The Sex Pistols’ final band meeting: “Totally pissed off”
Some bands needed to happen. Sure, there are a lot of groups that you like, and personally, it would be a shame if they didn’t exist; however, it might not make a huge difference to music as a whole if they had never existed. Then there are others where your opinion of them doesn’t matter all that much; the fact remains that for music to develop in the way that it did, they simply had to happen. The Sex Pistols were one of these bands.
To truly understand the band’s impact, you need to understand the situation in England in the 1970s. The wealth divide between the rich and the poor was bigger than ever, and politicians completely disregarded the public. Not to mention, music, the art form that people turned to often as a form of escapism, was becoming inaccessible as prominent artists at the time, such as David Bowie and the Rolling Stones, were playing to massive crowds at gigs that became impossible to get tickets for.
Something needed to change, and given that so many issues lay in the mainstream, whoever instigated that change would have to pioneer a counterculture. In other words, they had to be rebels. It was rebels, or as they would soon be known, “Punks,” who came forward in the Sex Pistols. They were a band that wasn’t afraid to speak out against authority, act outlandishly, and play gigs that were accessible to the public at large.
The band became renowned not only for its music but also for its attitude. It spoke on behalf of others as it voiced its frustration in the songs it wrote, in TV interviews, and at gigs. Of course, when you have so many big personalities working together in one band, there is always going to be the risk that minds will clash. That’s exactly what happened in Sex Pistols, as the band split up after only a few years of making music together.
The hot-headed nature of the band is best reflected in their final band meeting, which lasted seconds and saw the end of one of the biggest bands to come from the UK in a long time. They were all progressively getting tired of touring; band members were clashing with Sid Vicious, whose addiction to drugs was making him difficult to be around, John Lydon was constantly clashing with the manager Malcolm McLaren, and the Lydon’s outspoken nature was rubbing other members of the band the wrong way. Everything was bubbling up until the band couldn’t take it anymore.
“In retrospect, breaking up was a hasty decision,” admits Paul Cook, “Our final band meeting was really awful. John finally made his way over to the hotel. Malcolm was totally pissed off at him, and Steve and I were totally pissed off, too. When John turned up at the Miyako, Steve and I had been up in Malcolm’s room telling him how pissed off we were.”
The official meeting lasted minutes. “Malcolm, Steve and I went downstairs to the hotel lobby, and John was there,” recalled Cook, “Steve said to John ‘It’s getting too much. We can’t see it going on much longer. It’s falling apart.’ I said I agreed.”
Lydon wasn’t as quick to let the band go, but even he could see that things were crumbling, and he left with one final warning about their manager, Malcolm. “To give John his due, he tried to hold it together. He told us we were stupid and we should get rid of Malcolm and carry on. Steve and I told him we didn’t think that was the answer.” With that, the Sex Pistols were over just as quickly as they’d started.
