So, another artefact to add to the pile.
Danny Boyle is sitting in his kitchen sounding faintly surprised that his latest project has been made at all. "It's so not the story that everybody wants to be told," he says, "but it is the story that should be told." Pistol, a six-part miniseries, certainly isn't the first drama about the Sex Pistols. There was Alex Cox's 1986 movie Sid and Nancy, as well as The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle – a game attempt by the band's manager Malcolm McLaren to claim the whole thing was a brilliantly orchestrated money-making scheme. But Boyle's is by far the most ambitious.
Why so?
It is based on Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, Steve Jones's fantastic, occasionally harrowing autobiography, which takes readers from the guitarist's horrendous childhood (he was sexually abused by his stepfather) to that infamous, expletive-filled appearance the band made on ITV's Today show. It then covers the notoriety that followed, including the band's messy collapse during a US tour and the horrific aftermath, which culminated in bassist Sid Vicious dying of a heroin overdose while on bail, charged with the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen.
Some aren't happy.
Its making was controversial and demanding, too. There was Covid, of course, and a court case brought by furious frontman John Lydon, AKA Johnny Rotten, to prevent the band's music being used. Then there were the specific challenges of working with a cast largely too young to remember the 1990s, let alone the 1970s. "None of them knew what a Trimphone was," says Boyle, speaking by Zoom. "They couldn't work out how to put the receiver back on the cradle."
The challenges, eh?
Not sure if I'm that pushed about another iteration of the Sex Pistols on film. Boyle's effort is no doubt commendable. But it's not as if there isn't already a weight of documentary and fictional materials about the group and their supposed centrality to changing everything or something or perhaps nothing much.
The further that we pull away from these supposed world-changing events the less important they sometimes seem in themselves as against being symptoms of other broader dynamics taking place that fed through into popular culture and other nooks and crannies of the society. So the breakdown of formality, the pushing back against gender and other norms of one sort or another, the importance of television and music and youth culture at that particular point and many other aspects - third level education becoming a more widespread phenomenon to name just one, were all there and naturally aspects of the culture reacted and adapted to these. Because the Pistols while important, were but one amongst many. Absent them I suspect punk would have manifested there or thereabouts - it had been certainly being trying for quite some time by then from Iggy and others onwards - or even earlier, garage rock was surely an early attempt in that direction, with some of the same drivers and some of the same sounds.
But I'm particularly sceptical of the loading of so much weight of meaning on to music/popular culture in these instances, or in these very specific instances. It's not that they're not important. But how important? For those that were there or came shortly afterwards immensely so. And one can make a case that no succeeding musical 'scene' has had quite the socio-cultural impact, and yet, and yet. Is that completely true? How does one quantify these things?
Whether the following is quite like and like is open to question but interesting nonetheless:
Boyle "doesn't know" if the story has relevance today. "I'm too old for that, really," he says. "It's certainly not the reason why we did it." Yet the saga does have a modern resonance. We've heard a lot about cancel culture in recent years, but few pop stars in history were subjected to quite such a concerted attempt at cancellation as the Sex Pistols: banned from TV and radio, unable to play live unless under a pseudonym, with members of the Transport and General Workers' Union at EMI striking rather than handle their records. And then there were the sales figures allegedly fiddled to prevent them getting to No 1, with a blank space displayed in the singles charts where God Save the Queen should have been.
As is this:
The story also seems to touch on the very modern-sounding topic of confected outrage and its consequences, as well as celebrities having to contend with high levels of public scrutiny. "PUNISH THE PUNKS!" ran a Sunday Mirror headline in 1977, a week before Johnny Rotten was attacked by a machete-wielding gang outside a London pub. "I can't see how [the scrutiny] wouldn't have touched them," says Appleton. "It undoubtedly would have – it's life-changing. And now it's on a scale people wouldn't have been able to comprehend back then."
But even Boyle makes the point that the Pistols story resonates only so far. He's not sure about the United States. Which in a way tells us much. It's not as if punk had no impact in the US, post-punk more I'd argue, but that while it was vitally important for a good number (here, in the UK, Europe and the US) - it wasn't all that important, if even noticed for many many more. This isn't a slight against it, far from it. The manner in which it reset at least some popular music - stripping it down to its bare minimum in some aspects, allowed it to be rebuilt in new and improved ways. Or perhaps a better way of looking at it is that it focused on dynamics which prior to that had been marginalised and in doing so meant that those pre-existing musical dynamics, certain forms of experimentation, an openness to a variety of other musical forms, a certain DIY attitude (again tied into that break up of more formal social attitudes) and many others allowed for a flourishing of music in ways that had not been seen in quite that way prior to that. So in that respect is it fair to say the Sex Pistols were central and pivotal to change, but not the only pivot or centre?
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