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Jan Goodey on Glen Matlock:
still shooting from the hip.
"Do me a favour, don't just
go on about the Pistols." Glen Matlock's final words to me.
And to be fair he has done a lot since Sid Vicious replaced him
as bass player back in the heady days of punk, when the Sex
Pistols were the biggest thing since sliced bread. He's formed
his own band, Glen Matlock And The Philistines, written and
produced their debut album Open Mind, while his own back
catalogue reads like a Who's Who of rock: having worked with the
likes of Iggy Pop, the late Mick Ronson, The Rich Kids, Johnny
Thunders, and Mick Jones, (ex-Clash and Big Audio Dynamite). But
all that aside, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't mention
those spectral prescences that hover over this interview like
giant birds of prey: John Lydon, aka Johhny Rotten, and Malcolm
Maclaren.
What was it like working with
Lydon and was it their falling out which led him to quit the
group at the height of their notoriety in 1977? "Yeah, I
left cos me and John didn't get on basically. Steve (Jones) and
Paul (Cook) had a band in '72. I joined them, Steve was the
front-man and then decided he didn't quite have it as a singer,
so we was on the look out for someone else and we got Rotten. I
was the only one out of the lot of us who went to art school,
that was one of the reasons we didn't get on, me and John, I
think he was jealous, but he was quite a good painter funnily
enough." Matlock went to St Martin's, not because of any
particularly painterly streak, but because that's what The Kinks
and The Stones had done before him. Now he looks on it as a
'fast school to nowhere'. Back to Lydon: "We did the world
tour in 1996, and I wouldn't say we were best of mates, but
acquaintances, yes. I think Paul fell out with him or he fell
out with Paul that time. He's a funny kettle of fish, John. What
makes Johhny Rotten great as a front-man doesn't necessarily
make him great as a person. But then some people like him one
way, some people like him the other, and I'm sure he says the
same about me anyway." As for Sid Vicious, he's astute in
his summing up of what a tragic waste of life that was,
"Sid basically was a... loveable idiot. He looked good and
there was a proper band and then there was a media exercise that
was him. He swallowed that whole rock 'n' roll lifestyle."
It has been widely acknowledged
that Lydon was the creative brains behind the band. In the
recent, much vaunted Julian Temple film Filth and the Fury, he
says as much. However, what is often lost in all the furore -
the shock tactics of f-ing and blinding on prime-time TV, being
chased by River Police down the Thames while playing God Save
The Queen - is that most of the music came from Matlock, as well
as some of the lyrics. Pretty Vacant, for example, is a 100%
Matlock production. This may leave him with a fair degree of
kudos but that's about it. As for fattening his wallet, it's not
had quite the same effect, as he explains, "We decided that
everything would be a four-way split which maybe wasn't a good
business move in the long run, but there you go." Musically
he took his influences from bands like The Beatles, The Stones
and The Small Faces, which at the time, when everything had to
be brash, unique and iconoclastic, was a pretty brave move. Any
band which could fill the Hammersmith Palais, let alone Wembley,
was looked on suspiciously - weren't they just selling out? And
woe betide you if you name-checked the likes of Pink Floyd, or
Emerson, Lake and Palmer. You could be hung by your bondage
trousers for less.
So how does a principled
44-year-old, who stays true to his musical roots and even agrees
to a four-way split in royalties when he could have pushed for
more, how does he marry all this with the 1996 reunion tour?
This saw the Sex Pistols committing the worst sin in the book,
when it comes to the spirit of punk anyway: playing to venues
worldwide as a band of sad, sorry has-beens. "It's what
they call a nice little earner," says Matlock laughing, and
I suppose he does have two kids to support now. "Bands
that've been going ever since the Clash, they get to play all
those good songs for 20 years and we never done that. We had a
brief spell and then those songs never got played. When we
played live in '96, most reports were pretty good, there was a
couple that slagged us off, of course, it was never going to be
exactly the same as the birth of punk. But there was a musical
side to the Pistols as well as all the aggro. In Finsbury Park
that year we had 12,000 people."
