976, when the Pistols and their cohorts \u2014 booked as a last-minute replacement for Queen \u2014 appeared on Thames Television\u2019s Today programme, swore profusely after being goaded by an intoxicated Grundy and all hell broke loose.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt affected what size hat John wore,\u201d Matlock says of the episode. \u201cBefore that, we had done gigs to nobody. We played a chicken-in-a-basket working men\u2019s club in the north with a host who looked like Bernard Manning. We played a gig at a teacher training college in Dundee where they bottled us off.\u201d<\/p>\n

In October 1977 the Pistols released Never Mind the Bollocks, on which 10 of the 12 songs were co-written by Matlock. As Noel Gallagher of Oasis says in the documentary, \u201cImagine getting it so right, once. I made ten albums. In my own mind they don\u2019t match up to that and I\u2019m an arrogant bastard.\u201d It all collapsed with a disastrous US tour in January 1978. Then on August 22 Matlock and Vicious played a gig together at the Electric Ballroom.<\/p>\n

\"Sex<\/p>\n

Matlock and Lydon<\/p>\n

VANTAGE MEDIA\/ I WAS A TEENAGE SEX PISTOL PRODUCTION<\/p>\n

\u201cOne night at [punk venue] the Roxy, John and Sid turned up,\u201d Matlock says. \u201cI went for a pee and Sid came into the toilet, egged on by John, going, \u2018I\u2019m going to get you because I\u2019m the bass player in the Pistols and you\u2019re not.\u2019 But then I offered to give him bass lessons because I\u2019d heard he wasn\u2019t doing too well and he went, \u2018Would you really do that?\u2019 Sid was quite sweet, really. We came out together, smiling, and John was furious because it didn\u2019t go how he planned it. We did the gig to show we weren\u2019t enemies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Glen Matlock: why I really left the Sex Pistols<\/a><\/p>\n

Two days later Vicious left for New York. Six months after that he died of a heroin overdose. \u201cI let him have the cash for the gig not realising that Malcolm was keeping him short of money so he didn\u2019t put it up his arm,\u201d Matlock says. \u201cHe turned up in New York with all this money so in a way I hastened his demise.\u201d<\/p>\n

The original line-up of the Pistols did get back together in 1996 for the suitably named Filthy Lucre tour. \u201cWe did a press conference at the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood and someone asked: \u2018Are you going to write new songs?\u2019 John replied, \u2018What\u2019s wrong with the old ones?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

How did the reunion happen? \u201cNone of us had seen each other in years but I was in LA for a solo album so I gave Steve a call. I drove up to his place and he said: \u2018Let\u2019s go and see John.\u2019 I was going, \u2018errr \u2026\u2019 We went out for lunch. The bill was sitting on the table, nobody was picking it up and eventually I did, which is when John went, \u2018Ooh, I was going to get that!\u2019 From that moment we had a tour.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

The original line-up reunited in 1996<\/p>\n

AL SEIB\/LOS ANGELES TIMES VIA GETTY IMAGES<\/p>\n

In true Pistols style the good times were not to last. Matlock says the tensions on the reunion tour arose not from Lydon but from his ever-present minder, the late John \u201cRambo\u201d Stevens. \u201cI don\u2019t wish ill of most people but Jesus \u2026 his job was to stop trouble but if there wasn\u2019t trouble he didn\u2019t have a job so he created it. John insisted on him coming, even though he knew we didn\u2019t want him there, so it put a wedge between John and the rest of us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Could that wedge be removed? \u201cThere\u2019s too much water under the bridge. The Thames Barrier is stuck in the lock position.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2024 the Pistols reformed with Frank Carter of the Noughties punks Gallows as the frontman. Lydon dismissed it as \u201cno different to karaoke\u201d but Matlock sees it differently. \u201cMe, Steve and Paul have something in common that nobody else has, and when we get in a room and plug in, we\u2019re the Sex Pistols. Then Frank does his take on John\u2019s lyrics and it\u2019s great. How long he wants to do someone else\u2019s songs when he\u2019s quite capable of doing them in his own right is another matter.\u201d<\/p>\n

After spending an hour or so talking about his brief stint in the band, we do a quick run-through of the rest of his life: forming the new wave pioneers the Rich Kids with Midge Ure and Rusty Egan in 1977, making solo albums, playing bass for Iggy Pop, Blondie and many others. But his teenage band cast a long shadow.<\/p>\n

\"Group<\/p>\n

The Rich Kids in London in 1977<\/p>\n

DICK BARNATT\/REDFERNS<\/p>\n

\"Iggy<\/p>\n

Playing bass for Iggy Pop in 1979<\/p>\n

GUS STEWART\/REDFERNS<\/p>\n

\u201cAll four of us will do something on our own, climb the greasy pole of artistic integrity, but as soon as you have anything to do with the Sex Pistols you\u2019re back to square one,\u201d he says, sighing with a resignation half a century in the making. \u201cJohn Lydon has never been allowed to not be Johnny Rotten and I think he blames us for it. I ended up with a drink problem because of being the bloke who was sacked from the Pistols for liking the Beatles \u2014 which wasn\u2019t true.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022 Glen Matlock: \u2018I went partying with David Bowie in New York\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

In other words Matlock will always be a teenage Pistol. \u201cIt\u2019s not such a terrible thing,\u201d he concludes. \u201cThe problem is that when we play live, all we can do is rearrange the order of the 12 songs on the album. And maybe wear a different shirt.\u201d Such is the cost of making one perfect album, changing the course of history and leaving it at that.
I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol is on Sky Arts at 9pm on Nov 6, then Amazon and Apple TV from Nov 8<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is one of the most famous stories in rock\u2019n\u2019roll: that in February 1977 Glen Matlock was thrown…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":248206,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-248205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248205\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}