Never Mind the Sex Pistols, Here's Glen Matlock

“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. “But if that’s what people want, you try to give it to them.”

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. 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. 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.

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.

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.

Despite 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. As he says himself, at a particular time in his life he was in “the hippest place to be in the world.”

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. “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.

Frustrated 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 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.

Though containing four very different personalities, Matlock says that the band worked in harmony musically, at least in that early period. 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.

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. “I think I was just right,” he says. “But I suppose I would say that.”

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.

Matlock gives a resigned sigh. “I dunno, it’s funny, you catch people at odd moments. 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). But, he says in his London brogue: “I think you can tell from my accent that [Jones’ statement] is just not true. I’m from a very working-class background.”

“I was milder-mannered than him and I wasn’t a thief like him,” he says, referring to Jones’ well-documented kleptomaniac tendencies at the time. “But the fact is,” he mumbles with the air of a man tired of having to continually defend his position, “they wouldn’t have done what they done, if I hadn’t done what I done.”

The story of why he left the band has never quite been settled, with McLaren’s media-savvy statement at the time that he was sacked because "he liked the Beatles" still delighting journalists looking for an easy answer even today. Matlock’s version is that he left of his own volition after Lydon “became more of a pop star than the people he was playing with.” Sniffing trouble even before this, EMI had already approached him with interest as to what he might do next, he says.

He admits that what he did do next has been “an up-and-down rollercoaster thing, and it’s been very hard.” Some early success with his band Rich Kids revealed a poppier, more melodic side to his musical interests that he would have struggled to express through the Pistols.

“I didn’t want to be a second-division punk band,” he explains, but even McLaren told him that his more tuneful direction was “too much, too soon,” for a country in thrall to punk. The band foundered soon after their first single hit the charts. A one-off gig with Sid Vicious after the Sex Pistols split was undertaken “to show that there was no animosity” between them and became mildly legendary in its own right, not least due to Vicious’ untimely death mere months later.

Since then, Matlock has continued as a working musician, forming bands, touring his own music and sometimes being invited to play with the likes of Iggy Pop and Primal Scream. He reunited with the Pistols for their hugely successful Filthy Lucre tour in 1996 and on subsequent tours in the early noughties. But despite this modest success and his insistence that he doesn’t “cry over spilt milk,” I still get a sense of a man frustrated that the vagaries of fate and fashion haven’t quite gone his way.

Still, Matlock promises a “toe-tappingly tasteful good time” to anyone who turns out for his Fringe show, and expresses a lot of love for an audience who he says are typically “a bit hipper than the kind of believe-everything-you-read, old punk rockers.” A modest aim for a former member of one of the most important ever British bands, perhaps, but Matlock is endearingly prone to modest plans, as his retirement vision reveals.

“One day I’ll have a nice little patch of beach down in St Tropez, with a sun lounger and a parasol,” he grins. “And I’ll have Anarchy in the UK in French playing on repeat, and it will seep insidiously into all the beach combers’ minds.” Some would argue that it doesn’t get a lot more punk than that.