I wasn't enthused but try and keep me away. That's the problem, though. The band is so iconic that they are going to withstand the worst fantasy shrinkwrap attempt because what they left lives on and continues to excite and inspire. And this is not just to creaky old x-ers like me. You can get easily lost in a YouTube rabbit hole on Pistols interviews alone. They endure for the very good reason that it wasn't that they fought the establishment but that the establishment felt so threatened by them that it pushed back what might otherwise have faded into a few culty gigs before the next consumer tsunami. If the Pistols represented the anger of the dispossessed, then it was the continued repression that told the story, not the ensuing battle.
So, it's a good story. Let's keep telling it. Do we care that the actors don't really look anything like the people they're playing? We shouldn't. If this is truth through fiction we should see the point in the characters and their interaction. Are they overplayed to the point of caricature? Bloody hell, yes.
John Lydon has a permanent glare which makes him look more like a strung out Klaus Kinski and, in less intense moments, a young Brad Dourif. Did Anson Boon not see Lydon when his judgey resting face made him look more menacing? The voice is good but it's cobbled from YouTube. Chrissy Hynde, who serves as the moral centre of the whole six hours, is flawless, suffering and waiting her turn (when she finally gets fully named the way that only ever happens in rock bios). Malcolm McLaren looks about thirteen and --
And talks and acts like he's thirteen, a man boy who's wrestling his way out of a coddled start in life to make a big armchair revolution happen. And now I'm starting to get it. The real McLaren looked like an adult but the accounts of the band have him blathering slogans and bullshitting his way out of any corner the way a pre-teen might. So, Thomas Brodie-Sangster's full throated performance, as soon as you buy into the brief, works. It works even though Talulah Riley's more naturalistic portrayal of his partner Vivian Westwood is at odds. The clash of it works (see what I did there?)
So, if Glenn Matlock is a simpering would be pop idol in a den of punk vipers we need only recall the public view that he was wrong for the band and they needed it punk not professional. Matlock was the major musical contributor to most of the songs we think of as essential Pistols anthems. This is a myth with in a myth (that of McLaren pretending to have more control over the situation than he did) ... but he is too flossy and is written that way to justify the sacking scene. Now that I think of it the closest resemblance is between Beth Dillion and her character Siouxsie Sioux. She's in many scenes but, apart from one where she gets to re-enact the Lord's Prayer gig, she is a mute, quirky decoration.
And, as all this matching I'm doing between history and fable is going on, Danny Boyle is playing some very light footed moves with distorted action, narrative compression, a deft way with blending the looks of video with the kind of film for tv of things like Minder or The Sweeney. He gets the actors to play and sing as the band on stage, rather than mime to the real band recordings. All that. But there's still a problem.
I get a sense of the excitement of a London breaking out against the stodgy end of the '70s. There's a lot of well-crafted ennui and conflict that plagues every single band that ever there was. But it still looks like tv and feels like a soap. It's not without its powerful moments but soaps aren't, either. And, in a movie about one of the bands whose movement rallied against mainstream predictability, the clichés abound. The band can't quite get a thing together so the drummer comes in, on the point of quitting, and saves a future anthem. Did Steve Jones really tell Westwood and McLaren how to suck eggs in their own bloody shop? Sid Vicious is named through an excruciating setup. And they just keep coming. Hey, Danny, you did so well do dispel all the bullshit about heroin lifestyle back in Trainspotting and you can't find a way out of this?
These are in every rock bio. The worst one I've seen was in a tv movie about the Beach Boys. The band is taking a break outside the studio. A girl in a Thunderbird zooms past. One Beach Boy says, "she'll have fun." Another Beach Boy says, "yeah, till her daddy takes her t-bird away." They look at each other. One snaps his fingers. SONG! In Backbeat (whih is mostly really good) a pre-fame Lennon complains about the hours in the Hamburg club as a hard day's night. Brian May takes the band through the rhythm of We Will Rock You in Bohemian Rhapsody, explaining how it's a kind of democratic gift to the audience. Ray Manzarek tells the lads to take a break from trying to force the song they're working on in The Doors and then calls them back in and plays the nifty intro to Light My Fire. Now, I have never been in a famous band and don't know if someone comes up with hit song ideas like that or says something like: "No, let's be the answer everyone's been looking for let's be AH HA!" but, holy mucking bargemonsters, it surely doesn't happen like that. At least, people who were in famous bands don't remember it like that. This creative team ought to have known better or thought more of their audience to let this kind of thing through. What it does, apart from anything else, is add more heft to the mythology when it might pursue the same level of entertainment and tell its durably interesting story about how bad ideas can lead to bad decisions, no matter how big you get.
The Sex Pistols were a beacon for me. I felt an affinity with them, however far flung in tropical Townsville. I thrilled to see the violence of the fashion and was engaged to rigidity on finally hearing the album. I didn't wear the uniform of spiky hair or nasal safety pins. I went to school and already had a uniform. But the power and the snarling and the defiance and the cheek of it gave me strength to push back the big world of Kelloggs and Massey Ferguson. They helped me love that I was different. Not all that different, admittedly (straight, Euro, middle class) but just not wanting to be like the great slpadge, like them. That's what all that felt like. And if I was in the damp, hot arsehole of the old Empire they were playing around its rotting teeth and we were joined as one.
It was fun to play both advocate and self-dismissing clown with this at that age, and it armed me for what was to come. But now it looks and feels like the "edgy" reimagining that Riverdale makes of Archie and Jughead except in reverse it just cannot cut it. If you start watching this and relax into it I all but guarantee you'll sit up after six hours of it and wonder where the time went. It's fun to ride the tale again but I wonder if we, young or old, still need the pageantry of it. As a balance I played my favourite representation before writing this. No, not Swindle (which is McLaren's after-dinner speech on film) or even The Filth and the Fury (which is Julian Temple's attempted redemption for making Swindle) but the Classic Albums series episode on Never Mind the Bollocks. It's from the early 2000s and everyone is still in good form but old enough to feel the need for frankness and they, even McLaren, manage to build the world around the record by focussing on the sessions. Eventually, in about an hour, you really know all you need to. The big series, for all its virtuosity and energy never feels like the world I imagined from just the pages of the NME. The best fiction film about The Beatles is Nowhere Boy because it doesn't have to be about them and doesn't once mention the name. It's happy to be a strong story about youth. Maybe forget the names and tell the tale. It would still mean something, probably more. Maybe just go back and listen to the record. It still rips right into your nervous system.
I still have my copy, bought the day Gough Whitlam lost the 1977 election (and fled politics), with the money my Nanna gave me to buy my own Chrissie present. I spent the afternoon playing it over industrial sound pressure level recommendations and it was my most played platter for the next three years. I taped it for friends and took it to parties. I didn't talk about it into the night the way other kids talked about Dark Side of the Moon. Bollocks was a creature that I could loose to gaping mouths or big bright grins. And, though it felt a little corny even then, took it to my high school formal and got the DJ to play it as a small but intense few of us scared everyone else off the blinky dance floor. My copy is a standard Australian first release and wouldn't fetch more than its 1977 price on ebay. The cover is worn down one edge and needs to be kept in the plastic sheath I bought for it or it will disintegrate. But show me a mint EMI copy of Anarchy in the UK which would fetch an easy $1000.00 and it will just look like a piece of plastic. So, I passed the time with Pistol and don't mind that after six hours of it I barely remember it. It's alright but it's nothing like what I already had.
Pistol can be seen in Australia on Disney Plus
Classic Albums Never Mind the Bollocks episode is available free through sbs on demand here.
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