Pistols

In late 1975, just after her 18th birthday, Shanne Bradley went to a party at St Albans School of Art in Hertfordshire. Unbeknown to her and her friends, there was musical entertainment: a band from London no one had heard of. She suspects the group had just phoned up and asked if they could play. “They were so bad,” she says. “We were dancing, having a good laugh. We thought they were a piss-take of a 60s band. Someone said they saw the drummer afterwards and he was crying because they were so terrible.”Afterwards, the…

In an outbreak of mystifying sensationalism the Sex Pistols succeeded in breaking the bounds of most things believable yesterday.Johnny Rotten was reported from New York as saying that the group had broken up. And Sid Vicious was taken to hospital in the city after what was described by doctors as a “drug overdose,” having taken pills and alcohol during a flight from Los Angeles.All this came as the group were completing their gaudy and shock-inducing American tour. A spokesman for Virgin Records, in a series of confused…

Duke Fakir, the last surviving founding member of the Four Tops, is reminiscing on the halcyon days of Detroit’s seminal soul music label as it made its mark on the 1960s. “Motown really did feel like a big family back then,” he says. “We all hung out, partied, played golf, held BBQs, appeared on one another’s records. Those were amazing times.”The Temptations’ Otis Williams agrees: “Motown was no happenstance. God brought that up to start. Detroit, Michigan, was known for the big three – General Motors, Ford and…

On the morning of the day the Queen dies, the art collectors Paul Stolper and Andrew Wilson happen to be staring at a picture of her face. It’s a piece of card, smaller than a vinyl LP, which artist Jamie Reid produced for a concert by the Sex Pistols. He took the classic Cecil Beaton portrait, customised it with a safety pin through her lip, printed it on a union flag, and later hole-punched it for potential use as bunting on the band’s notorious Jubilee boat trip on 7 June 1977, although it was never used. This is the…

Early in Pistol, the FX-produced six-part miniseries about the thrilling rise and ugly fall of seminal English punk act the Sex Pistols, the band and their friends gather in their makeshift rehearsal space for a raucous party. Grandiose manager Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) proclaims to guitar player Steve Jones (Toby Wallace) that they are witnessing the birth of a new movement. A skeptical Jones, noting that the revelers are belting out the innocuous pop hit “Shang-A-Lang,” wonders if a rebellion can be…

The Sex Pistols lasted for three years, and it’s fair to say that a lot happened to them in that brief, blinding flash of late 1970s chaos. Strange, then, that Pistol (Disney+) ends up feeling too fast and too loose. Danny Boyle directs this frenetic yet baggy six-part dramatisation of the Sex Pistols story, largely told through the eyes of guitarist Steve Jones. It is adapted by Baz Luhrmann favourite Craig Pearce, from Jones’s memoir, Lonely Boy, which explains the Jones-heavy perspective. The problem with this is that…

The night before I meet Thomas Brodie-Sangster, a friend reads his Wikipedia page to me in horror. “He’s 32!” she says. “He can’t be!” The waitress in the cafe where we meet in central London makes a similar noise when she clocks Brodie-Sangster, noting that he has barely changed since he hit the big time in 2003. When he was in his mid-20s, bars were still refusing to serve him unless he showed ID. In 2019, a viral tweet highlighted how young he looked, with an image of him alongside Keira Knightley, who is just five…