PISTOLS AT DAWN
As a Sex Pistols TV biopic is released, three of the band talk to Will Hodgkinson about why they will probably never talk to Johnny Rotten again.
Danny Boyle’s six part series, Pistol, on the life of the ex istols guitarist teve Jones, is upon us. nd in true ex istols fashion, one voluble former band member is not happy about it. “utting me out is a shockingly stupid move,” John Lydon said of the decision by Jones, the drummer aul ook and the original bassist len Matlock to allow Boyle to use ex istols songs in the series after Lydon launched – and lost – a High ourt battle to prevent it. n his usual charming fashion, the man formerly known asJohnny ottenadded “Noneofthesef . would have a career without me.”
“John keeps saying that nobody told him about the series . t’s not true,” says teve Jones, whose past three decades of living in Los ngeles have made absolutely no dent whatsoever on his
hepherd’s Bush street urchin accent. “anny Boyle reached out early on and Lydon wasn’t interested. f the shoe was on the other foot, and
anny wanted to do John Lydon’s book, we would have been thrilled.”
s Jones suggesting that if Boyle based the series on Lydon’s memoir, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, rather than Jones’ memoir Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, it would be a whole different story? “No comment.”
or ook, who has been friends with Jones since the age of , such animosity from Lydon is par for the course. “Because of the court case, ’ve had no conversations with John. don’t think there will be conversations with John ever again,” he says.
To be fair, this kind of drama is exactly what you would expect from the most dysfunctional and notorious band in music history. The ex
istols were a perfect disaster of youthful energy and insurrection, with five – if you include their Machiavellian manager Malcolm McLaren – highly combustible elements coming together at a time when Britain was on its knees after years of constant strikes, barrelling inflation and the continuing violence of Northern reland.
The istols’ story begins in when Jones and ook formed a band called the trand, later the wankers, with a load of stolen gear Jones even lifted an amplifier and a microphone from backstage during avid Bowie’s iggy
tardust concert at Hammersmith deon. However, istol goes all the way back to Jones’ childhood. nd it wasn’t a happy one.
The problems began when Jones and his mother, his father having disappeared not long after he was born, left his grandparents’ tiny tenement flat in Hammersmith in west London when he was and moved in with a man called on ambagella in nearby hepherd’s Bush. t sounds like it was a pretty bleak scene
on regarded him as a nuisance and a pet dog provided companionship before disappearing without explanation. The defining crisis of Jones’ childhood was ambagella sexually abusing him at age .
“’ve been sober for years. ’ve done a lot of work on myself, therapy, blah blah blah,” Jones says when ask him about making public such personal trauma. “ou get to know yourself through that, and what realised is that
really didn’t know how to live. never had any teachings from my mum and stepfather. hen used to hang out at aul ooky’s realised that liked his parents his home was a safe place and didn’thave any of that. The abuse only happened once, as far as know, so had to let that shit go and move on. nce did,you’dbeama ed at how many guys wrote to me to say they went through something similar.”
suggest to Jones that the life of crime that followed, with him seemingly incapable of walking into a shop without seeing what he could lift from it, might have been a reaction to the trauma. “Nah, got that from my parents. They would go into Tesco’s and put all this shit under their coats. woke up and
thought, ‘What am I going to nick today?’ I was in uvenile schools 10 times and the only scary one was going to Ashford rem and centre, a no to rio usuve nile prison in Surrey because that felt like a proper nick.”
Apart from that, Jones seemed to uite like the punishment schools. “Oh, I did. There was one in the countryside called Banstead Hall and I liked being there much more than being at home. It was a big Tudor house. We did gardening and farming, and after a while they let you go home for the weekend.
very time I came back to Banstead, I did it in a stolen motor.”
At the time Jones formed a band with Cook, initially with a luckless friend called Wally Nightingale on guitar, the two of them were sneaking into concerts byoy Music and the Faces and hanging out at McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s shop on the ingsdinw est London. The shop began in 1971 as the Teds’ emporium Let It ock, spent a brief stint in 197 as the rockers-based Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, and in 197 morphed into the bondage centre and punk grounder o Se.
Thereisanama ingscenein sto whereSe ’s shop assistant Jordan, played by Maisie Williams, finds an unlikely admirer in the strait-laced newsreader and secret bondage enthusiast eginald Bosa nu et. According to Jones“Sometimes, when he was reading the news, he’d wink at the camera. It was a code to her that he was wearing rubber pants in her honour.”
Incredibly, McLaren’s original plan was for the Se Pistols to be like the Bay City ollers, but good. He envisioned a boy band that would, in his words, “really hurt and annoy people, a sound that would be stripped of all its slickness”. Matlock was already working as a Saturday boy at the shop, so he was on bass guitar, while Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders also a shop assistant at Se and Midge Ure of Ultravo were considered as lead singers. Only after Lydon reluctantly agreed to audition for the role by singing along to Alice Cooper’s ’ hteen was the final piece put in place.
