How did the Sex Pistols get their name?
During an interview with the CBS chat show 60 Minutes, Dave Grohl said of Foo Fighters: “Had I imagined that it would last more than a month-and-a-half, I might have named it something else. It’s the dumbest band name ever”. While that sentiment runs true for countless band names in the history of music, for the Sex Pistols, those wreckless punks opted for the perfect band name that encapsulates their image within two words.
There’s a strong argument to be made that the world has run out of strong band names, and new groups are left to pick from the dregs. While this would legitimise a series of strange handles spawned in recent years, lousy band names have been around forever. Ultimately, band names don’t count for anything unless a group has the songs required to push them forward, and fortunately for the Sex Pistols, they had both.
If a band is bold enough to audaciously anoint themselves the Sex Pistols, the group needed to ooze attitude and shake up the music industry, which is exactly what they did. If Johnny Rotten and his cronies weren’t raucous hell-raisers, it would have seemed absurd to be the Sex Pistols. Instead, it told the watching world exactly what the band stood for before they’d even played a note of music.
Malcolm McClaren, the controversial mastermind behind the group, co-owned SEX, a clothing shop on King’s Road in London, alongside the late fashion designer Vivienne Westwood. Considering McClaren micromanaged their aesthetic, it seemed feasible that he also christened them the Sex Pistols, and his shop certainly had a role to play.
Glen Matlock once explained to NME of the band’s relationship with McClaren: “Initially, we all had a very symbiotic relationship, and I don’t think anybody would have ever heard of the Sex Pistols if it wasn’t for Malcolm, but equally, I don’t think anybody would have heard of Malcolm if it wasn’t for us. He had the ideas; we had the content. And I don’t think he really understood what he had on his hands. He convinced himself that we weren’t much good and were just a louder version of the Bay City Rollers, which was how he was trying to pitch us.”
Before McClaren assembled the line-up for the Sex Pistols, Matlock worked in his shop on the King’s Road, where he met Steve Jones and Paul Cook. SEX became a community hub for local creatives, and everybody was on the radar of McClaren. During an interview with Please Kill Me, Matlock explained: “Originally, it was a teddy boy shop. It was mainly kind of older guys who were hanging on to the ’50s, but this was the ’70s. Then Malcolm got a bit sick of it, and it became a shop called Sex. We started selling rubber ware, and then we were called Sedition. I was there through that whole period. I helped make the sign. It was a big, pink sign. Like a Rauschenberg, kind of sculpture kind of thing. That’s why we were called the Sex Pistols, we were the Pistols from the Sex shop.”
While Matlock didn’t confirm who actually created the band name, they’d have likely needed McClaren’s blessing to call themselves the Sex Pistols. Furthermore, if it weren’t for McClaren’s decision to rebrand his shop as SEX, then the Sex Pistols would never have been a suggested moniker.
