Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock picks the most important artist since The Beatles
As the original bassist of the Sex Pistols, Glen Matlock was one of the crucial creative forces behind the punk movement. While he left the band before the major sessions for the seminal stand-alone album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, his songwriting and stylistic contributions were ubiquitous.
Though conflicting accounts have been given regarding the reason for Matlock’s expulsion from the Sex Pistols in 1977, the axe lay in the hand of manager Malcolm McLaren. At the time, McLaren sent a letter to the NME claiming that Matlock was “thrown out…because he went on too long about Paul McCartney….The Beatles was too much”. However, Matlock claimed he left the Pistols via “mutual agreement” because he was “sick of all the bullshit”.
During a recent interview with Far Out, Matlock was asked whether conflicting musical tastes were really the main cause of his departure. “I think that’s something that the press went on about, and I think if I didn’t have a variety of musical tastes, the Sex Pistols would never have sounded like what the Sex Pistols sounded like,” he asserted in response. “You can read into that what you like, but everybody in the band had a different set of influences from each other, and I think that’s what made it good. It might sound simple, but there’s a lot of stuff going on there, and I think all the influences that everybody individually had made a very rich stew.”
While The Beatles had an undeniable impact on Matlock, famously, his strongest allegiance was to Small Faces and later Faces, the offshoot fronted by Rod Stewart. Like many musicians of the 1970s and beyond, Matlock has nothing but enthusiasm for classic rock groups – for him, punk was just a way of bringing something new to the table.
Elsewhere in the interview, Matlock was asked who he thinks is the most important artist since The Beatles. “I think Bowie,” he replied pensively. “There’s a lot of people who’ve had one hit record. To have one or two hit records at a particular moment in time is an achievement, but to consistently do it for a long time through different trends and being ahead of the curve. I think Bowie was the guy who was most like that.”
“But [sic] there’s a few others,” he continued. “I mean, even the [Rolling] Stones keep on going all this time! I went to see them in Hyde Park just after my mother died in 2013. Just out of the blue, a friend of mine said, ‘I’ve got a spare ticket to the Stones. You want to come?’ I went, the day after the funeral, and I wasn’t that much in the mood for it. But they did an hour’s set, and it was just hit after hit, after hit, and you knew every song. And they played really well. Ronnie Wood was doing all the Brian Jones guitar parts, and they even had all the original guitars – the ‘Paint It Black’ sitar guitar that Brian Jones used. That was pretty cool!”
“My favourite song of theirs is ‘Midnight Rambler’,” Matlock added conclusively. “That’s great! Maybe the subject matter is a bit dubious in this day and age because it’s about the Boston Strangler, who was a rapist, but as a track, it’s fantastic.”
Listen to The Rolling Stones’ performance of ‘The Midnight Rambler’ at Hyde Park 2013 below.
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