Matlock later played bass with Vicious in the short lived band Vicious White Kids. In John Lydon's autobiography, Rotten: No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish, Lydon claimed that Matlock worked on later Sex Pistols material (including their album Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols) as a paid session musician (Jones played bass on all of the songs recorded after Matlock's departure, with Vicious also contributing to the song "Bodies"). After The Rich Kids he formed The Spectres with Tom Robinson Band guitarist Danny Kustow, and subsequently Mick Hanson, and then Hot Club in 1982 with guitarist James Stevenson and singer Steve Allen. Matlock was replaced by Sid Vicious, and went on to form The Rich Kids, a New Wave power pop band, with himself as bass guitarist and singer, Midge Ure (guitarist, singer and keyboard player), Steve New (guitarist and singer) and Rusty Egan (drummer). In the 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury, the band members generally agree that there was tension between Matlock and Rotten, which Matlock suggests was exacerbated by Malcolm McLaren's attempts to pit the two men against each other. In his autobiography, I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol, Matlock stated that he left the band of his own volition as he was "sick of all the bullshit". A claim made by the Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, regarding how he thought it was bizarre that Matlock was "always washing his feet", has also been misquoted and misinterpreted as the cause of Matlock's firing from the group. The former foul-mouthed punk meekly agreed.Matlock left the Sex Pistols in late February 1977, the legend being that he was 'thrown out' because he "liked the Beatles." Although Matlock has said that one of his biggest influences is the Faces, the Beatles anecdote is fictional. If there were any doubt that punk was dead, Jones was offered the chance to DJ on a Los Angeles station last year as long as he refrained from swearing on air.
Matlock, who was replaced in the band by Sid Vicious in 1977, reassesses his view of ripe old Anglo-Saxon in Channel 4's X Rated: The TV Shows They Tried To Ban, which also replays the incident. Jones obliged with the almost poetic panoply of: "You dirty bastard", "you dirty fucker" and "you fucking rotter". Matlock can hardly have forgotten the moment in December 1976 when he, Lydon, Steve Jones and Paul Cook were goaded by Grundy into unleashing a stream of bile on early evening television.Įxamining the "terrifying" moral vacuum embodied by the band, Grundy responded to Lydon mumbling "tough shit" by challenging them to say something outrageous in the final 10 seconds of his Thames Today programme. "It's pathetic when people just swear for the sake of it," he said in a carefully pre-recorded interview to be broadcast this Sunday. The bass player and father of two, who co-wrote The Sex Pistols' biggest hits, Anarchy In The UK, God Save The Queen and Pretty Vacant, hates it when his children, now 11 and seven, hear obscenities on the radio or TV.
Matlock, 48, believes unnecessary swearing is the curse of modern society. While his fellow ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon keeps the blue flame alive by deploying the c-word on I'm A Celebrity. He may have been a member of the band that bequeathed to the nation the words "you dirty fucker" and "you fucking rotter" in 10 seconds of live television 29 years ago, but the man who helped assail the eardrums of the hapless Bill Grundy has declared that "something ought to be done" about swearing. Punk really is dead: the former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock now minds the bollocks.