“We were at the epicentre of the hippest place in London at that time when nothing else was going on,” Matlock argues. Revolving around SEX, however, they were immaculately placed. “We’d row like cats and dogs and hate each other, but we worked well as a unit,” Lydon told a Classic Albums documentary in 2002. “When you do something like that, it’s just the four of you and the people who are helping you out against the world,” says Matlock – but a band of lifelong compadres they were not. He auditioned by singing along to Alice Cooper on the SEX jukebox and was recruited as frontman for the renamed Sex Pistols after Television’s Richard Hell and New York Dolls’ Sylvain Sylvain had both turned down the role. Matlock, Jones and drummer Paul Cook were playing together as The Strand before singer John Lydon, renamed Johnny Rotten for added gutter appeal, was spotted in an “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt in the street. Inspired by spending six months on the New York punk scene with The Ramones, the New York Dolls and Television, manager Malcolm McLaren had pulled them together from faces that hung around, worked in or – in guitarist Steve Jones’s case – shoplifted from his and Vivienne Westwood’s S&M-themed “anti-fashion” boutique SEX on the King’s Road.
In their early days, the Sex Pistols were a dysfunctional sort of insurrectionist gang. There was a dearth of music for young people that was of any consequence back then, and I think our mission was to try and stir it up a little bit.” If we’d done what everybody else was doing at the time we’d have been a lite jazz rock funk band, kinda like Kokomo… You know that bit in The Blues Brothers where John Belushi says, ‘We’re getting the band back together because we’re on a mission from God’? Now I don’t know that we was on a mission from God, but I do think we was on some kind of mission to educate the masses, provide an alternative voice. “Something needed to happen to stir things up back then,” says Glen Matlock, the Pistols bassist in 1976.
But a generation of young music fans – previously without identity or musical hope in an age of slick disco and expensive orchestral rock – were excited, inspired and galvanised by punk’s ravenous rallying cry. The prog fans were disgusted by their uncultured primal racket what corners of middle England had tuned in were outraged and terrified by their savage cries of sedition.
What had thus far been a thriving, confrontational subculture gradually building a following among London’s art, rock and fashion crowds now broke the surface of popular culture, landing with the shock of a lightning bolt.
#Sleepwalking lyrics glen matlock tv
In the three-and-a-half minutes of the Sex Pistols’ first TV appearance – in which they played their debut single “Anarchy in the UK”, released 45 years ago this week – everything changed. “I wanna be anarchy,” he barked like a hyena trapped in barbed wire, “get p*****, destroy!” With an opening cry of “Get off your a***!” this snarling creature writhed and sneered around the stage of Tony Wilson’s So It Goes show on Granada TV, his hair an untamed red, his shocking pink blazer shredded at the shoulder and held together with safety pins, and his true identity declared from the off: “I am an antichrist! I am an anarch-ist!” As a woman in a stencil-sprayed Nazi uniform danced beside him and his lairy bandmates made the sound of a biker gang roaring up outside your local church meeting with flaming torches aloft, he announced his devious intent, too. To an unsuspecting British public, the devil in pink announced himself on 4 September, 1976. Johnny Rotten performs on stage in December 1976 (Graham Wood/Evening Standard/Getty Images)
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