Far Out Meets: Glen Matlock talks Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop and new music
“Oh, here we go,” Glen Matlock uttered half sardonically as I ventured a the subject of his Sex Pistols exit during our recent conversation. Despite Matlock’s characteristically playful humour and endless courtesy, the subject of the Sex Pistols did confirm itself well-trampled at that juncture. Had the bassist before Sid Vicious shirked the limelight over the past 45 years, the topic of his formative band would be ubiquitous in his interviews. However, Matlock is much more than a punk rock pioneer, and his prolific, varied career attests to this.
As Matlock’s cheeky grin popped onto my screen for our video call, he hastily apologised for fractional tardiness. He had been busy with another call, and I assured him that I had been blissfully unaware of the passing time, thanks to my new harmonica. What I held in my hand was a mere blues harp, and was put to shame when Matlock proceeded to locate the real deal, his giant tremolo harmonica with all the bells and whistles. I recall flashing back to the “that’s not a knife” scene from Crocodile Dundee at that moment.
Matlock gave me a pleasant harmonica solo before we put our instruments away and got down to the first item on the agenda. Having heard ‘Head on a Stick’, the recent politically-driven lead single from Matlock’s forthcoming solo album, I was interested to know whether the LP’s title, Consequences Coming, related to a running concept in the collection of songs.
“Not all the songs on the album, but a recurrent theme on the album is just the harsh state of affairs that we’re in, that I see in England,” Matlock started. “I hate the daft lurch to the right of the Western World and also think Brexit is the most stupid thing we’ve ever done. In this country, it really curtails people like me, touring musicians, and our capabilities for getting abroad. And I think it’s enabled the Tories to act the way they are at the moment.”
“So, ‘Head on a Stick’, I think they should be held to account,” he added. “And Consequences Coming: I think I’m beginning to see that as a bit of a chink in things, and people are beginning to see through them. So hopefully, the consequences will be coming a little bit down the line.”
Consequences Coming is set to arrive on April 27th, and from the sound of its first preview, it promises to translate Matlock’s eclectic career and a level of musical maturity perhaps absent from Never Mind The Bollocks.
“There’s lots of things that influenced [the album]. If somebody else does something that sounds a bit like somebody else, it’s probably a nick, but when I do it, it’s a homage,” Matlock offered playfully. “But I think you take ideas from here, there and everywhere, and you hopefully dress it up enough to make it your own so people can’t stop the nick or homage. But they’re not all nicks or homages; some of them have my own thing. I’ve managed to assemble quite a stellar cast of people who have helped me out and played on it for next to nothing, which I very much appreciate.”
Naturally, I was interested to find out some of the names among this stellar and ostensibly charitable cast of musicians. “On the new album, I got a coterie of a main band which features [drummer] Chris Musto, who’s played with loads of people, like Johnny Thunders, Kim Wilde and Nico,” Matlock began listing. “He’s my mate, and he’s played on lots of things with me. I’ve got Norman Watt Roy on the bass, who played on most of the album, but not all of it. I’ve got Earl Slick from Bowie and John Lennon’s bands playing on it and James Hallawell, who’s currently the Waterboys’ keyboard player. So, it’s quite an assortment of reprobates and rascals who rock. The three ‘R’s, you know: rock ‘n’ roll, reprobates and rascals.”
As our conversation flowed, we inched toward the topic of the Sex Pistols like a raft toward a waterfall. Despite my apprehension, I couldn’t interview Matlock without broaching the well-trampled topic. Above all, I wanted to find out whether Matlock’s melodic sensibilities and conflicting music tastes were really the cause for his alienation from the band in 1977.
“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. 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.”
At the end of December last year, the eminent fashion designer Vivienne Westwood sadly passed away, aged 81. Westwood rose to prominence in the 1970s alongside her second husband, Malcolm McLaren, who managed the Sex Pistols during their short spell together. In close association with the Sex Pistols, McLaren and Westwood became world famous as they brought fashion and uniformity to the punk and new-wave movements.
