The story of Sex Pistols

Shepherd's Bush boys and a shop called Sex

The Sex Pistols story begins with two schoolboys from west London. Steve Jones grew up in Shepherd's Bush, raised by his young mother, a hairdresser, and his grandparents, after his father, a boxer, walked out when he was two. Jones hardly ever went to school, and he later admitted he could barely read until his forties. By his late teens he had fourteen criminal convictions and had spent a year in a remand centre. His best friend from Christopher Wren School was Paul Cook, a Hammersmith kid who loved Motown, ska and glam rock. Jones would later say the band saved him from a life of crime. In his memoir Lonely Boy he also revealed that his stepfather had sexually abused him as a child.[1] [2] [3]

Around 1972, Jones and Cook started a band with another school friend, Wally Nightingale. They called it the Strand, after the Roxy Music song Do the Strand, with Jones singing, Nightingale on guitar and Cook on drums. Most of their equipment was stolen. Jones and Nightingale broke into venues where big acts were due to play, and Jones later said he posed as a roadie at the Hammersmith Odeon during David Bowie's farewell Ziggy Stardust shows and walked off with amplifiers. The group rehearsed at Nightingale's house in East Acton while his parents were at work, and later on a sound stage at Riverside Studios, where his father worked. For a while they called themselves the Swankers.[1] [2] [3]

The boys spent their days on the King's Road in Chelsea, hanging around a boutique at number 430 run by Malcolm McLaren and his partner, the designer Vivienne Westwood. It had opened in 1971 as Let It Rock, selling Teddy Boy clothes, then became Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die. In 1974 it was renamed Sex, with giant pink foam letters over the door and rubber and bondage gear inside. McLaren was an art school rebel who loved provocation, and he had just spent months in America working with the New York Dolls. Jones kept asking him to manage the band. In mid 1975 McLaren agreed, on one condition. Wally Nightingale had to go, because he did not fit the image McLaren wanted.[1] [2] [3]

The bass player was already in place. Glen Matlock, an art student who worked Saturdays in the shop, had joined in late 1974 after the previous bassist was sacked for skipping rehearsals. With Nightingale gone, Jones moved onto guitar, which he had been secretly practising for months, because he never felt comfortable as a singer. McLaren suggested the name QT Jones and the Sex Pistols, and it was soon cut down to Sex Pistols. Now they needed a front man. Matlock recalled that since everyone had long hair, they would stop anyone with short hair in the street and ask if they could sing. Midge Ure says he was approached and said no, and the New York punk Richard Hell turned them down too.[1] [2] [3]

Enter Johnny Rotten

The singer they found was John Lydon, born in London on the thirty first of January 1956 to working class Irish parents. The family lived in a two room flat in Holloway, north London. At seven he caught spinal meningitis and spent about a year in hospital, drifting in and out of comas and enduring painful spinal injections. When his parents came to take him home, he did not recognise them, and his memory took around four years to come back fully. At school, other kids called him dummy. He later said the illness gave him his famous hard stare and a lifelong distrust of anyone in authority. At fifteen he was expelled from school after a row with a teacher.[1] [2] [3]

Lydon went on to Hackney College and then Kingsway College, where he fell in with a gang of friends who were all called John. One was John Wardle, later known as Jah Wobble. Another was a gangly boy named John Simon Ritchie, who would become Sid Vicious. After a row with his father over his long hair, Lydon agreed to get it cut, then dyed what was left bright green. He loved reggae, Can, Captain Beefheart and the Stooges, and he haunted the King's Road with his friends. In August 1975, at nineteen, he was spotted wearing a Pink Floyd T shirt with the words I Hate scrawled above the band's name and the members' eyes scratched out.[1] [2] [3] [4]

He was asked to audition at the Sex shop. There was no band to play with. Lydon simply stood by the jukebox and sang along to Alice Cooper's I'm Eighteen, twisting and sneering at his audience. Steve Jones remembered the green hair and an interesting face, and thought he was a nightmare, but smart. He got the job. A new name followed quickly. Lydon's teeth had turned green from neglect, and in the best known version, Jones took one look and told him he was rotten. From then on he was Johnny Rotten. Lydon later called it a showbiz name that began as a dig, and said John Lydon was still what he signed his cheques with.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The four began writing songs. Rotten wrote most of the words and Matlock most of the tunes, although their first finished song, Pretty Vacant, had lyrics by Matlock that Rotten tweaked. All credits were split equally between the four of them. Matlock arranged the first gig at his own art school, Saint Martin's in central London, on the sixth of November 1975, supporting a pub rock band called Bazooka Joe. Matlock admitted he drank a bottle of vodka before going on. They got through a handful of cover versions, including the Who's Substitute and the Monkees' Steppin' Stone, before someone pulled the plug on them. It was chaos, and it was a start.[1] [2] [3]

1976, the year punk caught fire

Through early 1976 the Pistols played colleges and clubs around London. In February they supported the pub rock favourites Eddie and the Hot Rods at the Marquee and got their first review in the NME, in which Steve Jones declared that they were not into music, they were into chaos. Two students from Bolton, Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley, read it and headed straight to London. After seeing the band twice, they formed their own group, the Buzzcocks, and Devoto later said his life changed the moment he saw the Sex Pistols. In April the Pistols supported the 101ers at the Nashville in west London, and their singer, Joe Strummer, watched and decided that punk was the future.[1]

