Sex Pistols have lifted the lid on the hedonistic and often violent days of their 1978 US tour that led to their break-up.
In a new interview, the British punk band recalled the overdoses and brawls that erupted on their notorious tour of America, which saw them joined by Sid Vicious – AKA Simon John Ritchie – following the departure of bassist Glen Matlock in 1977.
Among the most shocking anecdotes in the group interview with The Times was the revelation that Warner Bros had hired two Vietnam veterans as security guards to keep an eye on the band – and that they used “cattle prods” against them.
According to the publication, the label had put up £1m insurance surety against the group’s behaviour as a condition of their previously denied US entry visas.
The war veterans were tasked with making sure the musicians did not get out of hand, which they took to include beating up Vicious whenever he was badly behaved.
“Their main job was to stop Sid from getting high,” guitarist Steve Jones told the publication.
“One time, these guys from High Times magazine wanted to get Sid some dope and film him shooting up. The bodyguards put a stop to that, much to Sid’s disappointment.”
Drummer Paul Cook added: “They were great big burly guys with beards. We spent most of our time trying to escape them.”
He went on to reveal they used “cattle prods” to electrocute Vicious. “They had these cattle prods, and they thought it was really funny to zap Sid with them,” said Cook. “He was going berserk.”
The band’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, had arranged for the punk band to tour working-class venues around the American South where, the publication writes, they were “guaranteed to go down terribly”.
“It ended up being the ruin of the band, the nail in the coffin,” Cook said. “The whole tour was chaos from start to finish.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Cook recalled how Vicious almost killed a man at one gig in San Antonio after he swung his bass guitar at someone in the crowd but missed and hit a PR representative from Warner Music instead.
“Meanwhile, the audience was throwing everything from bottles to rats to pig’s ears at the stage,” said Cook. “They had read about us being British devils, come to destroy their country, so they thought it was what they were meant to do.”
Jones agreed that they were “all sick of Malcolm’s crazy publicity stunts” and recalled the high tensions in the band at the time, stating there were no “good moments” he could remember.
The notorious tour concluded with a final gig at Winterland in San Francisco in January 1978, at which John Lydon announced the band’s breakup, asking the crowd: “Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?”
Although they briefly reunited for tours in the Nineties and 2000s, the feud between Lydon and his bandmates continues to this day.
The Sex Pistols line-up now features 40-year-old Frank Carter as frontman. “It’s karaoke. That’s all it will ever be,” Lydon said of the band’s current iteration.
“I know people are moaning that it’s not the Pistols without John, but Frank has been a breath of fresh air,” Cook told The Times.
In a four-star review of Sex Pistols last year, music critic Mark Beaumont writes of Carter: “He’s a ringmaster as much as a singer, aware of his role but conscious not to step on the toes of history.”
