When Sex Pistols (pictured above) start their world tour later this month, a week before they play two shows in New Zealand, they will play at the Royal Albert Hall. So, if someone opens a window during God Save the Queen, the band’s sneering salute to the monarchy and a UK number two during Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee, it might be heard across the way in Kensington Palace. “I know old Albert will be turning in his grave,” says Steve Jones of his band storming this particular barricade all these years later.
You have to ask what’s it like playing God Save the Queen now that Her Majesty is no longer with us? Naughty? Nostalgic? “Well, Frank changes it up. Sometimes he sings ‘God save the King’. It’s just a song, you know.”
“Frank” is Frank Carter, a 40-year-old veteran of various next-generation UK punk bands. He was recruited by the band so they could tour without John Lydon, the singer Jones christened “Johnny Rotten”, and the man who possessed the voice and created the lyrics that made Sex Pistols – and punk – a headline generator at the time and a lasting cultural bombshell since.
Despite having done three reunion tours with Lydon in previous decades – including one to New Zealand in 1996 – the other three decided they’d rather go without him on what is likely to be a last blast for Jones, Carter, bassist Glen Matlock (the predecessor of the late Sid Vicious) and drummer Paul Cook.
It seems the court case Lydon brought against them and lost over the use of Sex Pistols songs in the 2022 television series Pistol ruled him out. “I don’t think John would have been interested in it anyway. He was pretty sore about the lawsuit,” Jones says from his home in Los Angeles. Despite having lived in the same city for decades, Jones and Lydon haven’t talked since the previous reunion tour in 2008.
Lydon has labelled the band playing without him as the “karaoke tour”. Jones sees playing without him as a blessed relief.
“The last tour I did with John in 2008 was just toxic. And I’m not putting John down. It’s just the way it is. We’d play two songs and I’d be looking at me watch, wondering ‘when is this going to be over? How many more songs have we got left?’ Which is not good to be doing it that way. It’s horrible.”
The tour is billed as the band playing its sole studio album Never Mind the Bollocks in its entirety. Which, given the band’s short life and song catalogue, they would have to do anyway. They’re not playing it in order.
Otherwise, the tour is “to have a bit of fun and make a little bit of dosh while we’re at it. We’re not making a bundle, but it’s more about having fun because with the new singer, it’s a lot more energetic, less politics, and it’s just a good time. Trust me, I don’t want to be traipsing around the world if it’s a drag.”
Still, given the tear-up-the-past musical revolution the band spearheaded, should “Sex Pistols” and “nostalgia” exist in the same sentence?
“Well, I don’t know … it’s all nonsense to me and, you know, something to write about. We were 19, 20 years old when we started, and I’ll be 70 in September, and you don’t know what your future is. You have no idea what’s going to happen. This popped up and it worked and it was pretty painless. So, we’re just running with it. Whatever people want to say about it … the usual, ‘whoa, they’re selling out, blah, blah, blah …’ I mean, whatever. Who cares?
“I’m sure, even in New Zealand you’re going to get your naysayers – ‘no John, no Pistols’. But they show up anyway and most, I would say, all leave enjoying themselves, because me, Cookie and Glen, we play the album like no one else because it was us who played it originally.”
According to his 2017 memoir, Jones bought his first house in LA with his earnings from the 1996 Sex Pistols reunion Filthy Lucre tour. Today, he lives in the showbiz enclave of Benedict Canyon. He says his neighbourhood escaped the wildfires – “it was close there for a minute” – but he knows plenty of people who lost their homes.
The New Zealand tour dates dovetail with the Te Papa exhibition of jewellery by the late Dame Vivienne Westwood, whose fashion house had its origins in her 1970s partnership with Malcom McLaren, the band’s Svengali of a manager who became a pop star-producer in his own right.
And the tour follows this decade’s earlier revival of the band and its legend in Pistol, the television series directed by Danny Boyle, whose memorable 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony featured the band’s songs.
It’s a lot more energetic, less politics, and it’s just a good time. Trust me, I don’t want to be traipsing around the world if it’s a drag.
The show was based on the first half of Jones’ as-told-to memoir Lonely Boy, which also described the sexual abuse he suffered as a kid growing up in West London and his tearaway years as a thief of bikes, cars and other band’s equipment. Among his notable victims were David Bowie’s band and 10CC.
Jones wishes there had been more in the series. “I would have liked it to add a bit more there, as opposed to the first episode going straight into the Pistols. I think there could have been some deeper stuff, psychological stuff but I’m not complaining. I liked the series. Ninety per cent of it I thought was fantastic. I was flattered Danny Boyle wanted to do a biopic. Who wouldn’t be?”
The show ends with the band’s split in 1978 and the 1979 death of Sid Vicious after the murder of his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. The post-split chapters of Jones’ memoir start with a sorry existence of sex, drugs and occasional rock’n’roll. The next band, The Professionals, which he formed with Cook, gave him an escape from London to the United States.
“I knew too many other junkies and dealers and I sold everything. The Professionals ended up in New York, and I just said to the guys, ‘I ain’t going back to London’ and I didn’t. I stayed in New York and I lived there. I carried on being a junkie for a couple more years, but then I drifted out to LA and that’s when I got sober. The thought of going back to London, dreary, rainy, not a pot to piss in … my survival instinct told me to.”
The latter LA section of his autobiography chronicles a life of 12-Step meetings, occasional acting bit-parts in shows like Californication, transcendental meditation, occasional supergroups with Hollywood rock mates and a period of steady employment.
He started hosting his radio show – and now podcast – Jonesy’s Jukebox – in 2004 with a guest list that reads like a rock’n’roll hall of fame. Even Lydon appeared on it in its early days.
The show came about by accident. “I just stumbled across it. I’m pretty lucky. I fall in shit and I come out smelling of roses. It’s a thing that I’ve always done. It’s like someone’s looking out for me. It’s bizarre.”
He stopped doing it as a regular broadcast on LA rock station KLOS during the pandemic. “I was doing two hours a day, five days a week, but the programme director kept saying ‘you’ve got to play more songs that people know’ so it was a battle all the time, and then if I did play what he wanted, then it just becomes a job. You’re not being creative and that’s the kick for me, is to turn people on to songs they haven’t heard. So, I just didn’t want to go back to it after the Covid thing.”
Still, the show’s musical eclecticism lives on, in Jones’ Instagram account, which regularly features self-recorded clips of him in his bathroom, playing acoustic guitar and singing tunes he likes. Of late, that’s included songs made famous by The Ronettes, The Rubettes, Roxy Music, David Bowie, Marc Bolan, The Smiths and Gordon Lightfoot – not something you’d expect from a man whose guitar the world first heard blasting the intro to Anarchy in the UK in 1976.
“What’s that term for a song you like but you don’t want to tell anyone?” Ah, guilty secret or guilty pleasure? “Yeah. I have a million of them, but they’re not secrets any more.”
Sex Pistols with Frank Carter, Auckland Town Hall, April 2; Christchurch Town Hall, April 3.