A gang of fiercely dressed young fans began following the band everywhere. They included Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin and Billy Idol, and the journalist Caroline Coon dubbed them the Bromley Contingent, after the south London suburb some of them came from. Their clothes, many bought at the Sex shop, set the look of punk. Violence arrived early too. At a return gig at the Nashville on the twenty third of April, Vivienne Westwood started a fight with someone in the crowd, and McLaren and Rotten piled in. Paul Cook said that was when the publicity took hold and the violence started creeping in. By then Jamie Reid, an old art school friend of McLaren's, was designing the band's cut up ransom note graphics.[1] [2] [3]

On the fourth of June 1976, Devoto and Shelley brought the Sex Pistols to Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall, a small room upstairs from the main concert hall. Only a few dozen people turned up, but that audience became legend. Morrissey was there, and so was Mark E. Smith of the Fall, along with two young men who would go on to form Joy Division. The band came back on the twentieth of July for a much busier show. Those two nights are credited with sparking the Smiths, Joy Division, the Fall and later the Factory label. The writer David Nolan joked that thousands have since claimed they were there, in a room that held about one hundred and fifty.[1] [2] [3]

At that second Manchester gig the band played a new song, Anarchy in the U.K. Matlock came up with the chords at rehearsal, and Rotten pulled the words out of a plastic bag stuffed with lyric sheets. Lydon later said the best rhyme he could find for I am an Antichrist was I am an anarchist. In early July two brand new bands, the Clash and the Damned, made their live debuts supporting the Pistols. In September the band played their first gig abroad, in Paris, and then headlined the opening night of the 100 Club Punk Special in London. McLaren organised it, and refused to call it a festival, because to him that word sounded far too hippie.[1] [2] [3]

On the eighth of October 1976 the major label EMI signed the Sex Pistols to a two year deal. Early sessions with their sound engineer Dave Goodman were scrapped, and the producer Chris Thomas, who had worked with Roxy Music and mixed Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon, was brought in. Anarchy in the U.K. came out on the twenty sixth of November 1976 in a plain black sleeve with no words on it at all. The image that went with it was Jamie Reid's poster of a torn Union Jack, partly pinned back together with safety pins. The single reached number thirty eight. A few days later, one television appearance would change everything.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The filth and the fury

On the first of December 1976, Queen pulled out of an appearance on Today, an early evening live magazine programme on Thames Television in London, because Freddie Mercury needed emergency dental work. EMI offered the Sex Pistols instead, and they arrived with four members of the Bromley Contingent, including Siouxsie Sioux. They were given drinks while they waited to go on. The host was Bill Grundy, a respected but hard drinking veteran broadcaster. From the start he was dismissive, talking about the band to the viewers rather than to them, and needling them about the forty thousand pounds they had been paid by their record company. The whole thing lasted only a couple of minutes.[1] [2] [3]

When Grundy brought up the money, Jones replied, with a swear word, that they had already spent it. Rotten muttered a rude word under his breath, and Grundy made him say it again, which he did. Then Grundy turned to the young women standing behind the band. Siouxsie told him she had always wanted to meet him, and he answered, we'll meet afterwards, shall we. Jones took that as a leering pass and let rip, calling Grundy a dirty old man and a string of far worse things. Grundy dared him to say something outrageous in the last five seconds, and he did. As the credits rolled the band danced to the closing music, and Grundy was seen mouthing a swear word of his own.[1] [2] [3]

The programme was only shown in the London area, but by the next morning it was national news. The Daily Mirror's front page read The Filth and the Fury. The studio switchboard had been jammed with complaints, and one viewer said he was so outraged that he kicked in the screen of his new television set. Grundy was suspended for two weeks, the show was dropped two months later, and his network career never recovered. Jones later said the interview made them famous overnight, but also called it the beginning of the end, because from then on it was all about the media and not the music. Glen Matlock's mother, who worked in a factory, was nicknamed Mrs Sex Pistols by her workmates.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Days later the Anarchy Tour set off, with the Clash and Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers in support. Councils and promoters cancelled show after show, and of roughly twenty dates only about seven went ahead. In Caerphilly in south Wales, on the fourteenth of December, carol singers and a Pentecostal preacher protested outside the Castle Cinema while a small crowd sat in the front rows inside. Years later, the local councillor who had led the carols said he felt thoroughly ashamed of himself. In London, a Conservative councillor said most punk groups would be vastly improved by sudden death. Even the packers at EMI's pressing plant refused to handle the band's single.[1] [2]

Early on the fourth of January 1977, a hungover band boarded a flight at Heathrow for three shows in the Netherlands. Within hours a London evening paper was reporting that they had vomited and spat their way onto the plane. The EMI representative travelling with them flatly denied it, but the label was under intense political pressure, and within days it released the band from their contract. The Sex Pistols had lasted about three months on EMI and released one single. While McLaren fielded offers from other labels, the band went back into the studio with Dave Goodman for one more session. It turned out to be Glen Matlock's last recording as a Sex Pistol.[1] [2] [3]

