Sex Pistols Photo
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Sex Pistols Photo
Young punks: unseen photos of the Sex Pistols
‘I didn’t want to miss a nanosecond’ … the Sex Pistols at the Nashville in London, on 3 April 1976. Photograph: ©1976 ©2016 PTMADDEN
John Lydon at 60 – a life in pictures
Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning
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Forty years ago, art student PT Madden photographed an unknown group playing to a handful of punters. Those early shots of the Sex Pistols have finally come out from under his bed
O n 3 April 1976, a young art student called PT Madden positioned himself in front of a deserted stage at the Nashville , a music pub in London’s West Kensington. The place was nearly empty: as he remembers, “There was no audience apart from about 20 rocker types at the bar.” Moving aside the tables in the audience area, he braced himself against the back of a chair to create an ad hoc tripod, aimed his camera at the stage and waited for the object of his obsession.
PT Madden was there to photograph the Sex Pistols. He had attended their very first show at St Martin’s College of Art in November 1975 and watched them alter the lyrics of the Small Faces’ What’cha Gonna Do Bout It ? “They made me laugh when Rotten sang, ‘I want you to know that I hate you baby.’” After this initial encounter, he saw them again at the Marquee Club in February 1976 : “That was the gig when I became fanatical about them after an irate French kid moaned, ‘But you can’t play!’ and Glen Matlock swaggered back with, ‘So what?’ I thought it was joyous.”
The Sex Pistols were at the 100 Club on Oxford Street on 30 March 1976. “I was there before the doors were opened,” the photographer remembers. “I didn’t want to miss a nanosecond. What was interesting was what happened before and after the actual music. Also the silences and pauses between songs would go on for five minutes. My main memory is thinking, ‘This is extremely important. It is not like any other gig I have ever been to. It has an atmosphere of expectation which is totally exciting. This means something and there is no one here.’”
“At that gig I became terrified they were going to implode after Rotten walked off stage in the middle of the set. The tension between the band members was so strong that as Rotten made his way up the club’s staircase, Steve Jones placed his right hand under all his guitar strings and then, in one astonishing movement, ripped them right off the guitar and stood holding them in pure and total anger like he had ripped all the hair from his head. I gasped, and thought, ‘If they split up I want something to remember them by so I can recreate this experience.’”
“The worry prompted me to seek out my tutor the next day and ask him to show me how to operate a 35mm camera so I could take photos at the Nashville. If they split up at that gig I would have my photographic time-travel machine. I had never used a 35mm camera before, mainly because the cost of a roll of film equalled the weekly rent of my Camden Road bedsit.”
Arriving early at the venue, he asked the band’s manager, Malcolm McLaren , for permission to take photographs: “I remember the Pistols dragging in their gear and a nervous Joe Strummer standing next to me watching them.”
On 3 April, the Sex Pistols were supporting Strummer’s band the 101ers, one of the up-and-coming groups in the London pub rock scene. It was the Sex Pistols’ second appearance at the venue, but they were not yet a draw: although they’d had a few press mentions – including Neil Spencer’s review of their Marquee show in the NME – they had no advertisements, no major feature, no record company backing.
Heavily styled in McLaren and Westwood designs from the Sex boutique at 430 Kings Road, the Sex Pistols looked like nobody else. Strummer later recalled: “At the Nashville I walked out on stage while they were getting their sound check together and I heard Malcolm going to John, ‘Do you want those kind of shoes that Steve’s got, or the kind that Paul’s got? What sort of sweater do you want?’, and I thought, ‘Blimey, they’ve got a manager, and he’s offering them clothes!’ To me it was incredible.”
While the group ran through their set – a few originals and covers of 60s songs by Dave Berry, the Who and the Small Faces – PT Madden shot two rolls of film. “I didn’t change position during the entire gig: I only sat down after I took the last shot.”
“I was tense and alert throughout, watching all four members at the same time. I never understood that myth that they couldn’t play: the music was actually quite motorik and once they got going, the timing was impeccable. Later I discovered there are quite a few shots where Rotten is staring at me, Cook is staring with bemused curiosity, and Jones poses away like a guitar hero – more or less saying, ‘Go on then – take my photo.’ I think they thought it was weird that someone was taking photographs. Now at any gig everyone takes photos but back then no one did.”