“Malcolm liked to portray himself as the arch manipulator. The one thing that does piss me off about sto is its perpetuation of the myth that we were Malcolm’s puppets,” Cook says. “Without a doubt, though, it did all revolve around Malcolm and Vivienne’s shop. We hung out there because it had a ukebo and it was the only place we could connect with. It wasn’t like everywhere else, where they looked at us with suspicion.” ightly so, given Jones’ inability to go into a shop without helping himself to whatever was on offer in there.
Initially, being a Se Pistol was great rehearsing living in a warehouse on Denmark St in central London staging little concert sat Saint Martin’ s School of Art and the sculptor Andrew Logan’s loft inLondonBridge Matlockbasing etty a ant on the chords of SS by Abba and nobody realising. And although Lydon hated McLaren, Jones was clearly rather fond of him. “I owe him. Prior to meeting Malcolm, I was an ’erbert in a council flat. He took me to rockstar places like the Speakeasy, to all these poncey parties, and tome itwa sam aing. Maybe he wasn’t the most honourable guy, but I loved him.”
It all went wrong, according to Cook and Jones, on December 1,197. That’ s when the band and their contingent went on Bill rundy’s oday show. Jones called rundy a “f ...... rotter” amid other profanities from himself and Lydon, and all hell broke loose. “It was tabloid hell straight away,” says Cook, who was beaten up by a gang of Teds, as was Lydon, after the release of God Save the ʤueen in 1977. “We became public enemy number one, these horrible filthy punks who had come to destroy our culture, and because we got hassled everywhere we went there was no time to enoyit.Wewas ustkids, trying to develop as a band, and we were thrown into this maelstrom of contempt. The media loved it, of course. They would chase us down the road in the hope that we might gob on someone.”
In February 1977 Matlock left, not, as McLaren claimed, because he was chucked out for liking the Beatles, but because he was, in his words, “sick of all the bullshit”. Lydon’s friend John itchie, who couldn’t play a note on bass guitar but looked and acted the part, came in under the name Sid Vicious and from there things went from bad to worse. “John and Sid stood out the most so they got the worst of it. I didn’t like being recognised unless I wanted to get some p ..” Jones remembers.
Jones’ promiscuity at the time was off the scale. Why did so many women seem to want to sleep with him? “I was a good looking guy and I was in the Se Pistols. And everyone, as far as I was concerned, was fair game.” Cook and Jones remember recording the Se Pistols’ sole album, ev end theooks, as a highlight, working hard wit hoy Music’ s former producer Chris Thomas to craft what would become the defining statement of the punk era. But after that it was all downhill. A free concert for striking firefighters and their families in Huddersfield on Christmas Day in 1977 ended in a food fight after Vicious turned out to be a bigger kid than all the children, but by then the writing was on the wall. “The thing about Sid is that he actually had a really sensitive side,” Cook says of Vicious, who died in February 1979, shortly after the death of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. “But once heoi ned the band, and he got into heroin, it got dark very uickly. Nancy Spungen clearly wasn’t good for him, but you can’t blame her. He was into drugs before he met her.”
“You don’ tu st become like that for no reason ,” Jones says. “I didn’t hang out with him and John because it always ended up going wrong, but Sid was damaged goods. Cooky had a great upbringing. len and John had good upbringings. Me and Sid had shit upbringings. And we both became unkies.”
When in 1978 the Pistols fell apart after a disastrous American tour, whose proceeds were all taken by McLaren and ploughed into his terrible film he Ge atok’ n’ o Sn de, Cook and Jones formed a band called the Professionals. Then Jones stayed on in New York after a US tour, sold his passport and became a full-on heroin addict.
“I hooked up with a young lady who became my girlfriend and we started do in gun kin Alphabet City,” he says. Wasn’t he warned off heroin after seeing what happened to Vicious? “It was destined for me. I tried to shove everything about my upbringing under the carpet, and this was the net level of not feeling. As soon as Is hot up for the first time I said to myself, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’” Jones’ story has a happy ending of sorts. He moved to LA, cleaned up, started a hit radio show called Jonesy’s Jukebox and actually made some money from the Se Pistols for the first time after a reunion tour in 2008. “As usual, we all f ... hated each other by the end of it, but I did make enough money to get a house for the first time in my life, a nice little place in Benedict Canyon. Now I look back and think about the Se Pistols as a moment in time, an opportunity that only comes once in a blue moon.”
With sto about to introduce them to a new generation, what is the Se Pistols’ legacy? For Jones it was “right place, right time, with a bit of talent thrown in ”. For Cook“The Se Pistols’ message was simple. If you want to do it, try it.”
Finally, Jones wants to clear up two long-held misconceptions thattheSe Pistolscouldn’t play, and that the session guitarist Chris Spedding played the tricky parts on eve nd the o o ks.
“We did some early demos with Chris Spedding and ever since then people have said he played on the album. I want to say once and for all that it was not Chris Spedding playing guitar on eve nd the
ooks .” Then he adds, as if to prove the piss-taking Shepherd’s Bush urchin lives on after three decades in the California sun“It was Brian May.” watch Pistol is streaming on Disney+ now
To be fair, this kind of drama is exactly what you would expect from the most dysfunctional and notorious band in music history.