The song that split John Lydon and Glen Matlock: “Much more hardcore”
National scandals, ripped up record contracts, and a litany of intra-band fall-outs, the Sex Pistols certainly packed a lot into their relatively short time together, perfectly capturing the kind of anarchistic punk revolution that they helped to spread far and wide across the nation.
Although the Pistols set out to destroy the musical establishment and rebuild from its smouldering ashes, the actual origins of the band weren’t all that different from the manufactured chart bands they were rallying against. Ultimately, the group was the brainchild of Malcolm McLaren who, in an act of proto-Simon-Cowell savviness, formed a band from various patrons and part-time workers at the boutique he ran with Vivienne Westwood.
On one hand, throwing those four young lads together was a masterstroke which united personalities and musical influences which would have otherwise never interacted with one another. On the flipside of that coin, though, putting together four angry, young, hedonistic teenagers and expecting them to gel together immediately is like putting four wolverines in a confined space and expecting them to get on like old friends.
Right from the very beginning of the Sex Pistols, then, the band members were at each other’s throats on a more or less constant basis. Admittedly, that undying sense of unease and the ever-lasting potential for violence did bolster the band’s anarchic output, but it is hardly a sustainable way to run a band. It didn’t take overly long, then, for the cracks to appear.
Predominantly, the disputes within the band centred around John Lydon and Glen Matlock, who never seemed to be able to get along with each other, despite co-writing much of the Pistols’ material. Eventually, the bassist left the band entirely, just before the recording of Nevermind The Bollocks in 1977, to be replaced by the musically inferior but aesthetically superior Sid Vicious.
At the time, McLaren claimed Matlock had been sacked due to his admiration of The Beatles, but the reality was that the bassist merely got tired of the headaches, arguments, and, crucially, John Lydon. Years later, in a 2001 interview with Year Zero, Lydon claimed that the split was the result of that old chestnut, musical differences.
“I didn’t kick Glen out, we reached an impasse,” the frontman recalled. “I wanted it to go much more hardcore he wanted us to soften up and was moaning a lot to Malcolm about the trite lyrics.” Seemingly, the specific song that caused this insurmountable conflict was the band’s debut single, ‘Anarchy In The UK’.
“To this day he says anarchy is a bad rhyme,” Lydon shared.
“I don’t think the rhyme of the thing is really what the world was paying attention to,” he continued, and it is difficult to disagree with him. The Sex Pistols were never famed for their particularly good lyrics or musical composition; their mere appearance and attitude was revolutionary in and of itself. What’s more, the fact that they could barely string a sentence together, let alone play their instruments or write skilful songs, formed the essence of punk’s DIY spirit.
Ultimately, there is no doubting that the Sex Pistols downgraded when they swapped Matlock for Vicious, at least in a musical sense. Still, his departure didn’t stop the band from preaching the gospel of punk revolution for another year or so, before they imploded once more.
