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| Young Punks |
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Forty-four years after their implosion, The Sex Pistols -- their music, fashion, and attitude
-- still matter.
This May, a new limited series brings the band's incredible story to life.
By Caryn Rose in Esquire
he Sex Pistols didn't invent punk rock. That honor goes to American upstarts at CBGB. But the Pistols deserve -- and accept -- the blame for bringing it to the 'burbs. When a teen turns up with spiky hair, a dog collar, and a leather jacket, the response is "What are you, the Sex Pistols?" It's a generic term now, like Xerox or Kleenex. The band blazed that trail. With flamethrowers.
The Pistols' antiestablishment attitudes sprouted from their working-class upbringing. Steve Jones was a prolific thief who claims to have walked off with David Bowie's equipment and used it to start the band. Paul Cook was bound for the electrical trades. In the early seventies, the two childhood friends frequented a London clothing store called Let It Rock. Its owners, designers Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren, saw fashion as a method of individual expression and cultural disposition, and they helped position the Pistols just for that. They also found bandmates. John Lydon -- soon to be Johnny Rotten -- caught McLaren's eye because Lydon was wearing a Pink Floyd tee over which he had emblazoned I HATE in ballpoint pen. 
Westwood noticed John Simon Ritchie -- who would become Sid Vicious -- among the parade of shop customers. He couldn't play bass, but he looked the part: Pale and lost, with a padlock-fastened dog chain around his neck.
The true genius of McLaren, who became the Pistols' manager, was using the band to prank the music industry. They burned through three record labels in less than a year. Shortly after the release of their first single, "Anarchy in the U.K.," in 1976, they appeared on Thames TV's Today. The host goaded them into uttering a number of swear words -- "You dirty fucker," Jones called him -- that were broadcast into sitting rooms across England. The most famous headline the next day read THE FILTH AND THE FURY! Police shut down the few live shows local governments didn't ban. "It was open fucking season on anyone who looked like a Sex Pistol," Jones wrote in his memoir, Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, on which the new Danny Boyle-directed FX series Pistol is based. Their arrival on U.S. soil led the nightly news. Suddenly, every high school kid and their parents knew about punk. Guidance counselors asked students whether they wanted to cut their chests with razor blades -- a favorite move of Sid's -- when all they wanted to do was listen to the songs.
And that's what people tend to forget about the Pistols: The music was fantastic. "Anarchy," "God Save the Queen," and "Pretty Vacant" are anthems. Naysayers gripe that the band couldn't play their instruments. The music was loud, the lyrics brutal, and the vocal delivery aggressive. But the same was true for the first Led Zeppelin album. The instrumentation wasn't avant-garde; Jones and Cook idolized the Faces and the Who. There were even guitar solos. Forty-five years later, nothing on Never Mind the Bollocks sounds dated.
The Pistols disintegrated in 1978, before they could become a parody. Capitalism absorbed their legacy, smoothing over its rough edges and morphing it into new genres like pop punk, emo, alternative rock, and grunge. Now you can go to a mall and buy the dog collar Sid Vicious wore, because the Pistols bulldozed their way into suburbia years ago. Even so, the band members continued to fuck with the establishment. When they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006, they refused the award, instead sending a handwritten note that read: "We're not coming. Your [sic] not paying attention."
Pistol is due to premiere on the Hulu streaming channel (and Disney+ where Hulu isn't available) on May 31. The six-episode series is created and written by Craig Pearce.
ACTOR PROFILES by Olivia Ovenden
Toby Wallace (as Steve Jones)
One moment that Wallace will never forget? "The first guitar lesson I ever had was from Steve Jones," he says. "I was shit, by the way. Wallace, twenty-six, won a breakthrough-performance award at the 2019 Venice FIlm Festival for his role in the indie Babyteeth; now he leads Pistol, playing the band's mouthy guitarist. Jones was a founding member of the Sex Pistols, and his autobiography, Lonely Boy, is the inspiration behind the series. During his pandemic, Wallace went for long strolls around Beverly Hills with Jonesy, downloading his memories of the punk movement. Another pinch-me moment that will stick in Toby Wallace's mind forever? When the sixty-something rocker felt nature calling and took a leak right there on the sind of the road in L.A.'s fanciest ZIP code. Feeling he should be faithful to the man he's playing, naturally Wallace joined him.
Thomas Brodie-Sangster (as Malcolm McLaren)
You might have seen Thomas Brodie-Sangster on Netflix's The Queen's Gambit, strolling across Westeros with Bran the Broken on Game of Thrones, or running through Heathrow Airport as the cherubic and lovestruck Sam in Love Actually. But Pistol is new territory. "It's dealing with quite tough social issues so is quite different to anything I've done before," Brodie-Sangster says of the project, on which he is unrecognizably louche as the band's manager, the musical kingmaker Malcolm McLaren. "That energy and the sheer audacity of some of the lyrics -- you still couldn't get away with saying a lot of that stuff today." A style enthusiast who recently walked the runway for Prada, Brodie-Sangster, thirty-one, especially liked power-dressing in the red tartan Vivienne Westwood suit that he work for one memorable Pistol scene. "He really enjoyed giving one to the establishment," he says of McLaren. "He was a naughty, naughty boy, and he wanted to encourage others to be naughty, too."
