I mean I’d quite happily go for a cup of tea or breakfast with Steve when I’m in Beverly Hills,” (where Jones now lives). “I dunno, it’s funny, you catch people at odd moments. In a recent interview with America’s Hustler magazine, former lead guitarist Steve Jones described Matlock at that time as a “middle-class mummy’s boy” claiming that Lydon wrote most of the lyrics that Matlock takes credit for and that Matlock (and his mum) “hated the words” at the time. It’s often said that Matlock was somehow too conservative for the Pistols, but he talks convincingly of the need for punk in the political environment of “the three-day week and the air of complete Nowheresville-ness that was London in '74-75,” as well as a music culture that had tolerated “horrible, bombastic songs about nothing… about hobgoblins and the wives of Henry VIII, all that sort of tripe,” for far too long. Roughly, he says, “it was John’s lyrics, it was my tunes and constructions and it was Steve and Paul’s sound.” He also claims credit for most of the writing of Pretty Vacant, a sort of “primal scream” of teenage frustration that was to become “almost a manifesto” for the band. Though containing four very different personalities, Matlock says that the band worked in harmony musically, at least in that early period. Matlock says he named The Sex Pistols with band’s first vocalist, Wally Nightingale, even before McLaren exercised his now legendary marketing skills and business nous by replacing Nightingale with the much more eye-catching and anarchic Lydon. “We all sort of gravitated there because we had a gut feeling that something, somehow would happen,” he says, talking of himself and his eventual bandmates Steve Jones, Paul Cook and, slightly later, John ‘Johnny Rotten’ Lydon.įrustrated by “the dearth of anything that was for the kids, by the kids,” at that time, the idea of forming a band soon took hold. Matlock describes his teenage self as “kind of driven… lost… and wanting to be different,” and “like every oddball at that time,“ he drifted towards Malcolm McLaren’s ‘Sex’ shop on the Kings Road in Chelsea.
As he says himself, at a particular time in his life he was in “the hippest place to be in the world.” His show will give some of his own take on this history, but that’s “more of a hook to hang other things on” – stories of his musical adventures and misadventures since with some of the key musical figures of three and a half decades, as well as songs old and new, played acoustically with a flair and energy that has seen him pull in audiences to solo shows worldwide.ĭespite seeing somewhat mystified that people still want to talk about the Pistols after all this time, Matlock quickly settles into the well-worn grooves of his story and it soon becomes clear why people still want to know.
His replacement by the altogether less reliable Sid Vicious has been the source of much speculation and storytelling since, and Matlock remains “a sort of semi-media bête noir” for contradicting the official narrative of the Pistols that has emerged, by shaky consensus, over the decades. He co-wrote most of the songs on the band’s only album, but missed out on actually playing the chords due to a split with the band just before they hit the studio. Matlock was part of the band for more than half of its history an explosive 18 months or so typical of the fast and furious nature of punk. Matlock is a newcomer to the Fringe – his show I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol taking its title from his autobiography and trading on a relatively brief but undeniably pivotal period of his life.
“But if that’s what people want, you try to give it to them.” “I don’t get up in the morning and think ‘I used to be in the Sex Pistols,’” says Glen Matlock, talking from his London home, his slight grogginess at 11am suggesting a man whose lifelong music career has never endeared him to the concept of mornings in the first place.
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