Sid Vicious and God Save the Queen

On the twenty eighth of February 1977, McLaren announced that Glen Matlock was out of the band. He told the press it was because Matlock went on too much about Paul McCartney and liked the Beatles. Matlock has always said he left of his own accord, fed up with the rows, and that McLaren only sent that line to the NME after the two of them had shaken hands. There was certainly real friction between Matlock and Rotten, who Matlock said were chalk and cheese. He says that two weeks later McLaren asked him to come back, but by then he was already forming his next band, the Rich Kids. Years later Steve Jones admitted that pushing Matlock out had been a mistake.[1] [2] [3]

His replacement was Rotten's friend John Simon Ritchie, now known as Sid Vicious. Born in Lewisham in 1957, he had a rootless childhood with a mother, Anne, who was addicted to heroin and threw him out at sixteen. Lydon had named him after his pet hamster Sid, which had bitten him. Sid had drummed for Siouxsie and the Banshees at their very first gig, and he is often credited with inventing the pogo dance. He was also violent. In 1976 he attacked the NME writer Nick Kent with a chain, and at the 100 Club Punk Special a glass he threw shattered against a pillar and blinded a young woman in one eye. He could barely play bass. McLaren said his craziness fitted anyway.[1] [2] [3]

In March 1977 the Pistols signed to A&M Records at a staged ceremony outside Buckingham Palace. It went downhill fast. Back at the label's offices Sid reportedly smashed a toilet, and days later a brawl broke out at the Speakeasy club, where the band cornered the BBC presenter Bob Harris, and a BBC engineer was badly injured, reportedly by Sid with a broken bottle. On the sixteenth of March, A&M tore up the contract. Around twenty five thousand copies of the new single, God Save the Queen, had already been pressed, and nearly all of them were destroyed. The few that survived are now among the most valuable British records ever made.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In May, Richard Branson's Virgin Records signed them, their third label in little more than half a year. Workers at the pressing plant briefly downed tools over Jamie Reid's sleeve, which showed the Queen with her eyes and mouth covered by cut out letters. The song had started life as No Future, but it came out as God Save the Queen on the twenty seventh of May 1977, just ahead of the Queen's Silver Jubilee. The BBC banned it for gross bad taste, as did almost every independent station, and big chains like Boots and Woolworths refused to stock it. It still sold more than a hundred and fifty thousand copies by Jubilee weekend, yet the official chart had it at number two, behind Rod Stewart.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the seventh of June, the band played God Save the Queen on a boat named the Queen Elizabeth as it sailed past the Houses of Parliament, mocking the royal river procession planned for two days later. Police boats forced it to dock. The band slipped away down a side stairway, but McLaren, Westwood and several friends were arrested. The backlash then turned physical. In mid June, Rotten was attacked by a gang with knives and razors outside a pub in north London, suffering tendon damage to his arm. Paul Cook was set upon by men with knives and an iron bar, and Jamie Reid had his leg broken. By August the band could only tour under a fake name, the SPOTS, which stood for Sex Pistols on Tour Secretly.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Never Mind the Bollocks

The album was pieced together through 1977, mostly at Wessex Sound Studios in London with Chris Thomas and the engineer Bill Price. Sid could not play well enough, and he spent part of the sessions in hospital with hepatitis, so Steve Jones played almost all the bass himself. Jones called the studio the best part of being in the Pistols, spending hours on layers of guitar. Sid's playing survives only faintly on the song Bodies, buried under a second part by Jones. Queen were recording next door. Sid reportedly barged in and mocked Freddie Mercury about bringing ballet to the masses, and Mercury called him Simon Ferocious, grabbed him by the lapels and threw him out.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The singles kept coming. Pretty Vacant, out on the first of July, reached number six and got the band onto Top of the Pops. Matlock admitted its famous riff was inspired by ABBA's SOS, and Rotten stretched the last syllable of vacant in a way nobody could miss. Holidays in the Sun followed in October and reached number eight. It grew out of a disastrous band holiday on Jersey, where they were thrown out, and a trip Rotten and Sid then took to Berlin to stare at the Wall. One of the album's most harrowing songs, Bodies, was about a troubled young fan from Birmingham named Pauline, and about abortion. Lydon said it was neither for nor against, but a plea to think.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols was released on the twenty eighth of October 1977. The title came from Steve Jones, who picked the phrase up from two fans, and Rotten said it simply meant stop talking rubbish. Jamie Reid's sleeve was loud yellow and pink, with no picture of the band. Boots, WHSmith and Woolworths banned it and some charts left its title blank, but advance orders of about a hundred and twenty five thousand sent it straight to number one in Britain. Critics grumbled that it included all four singles, a choice Richard Branson made himself, over the band's objections. Rolling Stone called it the most exciting rock and roll record of the seventies.[1] [2] [3]

Then came a court case over a single word. In November, the manager of a Virgin shop in Nottingham was charged under an 1899 indecency law for displaying the sleeve in his window. Branson paid for the defence and hired the barrister John Mortimer. Mortimer called Professor James Kinsley, head of English at Nottingham University, who told the court that bollocks was an old word once used for clergymen, and that here it simply meant nonsense. According to the lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, Rotten passed him a note saying that if they lost, they would call the album Never Mind the Stones. On the twenty fourth of November the magistrates grudgingly found the manager not guilty.[1] [2]

