Hear Me Out: Bill Grundy deserved better than the Sex Pistols
“They are punk rockers, the new craze, they tell me. Their heroes? Not the nice, clean Rolling Stones. You see, they are as drunk as I am. They are clean by comparison. They’re a group called the Sex Pistols, and I am surrounded by all of them.” When talk show host Bill Grundy opened an episode of the Today program with those words on December 1st, 1976, he had already been working in TV news for 20 years, maintaining a fairly good reputation among his cohorts in the industry.
Michael Parkinson mentioned him in his autobiography, describing Grundy as “a difficult man to keep sober, but not to produce. He was one of the best frontmen I ever worked with… At his best, he was a superb forensic interviewer.”
How did it wind up, then, that Grundy would become almost solely remembered and generally derided across several generations for one single bad interview? Was it even quite as awful as the usual narrative would suggest?
If you don’t know this piece of vital punk rock folklore, Grundy was the unfortunate man who, upon finding out that his original guests, the band Queen, had to cancel their appearance on the evening in question, agreed to chat with a very different band, booked at the last minute. This was, of course, the Sex Pistols, still almost a year shy of releasing their lone album, Nevermind the Bollocks, but in the midst of their rise into the public’s awareness.
Grundy, a 53-year-old Mancunian who’d spent his early life working as a geologist, was not the sort of daring raconteur best suited to this predicament, especially on a show airing well before the 9pm watershed for riskier content. And so, quite infamously, the Pistols and their entourage, some dressed in Nazi paraphernalia, demolished the man from the word go, endlessly slagging him off and cursing with increasing volume and vulgarity.
The whole exchange, which feels like 30 minutes of cringe, is actually over and done in just over three. The fallout would carry on for years, however, as footage from the dumpster-fire chat show would reappear in dozens of punk and rock documentaries, representing the fiery rebelliousness and danger of the Pistols up against the clueless old geezer in Grundy, a man clearly unaware that he was talking to the new voices of a generation.
The more times you actually sit and watch the Today clip, though, especially as you get older, the more the heroes and the villains of the piece become a bit harder to distinguish. Grundy is, without a doubt, in over his head. His weird semi-flirtation with young entourage member Siouxsie Sioux is also the worst moment of the whole thing, rightfully responded to by Steve Jones with a series of spot-on insults: “You dirty sod! You dirty old man!”
On the whole, though, it’s not so easy to say that the Pistols won every point in this match. And considering that Grundy’s professional career spiralled downward into oblivion from this point forward, maybe we owe him at least a brief reevaluation.
For example, Grundy’s first direct question to the band, before everything goes haywire, is actually a pretty fair one: “I am told that the group,” he says, “Have received £40,000 from a record company. Doesn’t that seem to be slightly opposed to their anti-materialistic view of life?”
Sure, it’s a bad-intentioned, condescending gotcha question, but with Britain only just beginning to make sense of the punk ethos, it’s a question worthy of a thoughtful response.
Instead, of course, Jones and Glen Matlock famously chose a different tact. “We’ve fuckin’ spent it, ain’t we,” Jones says, an opening curse-word salvo that Grundy misses entirely. “Yeah, it’s all gone,” adds Matlock. “Down the boozer,” says Jones.
“Good lord,” replies Grundy. “Are you serious, or are you just trying to make me laugh?”
This is the point where things really de-rail, as Grundy, out of annoyance, decides to make a bigger point. Are the Pistols “serious” in anything they’re doing? He basically suggests they’re a joke and don’t appreciate or understand real music (Bach or Mozart, for example), to which Johnny Rotten responds by saying the word “shit” several times exactly as a precocious nine-year-old would say it to his headmaster. It might have seemed quite punk rock in 1976, but it’s sort of embarrassing now, considering John Lydon’s actual intellectual capacity and lazy disinterest in using it.
As the show goes up in flames, Grundy does something you wouldn’t necessarily expect from a buttoned-up geezer shamed into permanent punchline status. He holds his ground a bit against the cool kids, and rather than chiding them for their language, he invites them to do better at it. “Well, keep going, chief, keep going,” he says to Jones. “Go on, you’ve got another five seconds. Say something outrageous.”
When Jones obliges with an F-bomb, Grundy replies, “What a clever boy.”
Isn’t that equally, dare I say, a punk rock way of dealing with that situation, recognising it for the shallow, sneering, pointless theatrics that it was?
Is the world ready for a requiem for Bill Grundy, who sadly shuffled off this mortal coil 30 years ago? Maybe not. But if we can agree that dressing up as a Nazi in 1976 was never actually cool or clever, maybe a frazzled old geezer from the same time period deserves a reassessment, too.
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