David Bowie never got to witness the Sex Pistols live: “I liked the guys a lot”
Every David Bowie song seemed to exist outside of any type of genre movement whenever he came out with something new.
There were some fantastic love letters to classic genres across his catalogue, but you never knew when picking up one of his records whether you were going to get some of the most glamorous hard rock the world had ever seen or the kind of experimental music that belonged in the most avant-garde sections of the record store. That’s what made his music so alluring back in the day, but it’s not like ‘The Starman’ didn’t have a good ear for what was happening around him as well.
Then again, Bowie seemed to take pride in being one step ahead of the rest of the world every time he walked into the studio. Half of his records were among the most adventurous music anyone had ever heard around that time, and even if Low was a bit strange when it first came out, the fact that it influenced post-rock decades after the fact was only further proof that he was sent here from the future to give us the greatest music ever made.
But you have to remember how risque ‘The Starman’ was even in his prime. Plenty of people loved watching him perform ‘Starman’ on Top of the Pops back in the day, but there were always going to be parents who took one look at his androgynous outfits and suggestive motions live and were convinced that their children shouldn’t be listening to that kind of music. If this was risque for the time, though, they had no idea what they were in for when the late 1970s kicked in.
Bowie had already been a god for the better part of five years when the punk regime started making waves in England. It may have got its start with Ramones across the Atlantic, but everyone from The Damned to The Clash to Sex Pistols were turning the genre into a style of music rather than a fashion for street urchins. This was music with a message, and Bowie was already willing to listen to.
After all, the heroes he idolised were also operating outside of the usual rules of stardom, and if Syd Barrett was pushing the boundaries for rock and roll, John Lydon seemed to be doing the exact same thing. But since Bowie was nursing a massive addiction to cocaine and making records in Berlin to clean himself out, he remembered never getting the chance to see the Sex Pistols when he had the chance.
The band burned out far too quickly for his taste, and he remembered wanting to do everything he could to see that band again, saying, “When I got back to England, pretty much all of that had died down. I was in Germany. I liked the guys a lot, I met them a few times. I never saw them onstage. I can imagine the kind of energy it must have been like. I would have loved to have seen them.”
That said, Sex Pistols were the kind of band that you hope to catch on a good night. They weren’t terrible by any means, but while Steve Jones and Lydon were partners in crime that could kick the snot out of any audience, their shows with Sid Vicious were always going to be somewhere between brilliantly chaotic and an absolute trainwreck depending on their state of mind.
But even if Bowie never got to see them live, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how he might have had an effect on those kids with safety pins through their noses. This was only the next phase of rock and roll breaking itself down all over again, and the rest of the world was in for a clobbering the minute that songs like ‘Anarchy in the UK’ and ‘London Calling’ reached the airwaves.