In December the band set off on a short British tour called Never Mind the Bans, and half the dates were cancelled because of illness or political pressure. On Christmas Day 1977 they played two shows at Ivanhoe's in Huddersfield, during a national firefighters' strike. The first was an afternoon party for the striking firefighters' children. Lydon later said Sid had to be warned not to act the hard rocker in front of the kids. When Rotten left the stage to dress up as Father Christmas, Sid stepped up to the microphone and sang Johnny Thunders' Born to Lose. Nobody knew it then, but these were the Sex Pistols' last shows in Britain for more than eighteen years.[1] [2]

America, and the end

In January 1978 the Sex Pistols finally went to America. Their visas were held up because of Jones's criminal record, and according to Billboard, their American label Warner Bros had to post a bond of a million dollars. McLaren skipped New York and Los Angeles and booked the band into bars and ballrooms across the Deep South, making sure a pack of journalists followed to record the chaos. Sid was on methadone, in constant withdrawal, and furious that Nancy Spungen had been kept off the tour. In Memphis he slipped away to look for heroin and was beaten by the security men Warner Bros had hired to keep an eye on him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The shows turned ugly. In San Antonio, Sid screamed abuse at the crowd and hit a man over the head with his bass. Before the gig at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas he cut the words gimme a fix into his chest with a razor, and on stage a woman who climbed up hit him in the face. He ended up in hospital that night. After the show in Tulsa he punched a hole in a dressing room wall. Rotten had flu and was coughing up blood, and was barely speaking to Jones and Cook. They in turn could no longer stand being around Rotten or Sid. Jones said the one thing that really went wrong in America was that everyone treated them like rock stars.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The last night was the biggest, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on the fourteenth of January 1978, in front of more than five thousand people. The sound was poor, Jones kept breaking strings, and Sid was often not even plugged in. For the encore Rotten announced they would play one song only, because he was lazy. It was the Stooges' No Fun. Crouched at the front of the stage, he chanted that this was no fun, no fun at all. Then he laughed and asked the crowd, ever get the feeling you've been cheated? He dropped the microphone and walked off. The Sex Pistols would not play together again for eighteen years.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band scattered. On a flight to New York, Sid slipped into a coma from valium, methadone and alcohol and was rushed to a hospital in Queens. A few days later he told the photographer Roberta Bayley on the phone that a doctor had given him six months to live if he kept drinking. Rotten felt cheated, lonely and broke. He announced on the eighteenth of January that the band was finished, and it was Richard Branson who paid for his flight home to London. He went back to his real name, John Lydon, and began planning something completely different. McLaren, Jones and Cook, meanwhile, were heading for Brazil.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In Brazil, Jones and Cook recorded with Ronnie Biggs, the fugitive Great Train Robber. Lydon refused to have anything to do with it, saying they were making a hero of a man who attacked a train driver and stole working class money. The Biggs song No One Is Innocent came out in June 1978, backed with Sid's sneering, rewritten version of Frank Sinatra's My Way, recorded in Paris over a string orchestra. The single reached number seven. After Sid's death his covers of Eddie Cochran's Something Else and C'mon Everybody both reached number three, and Something Else became the biggest selling single ever released under the Sex Pistols name.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Sid and Nancy

Nancy Spungen was born in Philadelphia in February 1958 and was a deeply troubled child. Her mother Deborah later wrote that she screamed almost constantly as a baby and was prescribed sedatives at three months old. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia at fifteen, and after being thrown out of college she moved to New York, working as a stripper and following rock bands. In late 1976 she flew to London, and after Rotten rejected her, she began a relationship with Sid. The London punk scene, and the band, largely despised her. Lydon later wrote that she was killing Sid, and McLaren admitted that he had plotted to have her bundled onto a plane back to America.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their relationship ran on heroin and violence. Nancy has often been blamed for turning Sid into an addict, though he was already using hard drugs, and friends believed his own mother had been supplying him. After the band split they moved to New York and checked into the Hotel Chelsea as Mr and Mrs John Ritchie, ending up in room one hundred. Nancy acted as his manager, putting together a backing band with former New York Dolls and booking shows at Max's Kansas City. According to Lydon's wife Nora, Sid often hit Nancy, and in her last call with her mother, Nancy admitted that beatings she had blamed on strangers had come from Sid.[1] [2] [3]

