The eternal feud at the heart of the Sex Pistols: “Exhausting”
If you’re looking to make friends, steer well clear of the music industry.
Since its very inception, the industry has been plagued by vicious feuds, rivalries, and arguments between different groups, different labels, genres, and, in many cases, between individual members of the same band. In fact, there was scarcely a moment when the Sex Pistols, for instance, weren’t at each other’s throats.
Typically, when bands first get together, they are born from a coming together of pre-existing friends, musical comrades, or, in some cases, family members, but that was merely one in a multitude of ways in which the Sex Pistols were different from the norm. With band manager and shopkeeper Malcolm McLaren acting as a kind of proto-Simon Cowell, the final formation of the Pistols was manufactured from various patrons of the ‘Sex Boutique’ clothes shop, which he ran alongside Vivienne Westwood.
Steve Jones and Paul Cook had already been playing in a band together since around 1972, but bassist Glen Matlock joined the ranks after working the odd shift at McLaren’s retail outfit, and a 19-year-old John Lydon formed the final piece of the punk puzzle, being granted an audition for the band on the strength of his T-shirt, which read ‘I Hate Pink Floyd’.
This was the line-up that first launched the Sex Pistols and, by extension, the entirety of the UK punk scene back in the mid-1970s, but at virtually no point did the band members foster a particularly harmonious relationship between themselves. They were, at the end of the day, a group of angry, snotty-nosed, and typically drug-fueled teenagers given explicit orders for a cultural revolution; they were never going to sit around having tea parties or doing team-building exercises.
“Problems were all the way through us as a band,” the ever-objective voice of John Lydon once declared. “I don’t know if we ever bothered to sit down and work out why we were a group. We not only appeared to the public as not liking each other, I think we genuinely didn’t.”
It didn’t take long for those cracks to form in the band, either, with Glen Matlock leaving the group in debated circumstances in early 1977, to be replaced by Lydon’s close – albeit devoid of any musical quality – confidante, Sid Vicious.
Even that recruitment didn’t ease the tensions in the group, though, and even before Nevermind The Bollocks hit the airwaves, Lydon was already looking for a way out. “It was the longest year and a half I’ve ever lived,” he told Rolling Stone in 2017. “I think all of us feel that way. When we talk, it all feels like a solid decade was crunched into such a tiny space of time. It was mentally draining and exhausting.”
The mental toil of being in the Sex Pistols was so great, in fact, that when Lydon finally did leave, he escaped to the Caribbean paradise of Jamaica, immediately formulating ideas for his next project, Public Image Ltd.
Still, the difficulties within the band can’t have been that bad, as the frontman did return for a reunion in 1996 and, in more recent times, has complained profusely about the current Pistols reunion, which he has not been included in. Seemingly, when it came to the band’s mantra of ‘Destroy’, the call was always coming from inside the house.
