Rummaging around in an old hard drive one lockdown, I found this review (for Details ) of the Sex Pistols’ Finsbury Park reunion gig – a quarter of a century ago. Ah! The summer of ’96! When they were so young! And when gigs – and life – still existed….
In those rancid gift shoppes, where American tourists stock up on their London Bus paperweights and Houses of Parliament ashtrays, there are three types of (fading) postcards available: guardsman in their quaint busby hats outside Buckingham Palace, Beefeaters in their cute red pantaloons and pikes outside the Tower of London, and punks in their zany bondage trousers and pink spikey hair in front of Trafalgar Square. British eccentricity – don’t ya just love it?
What most Americans don’t know, however, is that since 1979 all those punks posing for their cameras have been French – the British punks having moved on to New Romanticism, or the soybean futures market.
Or California – like the world’s second punk band the Sex Pistols did after they split up in 1978, self-detonating in the most glorious and perfect rock parabola ever just two years after their launch and at the height of their fame, and who have now decided to spoil it all. Yes, the passage of time and the rising cost of swimming-pool maintenance has healed their differences and brought them together again for the Filthy Lucre Tour and live album recorded tonight at London’s Finsbury Park.
The band who told us: ‘Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it’ has now decided that what they want is our money.
The world’s first punk band, of course, was the New York Dolls – those seriously scary Yanks in eyeliner and fishnets that Malcolm McLaren managed briefly and later plagiarised at length when he put together the Pistols in 1976. In addition to shameless thievery, there were four main ingredients to British Punk: Carlsberg Special Brew, teeth-gnashingly bad speed, and boredom. Lots and lots of boredom. The kind of boredom that takes hundreds of years of history and only three TV channels to produce.
Oh, and skinny people – the final ingredient of punk. You see, skinny people are nervous. Skinny people don’t have enough tissue between them and the world. Skinny people are disaffected. Skinny people are ANGRY. And Johnny Rotten, Pistols front man, later John Lydon of PIL, was the skinniest, angriest man in the world – a pair of mad staring eyes and spraying, sneering, snarling lips atop a Dickensian bundle of rags and bones.
But not anymore. ‘It’s only uncle Johnny and the boys here,’ he shouts, half challengingly, half apologetically, when they emerge on stage from behind a tattered curtain of ‘Pistols Outrage’ newspaper clippings (yes, they really were shocking once). ‘We’re fat, forty and back!.’ As ever, Johnny tells it how it is.
His face and chin has filled out in a way his lime green cartoon explosion hair can’t sharpen. Beneath his black and white check jacket lurks a definite paunch. Guitarist Steve Jones, wearing sorely tested spangly pants, doesn’t waste any time getting his shirt off to reveal a heavy, tanned body that perhaps shows some evidence of Beverly Hills Athletic Club membership, but his intensely highlighted hair and tiger-print stretchy pants makes him look a bit off-season female bodybuilder. (In fairness, Glen Matlock for his part looks even slimmer than he did 20 years ago.)
But when the fat, stinging chords of their first number ‘Bodies’ (‘I’m not an animal!’) hit, an epiphany happens. The crowd is instantly transformed from a bunch of well-behaved, plump thirty-ish people with mobile phones standing around minding their own business into pogo-ing accountants and civil servants, full of bad attitude. It’s intoxicating. We feel rowdy, we feel dangerous, we feel important. We feel like someone we used to know.
And the sound – the real Pistols were never this good. They were too drunk, stoned or fucked. The rolling attack of this guitar noise is enough to spike your hair without gel – but it’s professional. Nowadays, they really do mean it, man. This is Punk-lite. But when they strike up ‘Anarchy in the UK’ the crowd goes completely doolally and, having been born too late the first time around, I finally realise a lifelong ambition – to slam-dance to the Pistols with Johnny mewling and spewling the best lines in rock ever: ‘I wanna beee an-arr-keee!… Well, the best lines after, ‘There’s no few-cher, no few-cher/No few-cher for you!’ (‘God Save the Queen’). Which, in turn, are the best lines after, ‘We’re so pre-tay/Oh-so pre-tay/Vay-cuhnt… And we don’t caaarrre!’ (‘Pretty Vacant’).
Yes, it’s definitely fun pretending you’re angry, skinny and happy again. It’s especially fun when you’re British but now you’ve an excuse to actually touch other people. But twenty years on you’ve got to conclude that you’re not so pretty or vacant anymore and that there are, actually, far too many things you care about.
Like the fact that someone just pogoed on your lovely new trainers.
(Details magazine, June 1996)