SEX PISTOLS (Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock) featuring Frank Carter
SEX PISTOLS
On the afternoon of his first appearance onstage with the Sex Pistols, last summer at Bush Hall, Frank Carter’s peaceful afternoon stroll on the streets of Shepherd’s Bush was interrupted by a stranger sat outside a pub. “Big shoes,” the man shouted; nothing more, nothing less.
“That’s all he said,” Carter reports. “And I just replied ‘thanks for noticing’, and off I walked. But I thought, ‘Fucking hell, we’ve not even played one note yet’. At that point I felt like I was melting. I realised I had to get my shit together here.”
As if the matter was ever in doubt, hours later, he did just that. The stranger’s assertion that anyone stepping up to the microphone with the band who terrorised a nation faces one of the tallest orders in rock and roll – make no mistake, filling big shoes requires big cojones – overlooked the fact that he was speaking to one of the few singers, and perhaps even the <<only>> singer, capable of handling the job. Over the course of three boisterously received concerts staged to raise funds for the imperilled Bush Hall, this most famous and infamous of acts was born anew with energy, power, and the fiercest of joy. Never mind that the current iteration trades under the name the Sex Pistols with Frank Carter, with immediate effect, the band became a fist.
Such was its success, in fact, that this short series of concerts has blossomed into a busy diary. This year, Carter and the Pistols – drummer Paul Cook, guitarist Steve Jones and bassist Glen Matlock – are set to perform in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the United States of America, mainland Europe, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. They’ll headline halls and appear at festivals. In March, the group will top the bill at a Teenage Cancer Trust concert at the Royal Albert Hall, of all places. Much more of this and they’ll be playing at Buckingham Palace.
For anyone who might be wondering, they’re doing these things because, in 2025, the Pistols are sensational once more. And they’re doing it is because they want to.
“What I live by now is, if it ain’t fun, I ain’t doing it,” the always reliably blunt Steve Jones says. “I’m too fucking old to be putting up with a bunch of old shit and acting like everything’s cool just to keep the ball rolling. Those days are gone. If it ain’t fun, honestly, I’m out of here. I ain’t got the energy for any crap any more.”
The credit for bringing Frank Carter into the orbit of the Pistols belongs to Glen Matlock’s youngest son. As a member of the erstwhile group Dead!, Louis Matlock had seen the singer leading the charge while touring the UK as special guests to Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes. Night after night, he witnessed the fearlessness of a performer who approached live music as if it were a collision sport. Big shoes be damned, if you’re looking for a singer, the son told the father, Frank’s your man.
“Louis said, the guy you need is Frank Carter,” Glen Matlock says. “So I got his number off him and we arranged to have a coffee. I didn’t know much about him but Louis was always going on about him. So we had a play with him and Paul – Steve was out of the country – and Paul liked him, as did I, so we told Steve. I also went to see the Rattlesnakes at the Roundhouse [in Camden Town], where they did two sold out nights, and I was impressed. Then Steve came over [from his home in Los Angeles] and we started rehearsing and that was it.”
Asked to nominate the exact point at which he realised that this new version of the Sex Pistols became a force to be reckoned with, Paul Cook replies that it was during the marching-boots style drum intro to Holidays In The Sun, the first song on the first night at Bush Hall. “As soon as we did Holidays… I thought, ‘Yeah, this is working,” he says. “This is going to be brilliant. This is going to be fantastic.” I was at the back there, looking at Frank with his red hair, and I was kind of getting flashbacks a little bit. I just thought, ‘Wow, this is how it was and how it should be’.”
Naturally, Carter himself needed no introduction to the Sex Pistols. Raised in a home in the satellite town of Watford that groaned from the weight of vinyl LPs, as a 14-year-old, he would listen to his father’s copy of the epochal Never Mind The Bollocks… Here’s The Sex Pistols whenever his parents were out of the house. Smitten by its irresistible mix of fury and wit, blood and thunder, like countless other artists-to-be before him, he was at once captivated. Its guiding light helped lead him to the stage, and, in time, to <<this>> stage. So pivotal was its place in his life, in fact, that standing in public view alongside Matlock, Cook and Jones felt like a homecoming.
