I was a teenage Sex Pistol
Bollocks; Here’s the Sex Pistols, while John ‘‘Johnny Rotten’’ Lydon supplied the lyrics.
But Matlock and Lydon argued constantly, and he bailed before the band became famous. He was replaced by a photogenic heroin addict, the late Sid Vicious, who could barely play a note, and the Sex Pistols self-destructed in less than a year. It still rankles.
‘‘I had been good mates with the other two, Steve Jones and Paul Cook, and had a big hand in all three of our singles. It really gets on my nerves when the others debate that, but I get the last laugh, because I’ve always been paid for those songs, as a cosongwriter. I left in early 77, but I got publishing credits. If you come and see my live show, my contribution to that band becomes very obvious.’’
Ah, yes – the live shows. Matlock’s on his way down here – a solitary Sex Pistol, playing his most famous songs on an acoustic guitar. An alarming image arises of a gnarled folkie in tweed jacket and flat cap, strumming Anarchy in the UK all on his tod.
‘‘I do have a flat cap, but you can rest assured, I’m not gonna bring it. And you don’t need to worry that it’s all namby-pamby sounding with the acoustic guitar. People say it almost sounds like I’ve got a full band with me.’’
His past with the Pistols is only part of the deal, too.
Matlock went on to have all sorts of other sonic adventures.
He formed his own band, the Rich Kids, alongside future members of Ultravox, Misfits and The Skids.
He toured and recorded with rock’n’roll wild man Iggy Pop, original punk reprobates The Damned and drug-hoovering Scottish dance-rock pioneers Primal Scream. Paul Weller once invited him to join The Jam.
Matlock even found himself playing in a reformed version of his favourite British R&B band, The Faces.
‘‘Ronnie Lane had passed away by this point, and Rod Stewart didn’t join us, but Ronnie Wood came back from The Rolling Stones to do it, and I was thrilled. The Faces was the band I used to mime along to in front of the mirror when I was 13, learning to play. Next thing you l know, I’m playing with those guys in front of 60 000 people in Japan.’’
Matlock will play tunes from throughout his forty year career at the live shows, telling stories about all the bands between songs.
‘‘We’ll all have a laugh together, and I’ll get everyone joinin’ in. I’ve written so many good songs, and I wrote them all on an acoustic guitar, so it makes sense to play them to the audience that way.’’
Now 61, Matlock fills me in on the origin story of his most famous band, a story he relates at greater length in his 1990 autobiography, I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol.
The Sex Pistols convened around a London boutique called SEX, run by future Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood.
Matlock worked there as a sales assistant on Saturdays, selling bondage trousers and brothel-creepers to the masses, and the other three band members were regular customers. In 1975, a 19-year-old John Lydon was hired as frontman after an audition in which he howled along to Alice Cooper’s I’m Eighteen on the in-store jukebox.
‘‘What attracted us all to Malcolm was that he knew loads of people, and this shop was the antithesis of what was going on down the King’s Road at the time. Every oddball and weirdo gravitated there, and a lot of gogetter artistic types, too. That shop really was the epicentre of what came next.’’
The Sex Pistols developed their sound quickly, a rough and ready hybrid of each member’s musical fixations.
‘‘As the band’s main tunesmith, my influences were 60s things, ’cos I grew up on pirate radio stations playing The Kinks, The Who, Small Faces and The Yardbirds. Steve liked that stuff, too, but also had this big Johnny Thunders guitar sound. Paul liked a lot of reggae, and John played bloody Van Der Graaf Generator records! It’s all in the Sex Pistols sound, like some sort of weird, lumpy casserole.’’
The band members would all bring along ideas to a cramped rehearsal space they rented among the music shops on London’s Tin Pan Alley.
‘‘The room had previously belonged to Badfinger, but various members killed themselves, so we got it. We’d bring in musical ideas and John would come in with a plastic bag full of lyrics. A song like Pretty Vacant, I brought that in and showed the others how it went, then Steve and Paul would add their sound and John would finish IT all off with that fantastic