‘Nah, I didn’t really nick that Abba riff’
‘Teenage Sex Pistol’ Glen Matlock on that Pretty Vacant bass line
Strip away the swearing and the puking, the spitting and the sneering, the safety pins and the shredded clothes, and the Sex Pistols were just another great pop band.
They were The Monkees with a migraine, The Beatles with buggered amps, The Kinks marinated in bile and cheap lager.
Colourful, compelling, winningly ridiculous, The Sex Pistols followed in a long line of impudent singles bands – The Who, Pretty Things, Yardbirds, Small Faces – who were embraced by spotty teen miscreants around the globe while alienating their parents.
Their first three singles were, quite literally, a blast.
Anarchy in The UK, God Save The Queen and Pretty Vacant were cultural hand-grenades: detonations of gleeful din, bright flashes of melody and energy and noise, lobbed across enemy lines to rain shock and awe upon a slumbering population whose pop charts had gotten slick, safe and stale.
Pretty Vacant in particular still sounds as raw and audacious as the day it was made. It’s brash, thrilling, a joyous outrage.
And no wonder. Original Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock nicked the main riff from Swedish chart-pop titans, Abba.
‘‘I didn’t really nick it!’’ protests Matlock, who has lived in LA for many years now but retains the ‘‘gorblimey’’ accent of an East End London cabbie. ‘‘No, no, no. Who told you that!’’ Actually, you did, via numerous interviews with other people.
‘‘Nah, well, it’s not quite the whole story, though, is it?’’ Matlock pauses, heaves a mighty sigh, and prepares to set the record straight.
‘‘Look, there’s three types of songs for me. There’s songs with a great riff, like Led Zep’s Whole Lotta Love. There’s songs with amazing chord changes, like Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks. And then there’s songs that have both, and those are the ones I try to write.’’
With Pretty Vacant, Matlock already had the ripper chord changes; it just needed a little extra riff for liftoff.
‘‘I was in this pub near where I went to art college and Abba’s S.O.S came on the radio. All the pieces suddenly came together, you know? I didn’t pinch it note for note, but the structure of that song gave me the idea for the Pretty Vacant bass riff. And the rest, as they say, is history.’’
Yes, indeed, but it is history that often overlooks Matlock, about which he is far from chuffed. Though the rest of the band dispute his version of events, Matlock claims he wrote most of the music on their 1977 debut album Never Mind The 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 selfdestructed 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 go-getter 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 delivery of his.’’
Lydon’s trademark unholy howl was a sound born of necessity, reckons Matlock.
‘‘The room was only about 10 foot square and we made an amazing racket in there. Steve had his 100 watt amp turned up full. Paul was bangin’ away on his drums. I had my bass amp wound up to the max, and there was poor old Johnny with a tiny little 50 watt vocal P.A., trying to sing over all this mayhem! He learnt to do this very controlled sort of shout, just to be heard. He came up with this very distinctive whine, and no one else sounds quite like that.’’
But as the Sex Pistols began to attract attention from record companies and the media, Lydon became increasingly dictatorial, says Matlock.
‘‘Nothing prepares you for the sort of attention we suddenly had, and the stress of it created a lot of friction within the band, but John seemed to thrive on the attention. He became a real prima donna. He was more like Elton John than Elton John was! That annoyed me, so I left and formed the Rich Kids with Midge Ure (Visage, Ultravox) and Rusty Egan (Misfits, The Skids, Visage) and we became a bridge between punk and the new wave thing that came afterwards.’’
They were exciting times, the cultural jolt of punk having spurred people on to try bold new things in music, art, fashion, graphic design.
‘‘You had bands like Wire springing up, who sounded as much like the first Pink Floyd album as they did punk. You had reggae influencing great female bands like The Slits and The Raincoats. It was all moving very fast. But then Midge formed Ultravox and the Rich Kids split up, and I got a call from Iggy Pop. Next thing I knew, I was touring Europe and America at the tender age of 23. I’ll play a few songs I wrote for Iggy in this show.’’
It’s been a very full career, he says, with numerous unexpected twists and turns. And somewhere along the way, things came full circle. Matlock got the call to re-join the Sex Pistols when they reformed for their Filthy Lucre reunion tour in 1996, and has joined them for several tours since.
‘‘That was very strange, to be honest. The first time around, we’d all be at in the back of a transit van with no windows and the wind howling in, driving 200 miles to these tiny little gigs. When we reformed in 96, we ended up playing at Roskilde festival in Copenhagen in front of 125,000 people, and did a London show for 36,000 people. It was mental!’’
Relations were still very strained between the frontman and the rest of the band, but everyone made the best of it so they could fulfil their touring contract and make a few bob.
‘‘Me, Steve and Paul would travel on one flight and John would fly by himself. When we toured America, John demanded his own separate tour bus. It was ridiculous, and really expensive, too, but at least it meant we all got the whole tour done without pissing each other off too much and got paid at the end.’’
It may have been a torturous band relationship, full of stress and argument and regret, but Matlock remains proud of the role he played in British punk’s breakthrough band.
‘‘The Sex Pistols made people talk about music again, and get involved themselves. We made people realise there should be more topical lyrical content in songs rather than just progrock virtuosity. It was more about a simple, powerful thing done well, with a good message. And our TV appearances were really the end of the age of deference to the older generation. Previously, people our age were expected to kowtow to these older people who had no idea what they were talking about half the time. But once we were on the front page of the papers, it really felt like the tables had turned, and suddenly, the old guard were scared of us. A lot of these authority figures were only in authority because people allowed them to be, and we challenged that.’’
Good man. But how will it be hearing key songs of this era bashed out on a solitary acoustic guitar, interspersed with tall tales of musical misadventure from throughout Matlock’s chequered career?
‘‘Surprisingly enjoyable,’’ he reckons. ‘‘I’m only a passable singer and not much cop as a guitarist either, but I’ve written some great songs, and somehow, it works. I don’t have a set list or a script, but I know all my songs and the stories behind them, and if you shout out a song, I can probably play it. Best of all, there’s no strange band politics, because I’m on my own. When I get back to the Green Room afterwards, I get to eat all the sandwiches.’’
An Evening with Sex Pistol Glen Matlock: Auckland’s Tuning Fork, Friday November 24 and Wellington’s Valhalla on Saturday November 25. Tickets via Ticketmaster.
‘‘I’m only a passable singer and not much cop as a guitarist either, but I’ve written some great songs.’’
Glen Matlock