On the night of the eleventh of October 1978, people came and went from room one hundred. Sid swallowed a large amount of the sedative Tuinal and passed out. The next morning, the twelfth, Nancy was found dead on the bathroom floor, with a single stab wound to her stomach from a hunting knife she had bought for him days earlier. She was twenty. Sid was arrested and charged with second degree murder. He gave the police several versions. He said he stabbed her but never meant to kill her, then that he remembered nothing, then that she had fallen on the knife. Virgin paid his legal bills, and he was released on fifty thousand dollars bail.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Out on bail, Sid slashed his arms with a broken light bulb and was taken to Bellevue Hospital. In early December, at a Manhattan club called Hurrah, he smashed a beer bottle into the face of Todd Smith, the brother of the singer Patti Smith, and was sent to Rikers Island, where he went through forced withdrawal. He walked free on the first of February 1979 and went to a small gathering at his new girlfriend's flat on Bank Street in Greenwich Village. His mother was there, and so was Jerry Only of the Misfits, who remembered cooking pasta sauce with her. Heroin was brought in. Sid overdosed during the night and was found dead on the morning of the second of February. He was twenty one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nancy was buried in a Jewish cemetery in Pennsylvania. Sid could not be buried beside her, so he was cremated in New Jersey. According to a friend who was there, his mother asked Nancy's mother if she could scatter his ashes on the grave and was refused, but did it anyway, driven there by Jerry Only. With Sid dead, the case was closed and he was never tried. The Pistols' camp had even been selling T shirts with the slogan She's dead, I'm alive, I'm yours. Lydon, asked about it at the time, claimed he did not care. Years later, in the documentary The Filth and the Fury, he broke down in tears talking about his old friend.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Swindles, lawsuits and new lives

Five days after Sid died, Lydon's lawsuit against McLaren and his company Glitterbest reached the High Court. He claimed unpaid royalties, misuse of the name Johnny Rotten and damages. Jones and Cook first sided with McLaren, but as evidence showed their manager had spent almost all the band's money on his film project, they switched sides. On the fourteenth of February 1979 the court put the film and its soundtrack into receivership, and McLaren was left with heavy debts. The fight dragged on for years. Only on the sixteenth of January 1986 were Lydon, Jones, Cook and Sid's estate given control of the band's legacy, including more than two hundred and fifty hours of film.[1] [2]

That film was The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. McLaren had first hired the cult director Russ Meyer, with the critic Roger Ebert writing a script called Who Killed Bambi, but it fell apart on the first day of shooting. The young director Julien Temple took over, and the film came out in 1980. In it McLaren plays The Embezzler and claims he invented the band from nothing, as a scheme to extract cash from chaos. Jones plays a shady private detective and Sid performs My Way. Lydon appears only in old footage and called the film a pile of rubbish. Its title came from an old Lonnie Donegan article claiming rock and roll was a swindle.[1] [2] [3]

Lydon moved fastest. In 1978 he formed Public Image Ltd with his old friend Jah Wobble on bass, the former Clash guitarist Keith Levene and the drummer Jim Walker. Their first single, Public Image, was widely heard as a swipe at McLaren and reached number nine. The 1979 album Metal Box plunged into dub and noise and is often called one of the most important records of the post punk era. Lydon kept PiL going through many line ups, with his biggest hit, This Is Not a Love Song, reaching number five in 1983, before putting the band on hold in 1993. He revived it in 2009, and as of 2026 it is still his main band.[1] [2]

Jones and Cook formed the Professionals, whose American tour was cut short when a car crash injured Cook and two bandmates. They also helped launch the girl group Bananarama, with Cook producing their early records. Jones moved to Los Angeles, fought heroin and alcohol addiction, and got sober around 1990 through a twelve step programme. In 2004 he started a radio show, Jonesy's Jukebox, and became a much loved Los Angeles DJ, earning a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2018 for his radio work. Matlock formed the Rich Kids with Midge Ure, toured with Iggy Pop, and later admitted he had a drink problem in the eighties.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The story kept being retold. In 1986 Alex Cox released the film Sid and Nancy, with Gary Oldman as Sid. Lydon hated it, saying it celebrated heroin addiction, and when asked what it got right, he said maybe the name Sid. McLaren, meanwhile, reinvented himself. He managed Adam and the Ants and Bow Wow Wow, then became a recording artist, helping bring early hip hop to British audiences with Buffalo Gals and Double Dutch from his 1983 album Duck Rock. It later emerged that Double Dutch and other tracks were lifted from South African songs whose writers were not paid. McLaren was sued, and the case was settled out of court.[1] [2] [3]

Filthy Lucre and beyond

For years Lydon insisted the Sex Pistols would never return, asking reporters whether they planned to dig up Sid. Then Matlock, killing time in Los Angeles, looked up Steve Jones for the first time in seventeen years, and Jones said, let's go and see Rotten. At a press conference in March 1996 the original four announced the Filthy Lucre Tour, named after an old tabloid headline about them. Lydon said they still hated each other but had found a common cause, your money. The tour ran from June to December across Europe, the Americas, Australia and Japan. Shows in Ireland were cancelled over blasphemous content, and at Denmark's Roskilde festival they walked off after being pelted with bottles.[1] [2] [3]