“I suppose the camera was like a shield – with it held to my face I could quite easily out-stare Rotten. But in fact I believe Rotten wanted to be photographed. You can see he is giving me some of his finest work – I like the shot of him kneeling down exhausted and staring at the camera. At one point in the set he introduced Problems by glaring at me and saying. ‘Hello, Paul, you’re my problem.’ I had long hair. I giggled and kept the camera to my eye.”
Of the two rolls, only 26 photos remain: the first roll was destroyed during the developing process. The shots are simple, basic, without filters; the group are presented in black and white, against a flat background – a simple curtain. There are no flashing lights, no stage design, nothing but amplifier and small speakers, clothes left hurriedly on the floor.
The Sex Pistols are simply there, running through the poses and the movements that would soon become familiar. The most immediate visual hook is the clothes. All three in the frontline are wearing T-shirts from Sex: Rotten covers his with a small, ripped-up sweater that he removes mid-set. Both he and Steve Jones wear teddy boy-era brothel creepers, while Glen Matlock sports a pair of handmade painted trousers.
They look young but defined. Matlock, it is plain to see, keeps the group going – the motivator and the grounding force. But it is Rotten who catches the eye, constantly in motion: at once imperious and unsure, stiff and highly animated. He crouches on the floor, blows his nose, and fixes the photographer with an unmistakable glare.
Taken as a whole, the photographs recapture what it was like to stumble upon the Sex Pistols in early April 1976. Stewart Joseph, later the co-manager of Generation X, remembers walking into the Nashville that night:
“They had buckets full of attitude and grabbed my attention. They knew what they were doing, or at least trying to do. Young, raw and angry. They kept it simple and they had a genuine musical vocabulary. They were unlike any other support band and I recall saying they were like a ticking time bomb.”
It was clear that this was a whole new thing. As Strummer remembered: “They did their set, and that was it for me. The difference was, we played Route 66 to the drunks at the bar, going, ‘Please like us.’ But here was this quartet who were standing there going, ‘We don’t give a toss what you think, you pricks – this is what we like to play, and this is the way we’re gonna play it, regardless of whether you like it or not.’ They were on another planet, in another century. It took my head off.”
Within three weeks of the gig, the journalist Jonh Ingham placed a double-page spread in the weekly music paper Sounds - the first big interview with the group, designed to read like a manifesto. It ran the day after the Sex Pistols were involved in a fight with the audience at their third show at the Nashville: this occasioned sensational coverage – based around a reader’s letter sent to the NME by future Pet Shop Boy Neil Tennant – and sealed the association of the group with violence.
The Sex Pistols were on their way, but PT Madden did not exhibit or sell his pictures. They were not conceived as rock photography and were thus not distributed to the music magazines.
The Sex Pistols came to national attention that December, thanks to a profanity-filled TV interview with Bill Grundy . But, says PT Madden, “It was all over for me. I had seen them over a year before and I’d grown tired of asking people to come and see them.” He turned his back on punk and sought a different subject: “I became interested in photographing car journeys made as a passenger across London in order to map my existence.” The Pistols photographs were stashed under his bed and remained hidden for the ensuing decades.
Last year, PT Madden was interviewed for an oral history of punk by Colin Fallows, professor of sound and visual arts at Liverpool John Moores University, who immediately realised the value of his images. They decided to show the 26 photos, as one artwork, to mark the 40th anniversary of the Nashville show. Unseen for so many years, they have all the force of a revelation, one that takes you back to a moment of latency before the Sex Pistols were fixed: when they were, as Fallows writes, “a group of young artists in the momentary process of becoming”.
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Photographer Dennis Morris chronicled the U.K. punks amidst the chaos of 1977
In this article:
Johnny Rotten,
Malcolm McLaren,
Sid Vicious,
The Sex Pistols
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Photographer Dennis Morris first captured the attention of the Sex Pistols when Johnny Rotten saw some of the work he'd done with Bob Marley. The punk singer, a huge reggae fan, quickly brought Morris into the fold when the Pistols signed with Virgin in May 1977, and for the next seven months the photographer was constantly by their side, capturing incredibly intimate natural images during the absolute peak of their career. It was a time of madness, drug addiction, infighting and constantly canceled gigs, and Morris caught it all on film. The Bollocks , an exhibition of his work, opened at the Known Gallery in Los Angeles on August 9th and runs through the 23rd. Click through to read the stories behind some of his best photographs.