“The one thing I took from the album that I put immediately into the way I perform was just the energy of it,” Carter says. “I’ve heard records that <<sound>> energetic and then there are records that <<are>> energetic. It’s not even fast, but there’s something about it that undeniably moves you and forces you to feel. It’s the serrated edge. It’s the hot knife. It’s blood in the water, is what it is… It allows you to learn lessons that you don’t know are there to be learned. It changes you without you knowing that you’re being changed. Not much in the world can do that, but great music does.”
So, please, let us not be in any doubt as to his credentials as an MC of chaos. In 2008, 36 years after two members of the Pistols challenged each other to a fight after discovering they were playing different songs onstage at the 100 Club, at the same venue, as the singer with Gallows, Carter chased an audience member who had thrown a pint of lager onstage up the venue’s stairs and out onto Oxford Street <<in the middle of the set>>. “I’ve been knocked out multiple times during shows,” he says. “It comes with complications. Broken bones, concussion, whatever. But that’s part and parcel of being a storm.”
He even helped orchestrate his own Great Rock and Roll Swindle. In 2009, after Warner Bros. signed Gallows for a million quid, the group handed their new label the pummelling and furious Grey Britain, an album that seemed designed to repel the casual listener. “Britain is fucked,” Carter said at the time. “Grey Britain is all about what’s going on socially, politically and economically in the UK, and how it affects us.”
Sound familiar? As in, there is no future in England’s dreaming? Of course, in 2025, bands and artists are less inclined than they once were to sing about issues that affect and bedevil an entire nation. With social media replacing punk rock as the fastest route into the public bloodstream, rock and roll has entered an introspective phase. Just as well, then, that the Pistols’ State of the Union Address remains as pressing, and as prescient, as ever. Inevitably, in the (almost) half century that has elapsed since a pair of Millwall supporting hot dog vendors in Piccadilly Circus unwittingly provided Steve Jones with the title for his group’s sole bona fide album – “never mind the bollocks,” they would say, meaning “don’t bother with that…” – London and Britain have changed almost beyond recognition. But at street level, the problems and frustrations remain the same.
The Pistols themselves, though, <<have>> changed. Seventeen years after Steve Jones announced that “I am so fucking done with this”, at the end of a taxing world tour, it was the guitarist himself who suggested the group plot a course around the world in 2025. The decision was taken organically. Come the final night of a short autumn tour of Britain inspired by their success at Bush Hall, each member agrees they were cooking with fire. As luck would have it, the concert in London was attended by a number of promoters, in town for a convention, who duly tabled a series of offers to play up and across the world. The Pistols were back in the game.
It’s different, too, because in 2025 the group’s personnel no longer comprises elements of soap opera, or pantomime. Instead, unity and teamwork are the makings of the new machine; the cohesion of drums, bass, guitar and voice in the service of the songs. In this iteration, the rock and roll itself is allowed to shine, timeless and evergreen. There is no swindle. The people who wrote and played the music back in ’76 and ’77 are able to enjoy it anew.
“Don’t forget, the three of us learned to play together,” Glen Matlock says. “It was all pretty much at a similar level of competency when we started out. And we kind of grew together as musicians.” And now? “Put it this way,” he adds, “someone who is close to the band, I won’t say who, said it’s the first time they’ve seen us coming offstage with smiles on our faces since ’96. Which is good, because life’s too short for all that bollocks, really.”
As for what might come after the Sex Pistols have said hello and goodnight to audiences across the globe, no one is saying because no one seems to know. The promise of new music that was extinguished by a television interview with Bill Grundy and the subsequent shellshock of a young band receiving too much of everything, far too soon for anyone, may never be realised. But who can say for sure? At least for now, there’s no point in asking - you’ll get no reply.
But what we do have, for sure, is Frank Carter and the Sex Pistols whipping up a storm across the globe in a manner that is familiar but fresh, old but new. Catch it while you can, for as long as it lasts. Because we won’t see their kind again.
IAN WINWOOD
