Paul Cook was a Bash Street Kid Steve Jones an old greaser and Glen Matlock the Respectable One with
Posted in General on 21. Jul, 2010
Paul Cook was a Bash Street Kid, Steve Jones an old greaser, and Glen Matlock the Respectable One, with a suit beneath his leather jacket Sid Vicious, who replaced Matlock on bass, died in 1979. At this one, promoting a tour, a live album, but no new material, there were four Sex Pistols, hundreds of laughing journalists, and at least two spluttering with rage.The band sat behind a lectern festooned with an updated Pistols flag. (Diana replaced the Queen at the centre of the Union Jack; the trademark blackmail-note lettering across her eyes read “Queen of Tarts”.) John Lydon was immediately recognisable as the one who has been living in America. Now, a notice in the doorway advertises The London Swing Society: “Stompin’ dance music from the Thirties/Forties/Fifties. Learn to jitterbug.” Downstairs in the club, drag artists carried trays of smoked-salmon bagels.
The ironies were everywhere, but Lydon is so fond of irony, contradictions and flouting expectations, that it’s impossible to turn any of them against him.
The only real difference between this and any other press conference was that it was entertaining. At the Beatles Anthology launch, there weren’t even any Beatles present. Sid Vicious was dead, John Lydon (aka Rotten) wished that Glen Matlock was dead, and the band hated rock dinosaurs almost as much as they hated each other Their past was untouchable. And so, at the 100 Club on Monday, Lydon said: “When someone says something’s so sacrosanct that it can’t be touched, I wanna touch it.”
The 100 Club is where Vicious half-blinded a girl with a broken glass (allegedly). After all the happiness he’d given them over the years, how satisfying to give him some happiness in return
Nicholas Barber. THE Nineties has been the decade of rock-band reunions, of monstrous egos deciding that the stage might be big enough for the both of them after all. But even as Television and The Velvet Underground told the press that it was time to exorcise ghosts, reclaim their leg- acy from imitators, and, oh all right, make a few quid while they were at it, those of us with nothing better to talk about in the pub declared that there were two bands that would never kiss and make up: the Beatles and the Sex Pistols So much for the Beatles Still, the Pistols …
Indeed, the rows sitting behind the stage had paid to see Woody’s bald patch. In the process, they had to see six other people – seven if you include the cameraman who buzzed all over the place – who joined the Genius in ambling amiably through “There’s No Place Like Home”, “We’ll Meet Again” and other jazz standards. The band, looking like portly bar-staff, took it in turns to sing the odd verse Allen, sadly, stuck to his clarinet. At the end, he said it had been a great privilege to play for us That’s what the audience had paid for, too. They had paid for the Allen they knew and adored, in his moss- green jumper, eyebrows poking over his glasses, legs crossed floppily like a ventriloquist’s dummy. He had coughed nervously between words, just as he does in the films, and that was all the audience needed to convince themselves that they had witnessed a genuine gag from the Comic Genius And that was what they had paid for. It’s also worth mentioning that the baritone Tonio gets the last line – “la commedia e finita” – which he doesn’t always: not, at least, since Caruso introduced the custom of claiming it for the tenor Such is the pecking order of the lyric stage.