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Although they've disbanded, the Sex Pistols are still one of the most iconic British rock bands ever. Get caught up with the former members and learn what they're up to today.
The Sex Pistols will always be remembered for their influence on punk rock music. The British rock band formed in London in 1975 and initiated the punk movement in the U.K. Their initial career only lasted two and a half years, but they still were widely successful and influential. The band’s only studio album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols , reached number one in the U.K. They disbanded in 1978 but reunited on-and-off over the years until 2008, which marked the group’s final music release together.
Vocalist John Lydon (known as “Johnny Rotten”), guitarist Steve Jones , drummer Paul Cook , and bassist Glen Matlock were the original members of the Sex Pistols. Sid Vicious replaced Glen before the band disbanded. The Sex Pistols’ rise to fame will be explored in the TV miniseries Pistol , premiering May 31 on FX on Hulu. Here’s where Johnny Rotten and the rest of the Sex Pistols are today.
Johnny Rotten, 66, was the lead singer of the Sex Pistols. After the group disbanded, he formed his own successful punk band, Public Image Ltd. , which is still active today. His bandmates include Bruce Smith , Lu Edmonds , and Scott Firth . Johnny put out one solo studio album in 1997 called Psycho’s Path . He also released a compilation album, The Best of British £1 Notes , in 2005. Johnny recently appeared as a contestant on season 6 of The Masked Singer . He was the Jester and was eliminated in the eighth episode. Johnny is currently married to German publishing heiress Nora Forster and they are the guardians of her late daughter Ari Up ‘s three children. Johnny is being played by Anson Boon in Pistol .
Steve Jones, 66, was the lead guitarist of the Sex Pistols. He went on to form the pink rock band The Professionals with his bandmate Paul Cook. Steve also formed the rock supergroup Neurotic Outsiders with members of Guns N’ Roses and Duran Duran , but the band only lasted for three years. Steve has put out two solo albums, 1987’s Mercy and 1989’s Fire and Gasoline . He also had his own radio show, Jonesy’s Jukebox , and he continues to work as a disc jockey on local radio stations in Southern California. In 2019, Steve suffered a heart attack but he recovered. Steve is being played by Toby Wallace in Pistol .
Glen Matlock, 65, was the lead bass guitarist in the Sex Pistols. He left the band before it officially disbanded to perform with numerous other groups. He’s played for Rich Kids , Vicious White Kids , Iggy Pop , The Damned , and The International Swingers . He also formed the band Glen Matlock & The Philistines that released music from 1996 to 2018. Since his Sex Pistols replacement Sid Vicious died, Glen has stepped in as bass guitarist for any reunion shows with the group. It’s unclear if Glen has ever been married. He’s being played by Christian Lees in Pistol .
Paul Cook, 65, was the lead drummer of the Sex Pistols. Once they disbanded, Paul started the band The Professionals with Steve and Andy Allan . As of 2021, the group has released four studio albums and various singles, EPs, and compilations. Paul has also worked with the bands Bananarama and Chiefs of Relief over the years, plus his occasional reunions with the Sex Pistols. Paul is currently married to Jeni Cook , a former member of the British new wave band Culture Club. They live in West London with their daughter Hollie Cook , a solo musician. Paul is being played by Jacob Slater in Pistol .
Sid Vicious , whose real name was John Simon Ritchie, but also went by John Beverly, joined the Sex Pistols in 1977, replacing bass guitarist Glen Matlock. He was previously the co-founder and vocalist of the band Flowers of Romance . Sid Vicious played with the Sex Pistols until the group dissolved in 1978. Afterwards, he struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, slipping into a brief coma in January 1978. Later that year, Sid was accused of murdering his girlfriend Nancy Spungen , who was found dead in their hotel room. He was charged with second-degree murder, but was released on bail. He ended up assaulting someone at a New York City club and got locked up in Riker’s Island for seven weeks. After Sid was released in Feb. 1979, he resumed partying and died of a heroin overdose at the age of 21. Sid is being played by Louis Partridge in Pistol .
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Sex Pistols in Amsterdam in 1977 (L–R: Cook, Matlock, Rotten and Jones)
"Anarchy in the UK" reached number 38 on the UK singles chart.
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"God Save the Queen" was originally titled "No Future", but was changed to coincide with the 1977 Jubilee
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