Julien Temple returned in 2000 with The Filth and the Fury, a documentary telling the story from the band's side, with their present day faces hidden in silhouette. The four reunited again in 2002 to play Crystal Palace in London for the Queen's Golden Jubilee, and toured North America in 2003. In 2006 they were voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and refused to go. Their scrawled note called the Hall urine in wine, told the voters we're not your monkeys, and complained that a table at the dinner cost twenty five thousand dollars. Demand was so high that one Brixton Academy show in November 2007 grew into a run of five and festivals in 2008. That was the last time Lydon sang with them.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Time took its toll on the people around the band. Malcolm McLaren died of mesothelioma, a rare cancer, in a Swiss hospital on the eighth of April 2010, aged sixty four. Lydon, who had fought him for decades, said above all McLaren was an entertainer and he would miss him. Jones said he loved the man and called him the Brian Epstein of punk. McLaren's coffin was sprayed with the old shop slogan Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, and he was buried at Highgate Cemetery to Sid's version of My Way. Vivienne Westwood died in December 2022 and Jamie Reid in August 2023. In April 2023 Lydon lost his wife of forty four years, Nora Forster, after caring for her through Alzheimer's disease.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The deepest rift came over television. Danny Boyle made Pistol, a six part drama based on Steve Jones's memoir, and Lydon called it the most disrespectful thing he had ever had to endure. Jones and Cook took him to the High Court to let the band's songs be used. They relied on a 1998 band agreement allowing decisions by majority vote, and had the backing of Matlock and Sid's estate. In August 2021 the judge ruled against Lydon, saying he must have understood the deal he had signed. The series came out in May 2022. Lydon dismissed it as karaoke, while Matlock objected to the episode showing him being sacked, insisting once again that he had quit.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In June 2024 Jones, Cook and Matlock announced two benefit shows for the struggling Bush Hall venue in Shepherd's Bush, with a new singer, Frank Carter of Gallows and the Rattlesnakes, playing Never Mind the Bollocks in full. It grew into a full tour. Lydon called it karaoke and almost malicious, but Jones said there had been hardly any backlash, and the line up has since played from Australia to Japan, around Europe and across North America. As of 2026 they are marking fifty years since punk's breakthrough year, with British and Irish dates booked for December. Half a century on, one studio album and a handful of singles still cast a long shadow over rock music.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Sex Pistols

John Lydon and Malcolm McLaren. Singer and manager, then bitter enemies for decades. McLaren chose Lydon for his look and attitude, then clashed with him over money and control, and by the American tour they were barely speaking. Lydon sued him in 1979 and won control of the band's legacy in 1986, and his PiL single Public Image was heard as a swipe at McLaren. Yet when McLaren died in 2010, Lydon said that above all he was an entertainer, and that he would miss him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

John Lydon and Sid Vicious. They met at college in the early seventies, part of a gang of friends all called John, and Lydon gave him the name Sid Vicious. Lydon brought him into the band in 1977 and came to regret it, later saying he was sorry for the day he did. He blamed Nancy Spungen for Sid's decline and was disgusted by him on the American tour, yet in The Filth and the Fury he broke down in tears talking about his death.[1] [2] [3]

John Lydon and Glen Matlock. Chalk and cheese, as Matlock put it. They wrote Submission together, trading lines over pints in a pub, but clashed over lyrics, class and power until Matlock left in 1977. They buried it well enough to tour together from 1996 to 2008, which Matlock called a way of building bridges. When Matlock went back on the road with Jones, Cook and a new singer in 2024, Lydon dismissed it as karaoke.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Steve Jones and Paul Cook. Schoolfriends from Christopher Wren School in Shepherd's Bush, they started the band that became the Sex Pistols and have remained a double act for more than fifty years. After the split they recorded with Ronnie Biggs, formed the Professionals and helped launch Bananarama. In 2021 they took Lydon to the High Court together over the Pistol series, and since 2024 they have toured side by side again with Frank Carter.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. They were together for about nineteen months, from early 1977 until her death in October 1978. Friends described a real love tangled up with heroin, violence and dependence, and the band did everything it could to separate them. After Nancy was stabbed at the Hotel Chelsea, Sid was charged with her murder, and he died of an overdose four months later. Their story was retold in the 1986 film Sid and Nancy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Partners in life and business from the late sixties, they ran the shop at 430 King's Road through all its names, from Let It Rock to Sex and Seditionaries, and together dressed the Sex Pistols and shaped punk fashion. Their son Joseph Corré later founded the lingerie brand Agent Provocateur. The relationship ended around 1980, though they kept designing together for a few more years. Westwood died in December 2022.[1] [2] [3]

John Lydon and Nora Forster. Lydon met Nora Forster, a German publishing heiress fourteen years his senior, in 1975. They married in 1979 and stayed together until her death in April 2023, living mostly in Los Angeles. They missed the Pan Am flight bombed over Lockerbie in 1988 because she was late packing. When she developed Alzheimer's disease, Lydon became her full time carer, and said the person he loved was still there every minute of every day.[1] [2]

Steve Jones and John Lydon. The band's founder and its voice drifted far apart. Jones told the Los Angeles Times in 2017 that they had not spoken since 2008 and compared it to a bad marriage, while wishing Lydon well. Relations hit bottom in 2021, when Jones and Cook won a High Court case to let the band's songs be used in Pistol, a series based on Jones's memoir. Lydon said they had struck when he was weakest, caring for his wife.[1] [2] [3]

Sex Pistols and Jamie Reid. Reid knew McLaren from Croydon Art School, where they took part in a student sit in together. McLaren summoned him back from the Outer Hebrides to design for his new band, and Reid's ransom note lettering, torn Union Jack and defaced portrait of the Queen gave the Pistols their look. Q magazine named the God Save the Queen sleeve the greatest record cover of all time. Reid died at home in Liverpool in August 2023.[1] [2]

