Why was Glen Matlock fired from the Sex Pistols?
Malcolm McLaren was a smart man. He wasn’t the first band manager to understand the importance of mythmaking when promoting his wares to the world; that would be Andrew Loog Oldham asking the world, “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?”. However, ever the post-modernist, he was among the first to freely admit it was mythmaking. Frolicking in the grey area between fact and fiction with such barefaced cheek that the film made about his charges, the Sex Pistols was eventually named The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle.
A major part of the great provocateurs of punk’s legend concerns their original bassist, Glen Matlock. The Paddington native is a core part of the Pistols’ creation myth, being the first staff member of McLaren and his partner Vivienne Westwood’s boutique Sex to be drafted into Steve Jones’ band The Strand in 1975. However, the story that unfairly followed him around, like the lavatory paper on his boot heel, is that of how he left the band in 1977.
This was after the Bill Grundy incident, where Steve Jones had (quite accurately) labelled the drunkard talk show host a “fucking rotter” for propositioning a 19-year-old Siouxsie Sioux on live television. The Pistols were now not just the most famous people in the country but also the most hated. Questions had to be asked of how to keep up the band’s image as nightmarish, punk rock antichrists chipping at the nation’s very soul and corrupting its fair youth.
Which leads to the legend of how Matlock left. The story goes that he got the boot because, as McLaren put it to the press, he “went on too long about Paul McCartney.” To this day, you find some young radical with a stencilled T-shirt and an alarming haircut and ask them why Glen Matlock was kicked out of the Pistols; they’ll… well, they’ll probably go, “Who the fuck are the Sex Pistols?!” and laugh at you. However, a few of them will still say that Matlock was kicked because he liked The Beatles.
What conflicts did Glen Matlock have with Malcolm McLaren?
The truth is, that story is McLaren doing what he does best. Successfully combating a narrative that was turning against him. While it’s true that Matlock wasn’t quite the hellion the band needed him to be, it’s also true that none of them were apart from the vacuous waste of oxygen that was Sid Vicious. The man born Simon Ritchie was brought into the band to replace Matlock after being one of the band’s hangers-on for years.
He was everything that Matlock wasn’t. Pretty, devoted to John Lydon, and so fascinatingly stupid it’s a miracle he kept remembering to breathe. This was not an accident because the truth was that Matlock and Vicious were pawns being played by McLaren and Lydon for control of the band. As Jon Savage depicted in his seminal 1991 work England’s Dreaming, both men saw the Pistols as their project that should follow their creative lead.
The problem was that Lydon was alone, facing off against McLaren, who had Jones and Matlock in his corner since he brought them into the band. Matlock and Lydon were also at each other’s throats. As Matlock put it in his memoir I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol, he couldn’t put up with Lydon’s attitude “once he’d seen his name in the papers.” By getting rid of Matlock and replacing him with an attack dog like Vicious, who’d already assaulted rock writer Nick Kent with a bike chain at Lydon’s order, Lydon could have more of a say in the creative direction of the band.
The problem was that both of them were trying to control a project by fuelling the chaos within, which isn’t really how anything works. The band survived a single year without Matlock, crashing and burning before finally flaming out in 1978 among drug-fuelled acrimony. I’m sure both Lydon and McLaren would say they saw this coming. When it comes to punk, there’s more money in a beautiful corpse than anything else.
However, considering how much of the Pistols’ legacy seems to consist of some smug dickhead fucking everything up and then going, “I meant to do that. Ever heard of Situationism?” we’ll never really know for sure.
