Glen Matlock on Iggy Pop, John Lydon, and why there won't be a Sex Pistols reunion
Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols. Picture: Tina Korhonen
Original Sex Pistols bassist and songwriter Glen Matlock cuts a down-to-earth and easy-going character. His exit from the band is now widely regarded as one significant reason the Pistols imploded shortly after the release of their debut album; Never Mind The Bollocks.
That record in 1977 helped thrust punk into the mainstream and is still heralded as a classic. Matlock, however, is on his way to Ireland to celebrate another seminal album from the same year, Iggy Pop’s Lust For Life.
The Dublin Bowie Festival is presenting a live performance of the album in full at Whelan’s next month, featuring musicians who have worked with both Iggy and Bowie. Lust for Life’s original bass player Tony Fox Sales had to drop out of the project, leaving Matlock to step into the breach.
“Tony couldn’t make it in the end, they asked me to bail them out,” explains Matlock, who had a stint playing with Iggy Pop in 1980. The timing isn’t great for the 66-year-old but he’s enjoyed working with the distinguished roster of musicians assembled for the project.
“I know Clem [Burke] from touring with Blondie, Katie [Puckrik] and Florence [Sabeva] from Heaven 17. It’s a bit awkward as I have a new album coming out but it’ll be fine I’m sure.”
Lust for Life was recorded at Hansa Studio in West Berlin with David Bowie. Despite containing such classics as ‘The Passenger’ and the title track, the album only had moderate chart success on release.
The record simmered away as a music fan favourite, and was given a shot in the arm nearly 20 years later when ‘Lust For Life’ featured in Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting film, highlighting the album’s kudos among Edinburgh’s young working class of the late 1970s and early ‘80s. The city’s Hibernian FC still play the track before kick-off with an accompanying video on the big screen.
“There’s a lot to be said for sticking to your guns,” says Matlock in reflection of the album’s sustained appeal.
Of course, Matlock would also cross paths with Boyle around the Disney+ drama series Pistol, which the director adapted from Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones’ memoir. Much has been made of John ‘Rotten’ Lydon’s displeasure with the show, but Matlock was also unhappy with what he saw.
“It portrayed me as being thrown out of the band when I was the one who left,” says the irate 66-year-old. “It’s taken 45 years to tell my side of it and Boyle has set things right back to square one with a version of the story that just isn’t true. I saw him on the red carpet in L.A, he came over all smiles and said: ‘Hello Glen’. I said: ‘Danny; you're a c**t!’”
Pistol leans towards Johnny Rotten’s unflattering opinion of Matlock, one which he refutes. Lydon is also estranged from the rest of the group, and a surely-lucrative Sex Pistols reunion seems unlikely.
“I don’t want to stand on stage with a Trump and Nigel Farage supporting nitwit,” says Matlock. “Can I make a prediction? I know that John did the Irish Eurovision and didn’t get through. John was pro-Brexit and pro-Farage to pander to his, inverted commas, ‘working-class roots’. He’s no more working-class than me.”
Matlock hasn’t lost the ability to splice his own political convictions to a catchy tune. Down the line from his London home, he explains why his current single ‘Head On A Stick’ and forthcoming album Consequences Coming were inspired by the UK’s current political chaos and cost of living crisis. “Why does a multi-millionaire like Sunak want to be prime minister? I’m not Che Guevara or Tariq Ali but we’ve all been led into a cul-de-sac by politicians only interested in their own selfish, vested interests much to the detriment of the rest of the population. They’ve mugged-off the Alf Garnet types with Brexit and they should bear the consequences of it.” Matlock is unhappy with the restrictions on international travel that Brexit has brought for British people.
“If things weren’t going well, you’d go somewhere else. We’ve lost that now and it didn’t have to be that way. People are railing against the government now and there will be consequences for that lot, they are becoming unstuck. I’d like to see their heads on a stick, metaphorically. Boris Johnson is no longer flavour of the month and I’m thankful for that, I can see a light about a mile down the road in a house at the end of the tunnel.”
Matlock remains in contact with Sex Pistols guitarist and founder Steve Jones, as well as drummer Paul Cook. “I caught up with Steve in LA and we were on the phone the other night both watching the Man City game on the telly and discussing meat pies. I played with Paul and Billy Duffy in The Professionals just before Christmas. When you play an instrument, you tend to flock together more.”
Matlock also joined Cook at the recent memorial service for Vivienne Westwood, who died in December, aged 81. As the mother of the punk movement, Matlock suggests the generation who frequented or worked in her shop SEX with Malcolm McLaren “went on to do something”.
Matlock took a Saturday job there when the boutique was still known as Let It Rock. “I remember when we were all living hand-to-mouth and she said: ‘when you have chicken and chips, will you save the bones?’ She boiled them up and sewed them into the t-shirt (spelling out ROCK).
“It’s sad, because it’s not just the Pistols thing but the whole future of many people that came into the shop. Vivienne was a very clever, erudite and gifted woman. I hadn’t fallen out with her but our paths hadn’t crossed in a while. I was at Malcolm’s McLaren’s funeral [in 2010)] and was outside having a cigarette when the funeral car turned up and Vivienne was there, she said: ‘Glen’s here; how nice’.
“I was in Shanghai a few years ago, I went for a coffee to get through the long distance when I found a Vivienne Westwood flagship store. I remembered those chicken bones thinking: ‘She done well for herself’”.
- Glen Matlock, Clem Burke and others will perform Lust for Life at Whelans, Dublin, on March 8. The album, Consequences Coming, is released on April 28