Sid Vicious and Anne Beverley. Sid's mother raised him alone, struggled with heroin addiction and threw him out at sixteen. Yet she stood by him in New York after Nancy's death, joining him at the Chelsea Hotel and in court. She was with him the night he died, and later scattered his ashes on Nancy's grave against the wishes of Nancy's family. In 1996 she sold his white bass guitar to Steve Jones for two thousand pounds.[1] [2] [3]

Sex Pistols and Richard Branson. Branson signed the Pistols to Virgin in May 1977 after EMI and A&M had dropped them, and the band helped turn his progressive rock label into a force in punk. He chose the album's running order himself, fought McLaren over American rights, paid the Nottingham obscenity defence and paid Lydon's flight home when the band fell apart. Lydon went on to record Public Image Ltd for Virgin.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Rare facts about Sex Pistols

• Glen Matlock admitted the riff of Pretty Vacant was inspired by ABBA's SOS. Matlock had the chords and lyric but needed a melodic hook, and found it on an ABBA record. After he mentioned it in an interview, ABBA's bass player tracked down his address and sent him Christmas cards for about ten years.[1] [2]
• God Save the Queen was originally called No Future. Early set lists show the song as No Future. Matlock said it was renamed once someone, possibly McLaren, noticed that its opening line suited the Jubilee year. Lydon said he wrote it at the breakfast table over baked beans.[1] [2] [3]
• The line I use the enemy in Anarchy in the U.K. is a pun on the music paper NME. Said aloud, I use the enemy sounds just like I use the NME, the New Musical Express. The song's other initials, like the IRA, the UDA and the MPLA, were taken from the civil war headlines of the day.[1]
• Sid Vicious was named after John Lydon's pet hamster. The hamster was called Sid, after Pink Floyd's Syd Barrett. When it bit Simon Ritchie, Lydon started calling him Sid Vicious. Sid in turn gave their friend John Wardle his nickname, Jah Wobble.[1] [2]
• Chrissie Hynde once paid Sid Vicious two pounds to marry her so she could stay in Britain. In her memoir, Hynde said Lydon had already turned her down, so Sid agreed to a sham wedding to help her get a work permit. The plan failed because the register office was closed on the day they turned up.[1]
• Rejected band names included Le Bomb, Kid Gladlove, Teenage Novel and Crème de la Crème. Other names the band considered before settling on Sex Pistols included Subterraneans, Beyond and even the Damned, which was soon taken by another London punk band.[1]
• Steve Jones's famous white Les Paul once belonged to Sylvain Sylvain of the New York Dolls. McLaren got the cream coloured 1974 Les Paul Custom, later decorated with pin up girls, from Sylvain. In 2008 Gibson made a Steve Jones signature model to its exact specifications.[1]
• The amplifier Steve Jones used on Never Mind the Bollocks was reportedly stolen from Bob Marley. Jones recorded the album through a Fender Twin Reverb said to have been taken from Marley at the Hammersmith Apollo. It fitted his teenage habit of stealing gear from the stars he admired, which he called collecting trophies.[1] [2]
• The Pistols only appeared on the Bill Grundy show because Freddie Mercury needed emergency dental work. Queen were booked for Today on the first of December 1976 and cancelled at the last minute. In a 2008 poll by the channel's owners, the Pistols interview that replaced them was the most requested TV clip ever.[1]
• The support band at the first Manchester gig was a prog rock group called Solstice. For thirty years nobody knew who opened the fourth of June 1976 show. The author David Nolan finally traced the band to a pub near Blackburn and found they had never bothered to mention it.[1]
• A surviving A&M copy of God Save the Queen sold for a record twenty four thousand three hundred and twenty pounds in 2024. Almost all of the roughly twenty five thousand copies were destroyed in 1977. This one came from a former A&M receptionist, who said she was the first person to meet the band when they arrived at the office.[1] [2]
• Some chart displays showed God Save the Queen's number two spot as a blank line. WH Smith's in store charts left the space empty rather than print the title. The Guardian has called it the only track in chart history listed with a blank title to avoid offence.[1] [2]
• The expert witness in the Bollocks obscenity trial was a professor of English. Professor James Kinsley told the court the word was old English, once used as a nickname for clergymen, and here meant nonsense. The magistrates said they deplored the vulgarity but found the shop manager not guilty on all four charges.[1]
• The Pistols' last British gig of the seventies was a Christmas Day party for firefighters' children. On the twenty fifth of December 1977 they played Ivanhoe's in Huddersfield during a national firefighters' strike, with an afternoon show for the strikers' kids. They did not play Britain again for more than eighteen years.[1] [2]
• Warner Bros reportedly posted a one million dollar bond to get the Pistols into America. Visas were a problem because of Steve Jones's criminal record. According to Billboard, the label's bond secured two week visas, but the delay still cost the band several dates.[1] [2]
• Sid Vicious, not Johnny Rotten, sang on the biggest selling single released under the Sex Pistols name. Sid's cover of Eddie Cochran's Something Else reached number three in 1979, after his death, and outsold every other Pistols single. His version of C'mon Everybody also reached number three.[1] [2]
