A member of the Sex Pistols has revealed they once stole equipment from David Bowie during his last Ziggy Stardust show in 1973.
Three years before the punk rock band rose to fame with the release of their debut single “Anarchy in the UK”, guitarist Steve Jones snuck into the Hammersmith Odeon to steal supplies from the pop star.
Jones, 69, who rocked up to the venue in a stolen minivan at 2AM, managed to drive off with Bowie’s band’s cymbals, the bass player’s amplifier and a microphone with Bowie’s lipstick on it.
Speaking to The Guardian, Jones explained: “They played two nights, and after the first night they left all the gear up, because they were playing there the next night. I knew the Hammersmith Odeon like the back of my hand, I used to bunk in there all the time. I was like the Phantom of Hammersmith Odeon.”
He continued: “It was about two in the morning. I stole a little minivan and I got in. There was no one there, other than a guy sitting on the fourth or fifth row, asleep – he was snoring.
“It was dead silent. I tiptoed across the stage, and I nicked some cymbals, the bass player’s [amplifier] head – a Sunn amp it was – and some microphones. I got Bowie’s microphone with his lipstick on it!”
Jones later confessed the crime to Bowie who “thought it was funny” – because the microphones weren’t actually his. It was drummer Mick Woodmansey and bass player Trevor Bolder who truly suffered a blow.
“I actually did make amends with Woody,” Jones revealed. “He came on my radio show a few years back, and I thought I’d tell him live.”
The guitarist asked Woodmansey what he could do to make it up to him for stealing his cymbals, to which the drummer asked for “a couple of hundred bucks”.
“I think I gave him $300 (£231),” Jones said. “So, he was well happy.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Jones revealed the most chaotic thing that ever happened on stage with the Sex Pistols was during a gig they played at a club in Milwaukee with a “ridiculously high stage” in 1996.
“It was about 20 foot,” he recalled. “Some guy walked on the stage, I don’t know how he got through John [Lydon]’s security, Rambo, saw him and came running across the stage.
“He grabbed the guy, the guy hit John, and John fell off the stage, head first,” he continued. “And I thought, that’s the end of that. But he got up and carried on!”
It comes after the 2025 iteration of the Sex Pistols — Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock and Frank Carter — announced the band’s first North America tour in two decades earlier this month.
This autumn, the legendary punk band will embark on their first tour of North America without Lydon, at the Longhorn Ballroom in Dallas, Texas — the site of a particularly hostile show for the band when it first toured the U.S. in 1978, where the band had “pigs’ hooves and bottles” thrown at them by cowboys.
Jones, Cook, Matlock and Carter revealed they didn’t reach out to Lydon to see if he wanted to participate in the reunion tour, which he has been vocally dismissive of in prior interviews.
“The last thing he wants to do is have anything to do with us right now,” Jones said, referencing a lawsuit the singer filed against the band over the use of Sex Pistols music in their TV series, Pistol.
“We wish him the best,” he added.
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