“I hadn’t fallen out with Vivienne, but our paths in life went different ways,” Matlock said as the conversation touched upon the late fashionista. “I was never particularly that close to her, but we were friends when we started out working for her. The way I found out she had passed away was a phone call from Radio 4 at half past seven in the morning, ‘Vivianne Westwood’s just died. Will you talk about her?’ I was like, ‘Aghh, what!?’ I didn’t know she’d been ill. It transpired she hadn’t been well, sadly.”
“She was a very single-minded, opinionated, driven, talented woman who climbed the greasy pole of the fashion world on her own terms, which I think is no small achievement,” he added.
As Andy Warhol raised The Velvet Underground’s status a decade prior, Westwood and McLaren played an undeniably central role in promoting the Sex Pistols brand. However, I wanted to understand just how crucial a role the couple really played. “Well, there’s a whole story that Malcolm McLaren formed us, and Vivienne Westwood dressed us. That’s not true,” he asserted. “They provided the meeting place, and there was a bit of a collective consciousness of ideas floating around from people like Malcolm, who was ten years older, and us, and Vivienne, who was a little older still. And there were some pretty wacky people that they knew who were all of that age group, and ideas were floating around”.
He added: “We were young kids who wanted to do something, not quite knowing what we wanted to do – knew what we didn’t want to do, but didn’t know what we did want to do, but we were gonna do it anyway. So, it came out like that, through being in the right place at the right time with all these happening people around us. But I will say that, out of all the British punk rockers, we were first by a long way. Just because we stuck our necks out, you know?”
Beyond his formative role as the Sex Pistols’ bassist, Matlock has performed and written alongside some of the biggest stars on the cutting edge of rock ‘n’ roll, including Blondie, Ronnie Wood, The Damned, Primal Scream, Mick Jones and Midge Ure. One of Matlock’s dreams came true in the late 1970s when he was invited to work with Iggy Pop, initially on tour in Europe and then in the studio for the former Stooge’s 1980 solo album, Soldier. “He was a bit like Vivienne, really,” Matlock replied after I asked what Iggy was like to work with. “He was driven, single-minded, opinionated. I started working with him on a European tour because he was stuck for a bassist because the guy who played on the New Values album – the one before Soldier – was going to play second guitar on the tour”.
Matlock continued: “So they were short of a man, and I got suggested. His manager called me up, and the next thing I know, I’m on tour around Europe with him. The thing is, I had done the Pistols at that stage, and I had had my band, the Rich Kids, and that was all a bit on a wing and a prayer, and you’d have some mates helping you out; it wasn’t that organised, and some things wouldn’t work out. But Iggy had been touring for years. So, although he might be this wild and crazy guy, he had this whole operation, and it was really professional. So much so that when we were rehearsing, he noticed that there was always somebody that slumped off to go get a drink. So he sent the roadie out to get a dustbin, fill it up with ice, and put in a bottle of Jack Daniels, a bottle of vodka, beer and wine, purely to keep people in the same room at the same time and it worked!”
I finally asked if Matlock had had a chance to listen to Iggy’s brilliant new album, Every Loser, yet. He said he hadn’t, but it’s on his “list to check out. I’ve been busy getting all of this together [Consequences Coming], and if you’re a songwriter, if you listen to too much other stuff, there’s always a danger that what you write sounds like what you just listened to”.
So beyond the odd homage or “nick”, we can trust that Matlock’s forthcoming LP won’t be too derivative, and if the lead single is anything to go by, it’ll be a delightful listen. At present, Matlock is busy with his touring commitments to Blondie, but he told me, “hopefully, I’ll be out and about with my own band off the back of a well-received record later in the year.”
Hopefully, more preview singles will arrive between now and the Consequences Coming launch in April. Until then, feast your ears on Glen Matlock’s latest single, ‘Head on a Stick’.