• Sid's My Way was recorded in Paris with musicians from the French bands Magma and Voyage. Sid and Nancy rewrote many of the lyrics at the April 1978 session, and a jibe about a prat who wears hats was aimed at Johnny Rotten. Leonard Cohen said it was the only version of the song he liked.[1]
• The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle was first going to be directed by Russ Meyer, from a Roger Ebert script. The film was to be called Who Killed Bambi. It collapsed after a disastrous first day of shooting, when McLaren could not pay the electricians, and Julien Temple took over.[1]
• The Swindle's title came from a Lonnie Donegan article calling rock and roll a swindle. The skiffle star wrote the article in the fifties. A copy sits in Jamie Reid's archive at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.[1]
• John Lydon and his wife missed the Lockerbie flight because she was late packing. Lydon said in 2004 that he and Nora should have been on Pan Am Flight 103 on the twenty first of December 1988. Delays over her packing meant they missed it before it was bombed over Scotland.[1]
• Lydon's Country Life butter adverts lifted the brand's sales by eighty five per cent. Dairy Crest reported the jump in early 2009, after Lydon appeared in tweeds on British television. He said he took the job to fund a Public Image Ltd reunion, and the money went straight into the band.[1] [2]
• In 1978 Lydon attacked Jimmy Savile on BBC radio, and the remark was cut. Decades before the Savile scandal broke, Lydon called him a hypocrite and hinted at rumours in a Radio One interview. The BBC edited it out, and it resurfaced as a bonus track in 2013. Lydon said he was blacklisted afterwards.[1]
• Malcolm McLaren's last words were reported to be Free Leonard Peltier. His son Joseph Corré said McLaren spoke up for the jailed Native American activist at the very end. McLaren had asked to be buried at Highgate Cemetery in north London, and he was.[1]
• McLaren once ran for Mayor of London, promising to let public libraries serve alcohol. In 2000 he campaigned as an independent against what he called the great political swindle of the main parties. His campaign manager said Ken Livingstone's late entry into the race pushed him out.[1] [2]
• The Filthy Lucre Tour was named after a 1976 Daily Express headline about the band. Just after the Grundy interview, the Express ran the headline Punk? Call It Filthy Lucre. Twenty years later the band borrowed it for a reunion they openly admitted was about the money.[1]
• Jamie Reid had his leg broken by a gang while wearing his God Save the Queen design on a T shirt. The artwork was so inflammatory in 1977 that the platemakers at first refused to print it. In 2001 Q magazine named it the greatest record cover of all time.[1]
• Sid Vicious played drums at Siouxsie and the Banshees' very first gig. At the 100 Club Punk Special on the twentieth of September 1976, the band improvised for twenty minutes while Siouxsie recited the Lord's Prayer. They did not yet know how to play any songs.[1] [2]
• Freddie Mercury called Sid Vicious Simon Ferocious and threw him out of Queen's studio. Both bands were at Wessex studios in 1977. Sid barged in and mocked Mercury about bringing ballet to the masses, and Mercury took him by the lapels and put him out of the room.[1] [2]
• Nirvana's album title Nevermind was inspired by Never Mind the Bollocks. Kurt Cobain listed the Pistols album among his fifty favourite records. The nod in Nirvana's title annoyed Rotten at the time.[1]
• Christopher Nolan has said Johnny Rotten inspired his version of the Joker in The Dark Knight. It is one of many signs of the band's reach beyond music, alongside Jamie Reid's graphics, which still influence designers today, and the punk fashion credited to Westwood and McLaren.[1]
• In 1996 Sid's mother sold his white Fender bass to Steve Jones for two thousand pounds. The Precision bass had a black pickguard and a leather strap with the name Sid etched into it. Sid had barely been allowed near the studio, but the instrument became a punk relic.[1]
• George Clooney's stage debut was in a 1986 play about Sid Vicious. The play, called Vicious, premiered in Los Angeles. Clooney played a male prostitute who dealt drugs.[1]
• Steve Jones has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his radio work. His show Jonesy's Jukebox began on Indie 103.1 in 2004 and later ran on KROQ and KLOS. He received the star in 2018.[1] [2]
• The Sex Pistols' 1996 shows in Ireland were cancelled over blasphemous content. Dates in Belfast and Dublin on the Filthy Lucre Tour were called off, and the band played Shepherd's Bush Empire in London instead.[1]
• Glen Matlock's mother was called Mrs Sex Pistols at work the day after the Grundy interview. Matlock said it upset her badly. She took it out on his father, his father took it out on him, and father and son did not speak for a year.[1]
• Frank Carter was suggested as the new Pistols singer by Glen Matlock's son Louis. Matlock told NME his son, a musician himself, was in tune with the current scene. Steve Jones said Carter was the first singer they tried, and it worked straight away.[1]
• The bus graphic on the Pretty Vacant sleeve may not have been Jamie Reid's own design. In 2010 the American activist David Jacobs said he created the Nowhere Buses image in 1973 for a San Francisco transit protest pamphlet, years before it appeared on the single.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.