Anson Boon (as Johnny Rotten)
When it came to bringing Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten to life, Anson Boon was keen to avoid doing a caricature of the anarchic hell-raiser. "There's an image of the band being these spitting devils," he says. "But I was also interested in John Lydon who loved his mum, went to bed with a glass of milk every night, and worked at a youth center for underprivileged children." At twenty-two, Boon has already worked with Hollywood heavyweights, including Kate Winslet and Susan Sarandon in Blackbird and director Sam Mendes in 1917. For Pistol, Boon went a little Method, replicating the graffiti on the walls of the band's rehearsal space in his own dressing room and obsessing over which of the fourteen Johnny Rotten wigs each day called for. "I did my research so everything down to the last thumb ring was correct," he says proudly. "I wanted to pay him the respect he deserves."
Jacob Slater (as Paul Cook)
Jacob Slater remembers being blown away by Danny Boyle's Trainspotting when he was fifteen years old. Years later, when Slater was working as a surf instructor in Cornwall, on the southernmost tip of England, a friend told him about auditions for a series about the Sex Pistols. The director? The same man who had made the UK of the eighties shine in the dark in another story about a group of men and their excesses and demons. "I'd always listened to the Pistols and punk music when I was younger," says Slater, twenty-four, who fronted the band Dead Pretties and now performs as Wunderhorse. A first-time actor, he channeled his time spent onstage as a musician to play Pistols drummer Paul Cook. Slater incorporated one particularly useful bit of advice Cook gave him when the drummer came down to watch him on set. "He said, 'Stop fiddling with your drums in between songs, because I never did that,' and I though, Fair enough."
Sydney Chandler (as Chrissie Hynde)
The real audition to play Chrissie Hynde came at the London home of the iconic Pretenders singer herself, when Hynde invited Sydney Chandler, twenty-six, over to share her memories of hanging out with the Sex Pistols. "I thought, If I could play her songs in front of her, then I'd be okay on set," Chandler says. "She's someone that has no ego, and I like to think I was able to keep a little bit of that with me." The daughter of actor Kyle Chandler, she had just finished shooting her first project, Don't Worry Darling, a psychological thriller from Olivia Wilde, starring Harry Styles and Florence Pugh, when she got the call to play Hynde on Pistol. "My mom sings 'My City Was Gone' all the time, so my parents were jumping up and down a bit when they found out," Chandler recalls. "It's a big leap of faith, but when Danny Boyle tells, you that you can do something, you believe it. Yes, sir!" 
| Yusuf / Cat Stevens Interview |
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The folk-rock seeker on songwriting, spirituality, and climate hope.
By Simon Vozick-Levinson in Rolling Stone
What's the best advice anyone has ever given to you?
I would have to go to the prophetic sources: "Leave that which makes you doubt for that which does not make you doubt." That means you have a calmness about you, and you can relax a little bit.
When you put it that way, it sounds almost easy.
You're right. It's not necessarily that easy. Sometimes you have to fight yourself, because our soul or your desire are pulling you one way.
You were writing about profound subjects at an early age. What led to a song like "The Wind"?
I'm talking to somebody; I think it's the divine, but I'm not quite sure, and because I'm not sure, it's universal. My goal was to be able to detach myself from my physical surroundings and material things. I was very earnestly searching. I would visit esoteric bookshops whenever I could, and pick up whatever new pathway to the truth I could find.
Many musicians have written songs about God. You really followed through on that in your life.
I mean, Little Richard left music. He said it was the devil's stuff. Then he came back again. But, yeah -- I did strive, not only lyrically, but mentally, spiritually, to attain the ideals of my songs.
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Oh, yeah, for sure, I had to go through that. I wouldn't have written all of those great songs -- come on! [Laughs.] It was important, and it was necessary, and it had to be.
What gives you hope about the world today?
I think Greta [Thunberg] is a great sign of hope. I love to see her talking, almost knocking these politicians down with her words. People are picking up on things and saying "I don't want this to go on."
You faced a lot of hostility when you first told people about your faith. Do you think the world has gotten any better at understanding Islam since then?
Well, we've got a Muslim mayor in London, so that's not bad. That's at least progress in one direction.
What have you learned from the pandemic era?
It's taught us all that we can change. I feel most sorry for those who were kept in their urban prisons -- a one-bedroom flat somewhere. That's scary.
What do you do to relax?
I may do some art, get into Photoshop. I might watch a bit of football. I swim to keep myself fit. I don't enjoy doing 30 lengths a day, but I do it, and as I do so, I try to remember the names of God, so that keeps me afloat. I'm also writing my autobiography.
How's that going?
It's absolutely my whole life. If you want to know about me and Jimi Hendrix, it's in there. Some friends have read it, and they went, "Oh, my God. I don't feel as if I've lived!"
What do you remember about Jimi?
We were doing a tour [in the spring of 1967]. It was the first time he lit his guitar on fire. They were screaming at me, saying "There's a fire onstage!" I was too scared in my dressing room, thinking about how I'm going to approach my set, to even bother about going down there [laughs]. We had some good times together, as well. We shared a few puffs, as you would, in that purple haze.
Are you still writing new songs?
Yep. I wrote a new song last week about the climate. It's two people, a husband and wife, talking about the old days -- a little like "Old Friends," by Simon and Garfunkel, but as a climate reflection. The songs are always going to be, in some way, leaning toward idealism and morality -- and the problems that get in the way.
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