Malcolm Maclaren, erstwhile
manager of the band, was probably not one of them, his public
falling-out with Lydon is well documented. What are Matlock's
views on the man who would have been mayor? "I worked with
Malcolm in his shop on the King's Road, that's how I got to know
him. When he tried to become mayor he had to get 10 people from
each borough to nominate him. Thing about Malcolm is that he
knows about 1,000 people in Soho and Bloomsbury, but doesn't
know one person in Enfield or Clapton. I heard him interviewed
on the radio, all about what he'd do on transport issues, the
tube. Malcolm said (Matlock affects a high-pitched nasal
squeal), 'I don't know dear man, I always walk everywhere'. I
mean what's he going to have in common with your average man in
the street. Malcolm's full of shit to be honest, I mean he tries
to paint it that he created us, the songs were nothing to do
with the success, but that was bollocks. You can't hoodwink
people like that."
The only people from the band
that Matlock still has any time for are Steve Jones his fellow
guitarist and Paul Cook the Pistols' drummer. "Yeah, I
spoke to Paul the other day," he says, "Steve lives in
the States, but we still keep in touch." The Matlock
residence is in the well-to-do environs of Little Venice, a far
cry from his humble beginnings back in Kensal Green. London's
quite a happening place to be at the moment, according to him,
"I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, I've been around over
the years. London was a dump in the early Eighties and that, but
now it's quite vibrant." Does he go to gigs, mix it with
the rest of the mosh-pit? "I saw a band that Mick Jones was
producing, Contempo, the other night, they were pretty good...
another band last night, young kids from Bath called Caned and
Unable, a punk kind of metal band. I've got quite Catholic
taste, anything from Scott Walker to Black Sabbath, I quite like
that American band at the moment, The Bloodhound Gang. I try and
keep an ear to what's going on, but there's so much stuff out
these days you can't keep track of it all."
Matlock's latest album Open Mind
is a mix of rock, indie ballads, reminiscent of Ronnie Lane and
Pete Townsend. He finished in the studio in January and is in
the process of promoting it up and down the country with gigs,
TV and radio appearances. Here's hoping it'll do better than his
last, which sank without trace. "Oh that," he says,
"yeah - I did an album for Creation Records in '95 and
they, in their wisdom, decided to put it out the day before I
went on the Pistols reunion, so that wasn't very good
marketing." Originally published in 1990, his autobiography
I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol is being re-issued to tie-in with the
interest garnered from The Filth and The Fury, which looks like
a more promising prospect for him. In the future he'd like to
collaborate with Mick Jones and some of the faces who used to be
The Faces. He says he'd also like to work with some younger
bands, "I want to slot myself in between the old and the
new. I think people have a Year Zero approach to music and I
think that negates a lot of good stuff that's gone before.
That's why Macy Gray is so important - she's married what's
going on in the street with all that wealth of soul stuff like
Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke."
He's not so complimentary of the
dance scene which he sees as escapist: "At least with Punk
lots of things came out of it, it was on the case - Rock Against
Racism stuff like that. The dance thing is so escapist. I'm not
talking about the ecstacy and all that, it's just that to me
they don't really have anything to say, what they're doing
doesn't change anything." That's debatable, when you take
into account the all-embracing nature of dance culture, the DIY
element and its links to road protest and other campaigning.
Still, old punks die hard and all that.
Does he keep any mementoes from
those days, the odd crushed policeman's helmet? "Nah none
of that, we were always too quick getting away from them. I do
have a big box though, that I just sling things in. Mick Jones
was round here the other day and he's like, 'Where's all your
stuff, I've got all my stuff out.'" Matlock has an original
Anarchy shirt which would be worth a small fortune now. What
does he do with it? He uses it to wash the car, but then as he
says, "That's in the true spirit of Punk, innit?"
Glen Matlock is at Borders
Bookshop on Aug 23 at 7pm.
copyright New Insight 2000
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