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Tonight’s billing suggests m’learned friends have been involved, as the Sex Pistols take the stage without one pistol in particular. Recent years have seen the Seventies punk icons divided: on the one hand John “Johnny Rotten” Lydon, and on the other, the three here tonight, Steve Jones, Glen Matlock and Paul Cook. Tensions came to a head recently after Lydon objected to the band making a TV series with Danny Boyle and ended up going to court in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the band’s music from being used in it.
The dispute seems to have only galvanised the other three, because here they are reuniting for the first of three concerts to raise funds for the local venue Bush Hall in London – the Pistols’ home ground. Tonight, Jones sports a T-shirt emblazoned with “Shepherd’s Bush”, and over Matlock’s amp is draped a flag for Queens Park Rangers FC, who play just round the corner.
But what is missing is just as important as what’s there. The Pistols were the Pistols because of Lydon, because of his disgust and horror at himself and the world around him. No one else could have written a line such as “She was a girl from Birmingham/ She just had an abortion.” Lydon turned songs into emotional cluster bombs, detonating with devastating effect.
Frank Carter, a British punk singer of a younger generation, is landed with the unenviable task of replacing Lydon. It’s impossible, really, but he does his best. Carter replicates Lydon’s on-record intro to the Stooges’ “No Fun”, throws himself around the stage and into the crowd, and drags pop-punk artist Yungblud out of the front row for a couple of lines of “God Save the Queen”. He’s a ringmaster as much as a singer, aware of his role but conscious not to step on the toes of history.
The set is drawn very tightly from the Lydon era – all of Never Mind the Bollocks, plus three B-sides, are done in an hour. The brutal truth is that the Pistols really had just four great songs, but, of course, as they have proven, it’s possible to change history without a vast catalogue. Wisely, the band make the decision to strategically pepper those tracks – “Holidays in the Sun”, “Pretty Vacant”, “God Save the Queen” and “Anarchy in the UK” – throughout tonight’s set.
“Holidays in the Sun” opens, but there’s rustiness – Cook keeps the marching kick-drum beat going before Jones finally piles in with the riff, which sounds muddy and unfocused for a few minutes. One wouldn’t call it the tightest of sets – Jones especially seems a little rusty, and perhaps suffering in the sweltering heat of this tiny room – but the Pistols were a punk band, and perfect performance was never the point. Of course, at nearly 50 years’ distance, these songs no longer have the terrifying force they had when they poured out of teenagers’ speakers demanding insurrection and violence. There are no threats to polite society tonight, but there’s still a crushing weight to the music when the band are able to lock into a groove.
Cook, on drums, is revelatory as he drives the band along, looking at his bandmates to give them cues and cheerleading for Carter. Meanwhile, Matlock has aged into a matinee idol, who looks as though he should making cameo appearances in bawdy comedies. Jones is as big and solid as an outhouse, thrashing at his Les Paul as though he’s not a man pushing 70.
Any exercise like tonight’s concert is as much a challenge of legacy preservation as it is playing rock music. At Bush Hall, the Pistols do not disgrace theirs, even if they will never add to it. “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” asked Lydon of the crowd at his last gig with the Pistols. Certainly, no one felt cheated here.
