That's a pretty short list of things going wrong, but they're pretty crucial things. Glen Matlock was a great bass player and the other Pistols acknowledge that he was a big part of their songwriting. I never got off on the Rich Kids (Matlock's post-Pistols outfit) but I actually really like his current band, The Phillistines. The first few things by Steve Jones' and Paul Cook's post-SP band The Professionals are very Pistol-like and very cool: For instance -- Join the Professionals, by the Professionals.. They're trying to be a pop band like the Romantics, but their lyrics don't quite make it. They needed Johnny.
I wonder what a second or third Pistols album would have sounded like...
5 comments:
Glen Matlock leaving the Pistols being their downfall? If you'd asked me in 1978, I'd have laughed. Hindsight being 20-20 and all that, it's a no-brainer. You see, Matlock brought something special to the Pistols' armoury: and it wasn't just the ability to play the bass - it was form. Focus. Structure.
A pop sensibility.
I revel in the freefall "no rules" ethos of much of post-punk: yet NONE of that would have been possible without punk. I'm arguing that punk would not have had its impact if ...Bollocks had been as outré as many of its detractors wished it had been. If ...Bollocks was as primitive as many of the bands that followed, if it had been, say, more in the spirit of The Ramones, Crass or The Exploited, it would have never been the ground-breaking totem it is.
And what is it? 2 "shock tactic" songs followed by 8 tight songs with structure, dynamics and hooks. OK, so Captain Sensible described ...Bollocks as "Old Man Steptoe grumbling over some Bad Company outtakes," but that misses the point. Matlock was to the Pistols what Townshend was to The Who. They were never the same band after McLaren manipulated his departure.
Essentially correct, with 2 comments: I wouldn't lump the Ramones in with Crass or The Exploited. The Ramones were part of the blueprint that the Sex Pistols were built from (along with The Who, Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers, Van Der Graaf Generator, and a few other things of similar ilk)
And also --
As Johnny has stated, Bollocks was pretty much intended to be funny top to bottom. And it seems Johnny Rotten has always found getting in people's faces funny. The whole album is shocking in that way, but also tempered with the dude's sense of integrity. You can call the 2 singles "shock tactics", but what about "Bodies" or "Pretty Vacant"? Or for that matter just about anything the band did?
Thanks for being first to comment on my blog -- I'm adding your link to my permanent blog links.
Well, I wasn't really meaning to lump The Ramones, Crass and The Exploited together - it was more three more outré directions to choose from.
As for the "Shock Tactic" songs, I was referring, quite specifically, to the running order. The album opens with "Holidays In The Sun", and follows that up with "Bodies" - neither bear the imprint of Glen Matlock. On the other hand, "Anarchy" and "Pretty Vacant" have precisely the pop structure I've been bibbling on about. Good grief, I remember seeing The Pistols doing that on Top Of The Pops (RIP).
As for the precursors, are we forgetting The New York Dolls here? Surely much more of an influence than The Ramones? Especially as Lydon went on to pretty much want to kill rock with PiL - exactly the sort of forward looking manifesto that would have been anathema to the almost revivalist Ramones.
(For exhibit "A", I give you Rotten/Lydon's comments during "Johnny B.Goode": "Oh, fuck, it's awful! Hate songs like that!" Surely the opposite to The Ramones' approach which owed as much to the Shangri-Las as anything.)
I won't argue about Rotten/Lydon's sense of humour: it's the source of some of his best work - "Fodderstompf" from PiL's first album is amazingly effective and influential for something that was meant to be an album-filling goof-off.
I wasn't forgetting the Dolls, I just kinda lumped them in with the Heartbreakers, and felt they were the better representative of what the band got from the Dolls because the Pistols actually hung out with them when they came over for a tour in '77. Them English fellers seemed to transmogrify right around that time in a more Heartbreakerish direction, so it seemed to me I could make that distinction. It is worthy of note that Malcolm McLaren mis-managed both the Pistols and the Dolls, of course.
I list the Ramones as an influence because they were the original punk band. They were the first ones to write and perform those stripped down straight ahead ferocious 2 minute pop rock songs. They came to England in July of '76,, and they were the permission for the whole movement. The Sex Pistols were already around then, but I think the Ramones were a galvanizing point for them, the Damned, the Clash, etc. etc. They may have been classicists, but so were all those bands. It was kind of a hallmark of the movement, in my eyes. Everybody thought these bands were so shocking and bizarre, but they were all trying to reinvent 1964 on some level or other. Even the Pistols.
And a further answer to Sp3ccs:
I misinterpreted your remarks, I guess. I remembered that there were 2 songs with Sid in the credits and not Matlock (no relation to Andy Griffith), but didn't remember that they were Holiday and Bodies.
Dang it, Speccs, I like both them tunes! Don't underestimate Steve as a songwriter, he did OK -- I love Silly Thing, f'rinstance.
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