Rocker Matlock has grown up
Oh, the irony.
Did Glen Matlock, formerly of the Sex Pistols, discourage his own sons from being in rock bands. He says he “didn’t really dissuade them,” but “didn’t exactly encourage them” to invest their futures in rock and roll, and then he says what one might never expect to hear a Sex Pistol say: “As it happens, the younger generation never listen to their fathers.”
This from the man who cowrote God Save the Queen, perhaps the prototypical punk anthem, which includes the sneering line, “Don’t be told what you want/and don’t be told what you need.”
And from the man who wrote, in his 1989 memoir I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol, that his own dad “was always on at me to become a cab driver or something. Just in case the music didn’t turn out.”
Just as Matlock’s children ignored his cautionary advice — “They’re both in bands,” he says, over the phone from London, England — he ignored the advice from his dad. Then he went on to make musical history and set the British establishment’s stiff upper lip to trembling anxiously.
The Sex Pistols embodied punk nihilism while becoming a global commodity. Matlock was still a teenaged bass player in the 1970s when he cowrote 10 of 12 songs on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, the band’s only album of original material, including the seminal tracks God Save the Queen, Anarchy in the U.K. and Pretty Vacant. The Pistols were famously fractious, and Matlock left just a few months before Never Mind the Bollocks was released in October, 1977. He was replaced by Sid Vicious, who looked the punk part but could barely play a note. (Matlock was rehired to complete most of the bass work on the album.) Less than a year later the Pistols broke up, on stage, during their only U.S. tour.
Like much of the Pistols’ short, explosive history, the principals still disagree on who did what. Pistols guitarist Steve Jones told NME in 2011 that it “bugs” him whenever he hears of Matlock getting credit for having written Sex Pistols’ songs. “If he was such a great songwriter,” Jones said, “where are the songs after the Sex Pistols? ”
One could rightly note the dearth of Sex Pistols songs written after Matlock left the band, which testifies to allmusic.com’s conclusion that Matlock “had the strongest melodic sensibility of anyone in the group, and regardless of personality conflicts, he was an invaluable part of the Pistols’ songwriting chemistry.”
In fact, Matlock has written plenty of songs postPistols, first with Midge Ure (Ultravox) in Rich Kids, and these days with the Philistines, the band with which he released his most recent record in 2012.
Since the 1970s he has recorded or toured with Sid Vicious, Iggy Pop, Johnny Thunders, Clem Burke and many others. A recent video on YouTube shows him on stage in Times Square, playing Iggy’s I Wanna Be Your Dog with Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses.
He has also taken part in the Pistols’ five reunion tours.