He reunited with his fellow Pistols for a decade of sporadic touring, some 19 years after he had left the band.Īnd now the Sex Pistols are heading back to our screens, as the fashion for music biopics continues unabated. He toured extensively with Iggy Pop, guested with musicians such as Ian Hunter (Mott the Hoople) and Frank Black (Pixies), was a member of the reformed Faces 2010 to 2012 – and has spent decades playing both in bands and solo. Glen (left) and his band featuring Earl SlickĪfter the Pistols, he went on to form bands such as the Rich Kids, with New Wave architects Rusty Egan, Steve New, and Midge Ure, and The Vicious White Kids with his Sex Pistol replacement, Sid Vicious. He is credited as a co-author on 10 of the 12 songs on the iconic album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”. Glen left the band in 1977, leaving a song-writing legacy that includes punk anthems such as “Pretty Vacant”, “Anarchy in the UK” and “God Save The Queen”. So I just kept doing it really, and I’ve left it a bit late now to get a proper job!” “I always wanted to be a musician, and I’ve been lucky – making music that people dug, and then I got to meet and work with people I dug. “Well, I put myself in the right place at the right time,” he tells me from a recording studio in Richmond, where he’s taken a break to talk to me. Malcolm introduced Glen to Steve and Paul, became the band’s manager, and later introduced John to the line-up.īut don’t be fooled into thinking Glen was simply in the right place at the right time by some stroke of luck… Glen was working in the first of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s legendary boutiques, ‘Let It Rock’, the forerunner of SEX and Seditionaries and a hub of the 1970s London music scene. But if you’ve got something to say, and people find it outrageous, that’s a totally different matter.” “You know, I think outrage for outrage’s sake is shallow. When we got done for swearing, it was almost inadvertently, so it’s different. Now people just think swearing for the sake of it is good, without it being about anything. “We unleashed a barrage of foul words, but I think we had something to back it up. Glen is protective, though, about the fact the Pistols’ anarchy had real substance. The furore and headlines that followed put punk firmly on the music map AND into the nation’s dinner table conversation. Let’s be honest, we’d barely raise our collective eyebrow at a couple of on-screen profanities nowadays, but when the Sex Pistols swore on live national television in December 1976 – admittedly having been goaded, some might say, by the beleaguered host, Bill Grundy – the nation gasped and clutched its pearls. And yet it provided the stage for some of the loudest and most enduring stories of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll – and tragedy – of any band we’ve seen. With the generous benefit of hindsight, it’s staggering to realise the Sex Pistols’ original incarnation lasted just three years and one album before its white-hot flame burned itself out. In fact, when he tells me he’s 64, he’s at pains to add “and eleven twelfths” before confirming with some disbelief that he’s about to turn 65 on 27th August 2021.Īnd for another, his colourful 45-year career in the music business started with as loud a bang as you could imagine.Īlongside singer John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten), guitarist Steve Jones, and drummer Paul Cook, Glen is one of the four founding members of the Sex Pistols, the band that detonated the fury of a generation (and the moral outrage of another).
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He knows how to tell a story with dry wit and good timing, and of course he has plenty of stories to tell.įor one thing, he’s been around for a bit. And I definitely didn’t expect to laugh so much.īut it turns out Glen Matlock is a raconteur. I really didn’t expect to talk about favourite Shakespearean characters. I didn’t expect to talk about the Large Hadron Collider, for example. This was the band that redefined the word ‘anarchy’ for our modern times, after all.īut my conversation with Glen Matlock, original bassist and co-writer of almost all the band’s songs, was far from what I expected. It’s probably a fair bet that you should expect the unexpected when talking to one of the Sex Pistols. An unforgettable moment now part of music history, which hit the headlines in “outrage” back then, it’s just one of the many memories Glen recalled when he spoke to Lucy Boulter ahead of his imminent 65th birthday…
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Glen Matlock helped to shock the nation when – as bass player and original member of the world’s most famous punk band The Sex Pistols – he was part of the infamous 1976 live TV show peppered with expletives.