1996

The Sex Pistols

with Skunk Anansie

Thebarton Theatre

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

In 1975 the Sex Pistols proved you could sell anything. Now, with their Filthy Lucre Tour they are proving that you can sell anything  twice. Never has a band been surrounded by such legend. Despite their best efforts not even Oasis can generate the tabloid loathing and fan fascination that, in their heyday, the Pistols engendered with their chaotic, apparently inept, anti-sound. They are the apotheosis of Punk, lords of low-fi, the stake through the heart of bourgeois pop. They are proof, as their Svengali manager Malcolm McLaren gleefully highlighted, that record companies will do anything to court those they most despise.

Back on the road, the Pistols have re-assembled the original firm – Paul Cook on drums, guitarist Steve Jones, exiled bassist Glen Matlock and of course, singer John Lydon aka Johnny Rotten. Despite their short three year history the band has a lengthy discography of repackaging including the Sid catalogue, the Ronnie Biggs sessions and a swag of bootlegs. It was smart of their current label to release an official tour album from their first Filthy Lucre show- the Finsbury Park concert in June- because already the unauthorised CDs are growing like hydra. As ever, everybody else is making a quid off the band.

Not that the chaps will be doing badly with a top ticket price and a playlist that doesn’t keep them out too late. As the crowds gathered at Thebarton the speculation about who would turn up for a Pistols gig was soon answered. Average age forty. Retired punks, old rogues, a few loonies conspicuous in their Third Reich t-shirts, and ordinary punters out for a bit of fun.

And that’s what they got. Support band Skunk Anansie, led by young black singer Skin, sets the pace with Let’s Get Political and a set from their Paranoid and Sunburnt CD. Selling Jesus, Little Baby Swatikkka and She’s My Heroine all hit home as Skin bobs and bounces among the rest of the band -Ace on guitar, Cass Lewis on bass and Mark Richardson, solid on drums. SA work hard, their musicianship emerging with each number. The highpoint was Skin’s moody femme love song, Weak. Weak as I am, no tears for you.

But, despite the three band support, we were there for the Unfab Four. Ever since the announced tour there have been jokes about the band’s musical proficiency and whether Lydon’s onstage antics would rival the gobbing, sneering, incoherent spleen of the Pistols at the height of their powerlessness.

As the snot-green stage lights reveal an elaborate backcloth of old Daily Mirror headlines, the band saunters on. Jones, with t-shirt and tatts, takes up his guitar. Cook climbs into the drum seat, Matlock still looks weedy under his bass. And then…. it’s Johnny. With a fetching corniced hairstyle in green and orange, a blue t-shirt and baggy black shorts he looks like Pere Ubu in a party hat. He stares imperiously at the crowd and waddles into Bodies, an oldie and a goodie which like the rest of the set comes from the definitive anthology, Never Mind the Bollocks, it’s…

White lights flood the auditorium as Lydon (he is never going to be anyone’s Rotten tonight) high steps backward and forwards to the moshing, waving, blissed-out enthusiasts at the foot of the stage. On to Seventeen (Lazy Sod) he holds the mike out to the crowd for some help with the chorus. It’s community singing. It could be an Arsenal crowd in anticipation of a comfortable win. We’re not worthy, Lydon chortles, prostrating himself as the audience cheers the end of No Feeling and heads into the Pistols’ Number Two hit from 1977, banned from the airwaves of the free world but known in every house of the realm- God Save the Queen/No Future. Lydon is Lord of Misrule, the punk Mr Punch, rolling his unmatched eyes and fluting his distinctive recitative above the three chord thump of what turns out to be a respectably tight trio.

It’s a love affair with the crowd. Lydon is beaming. You’re a fucking sight better than Melbourne, I’ll tell you that, chaps. He’s all flattery and conspiracy. Then it’s Liar and a beaty version of Stepping Stone before the band move into a slowed down rock version of Submission. It’s not half bad. Lydon’s vocals, increasingly dexterous after his PIL stint, are plaintively expressive. The man could be the next Al Bowlly. Holidays in the Sun is also a big favourite. The crowd sings most of it with the house lights up and Lydon full of beans while the band grafts away. Nice town, nice people, coos the former Mr Rotten, and the Sex Pistols close the set with We’re So Pretty and their tribute to a former employer, EMI.

But it wouldn’t be a Pistols show without the A word. In rapturous encore the crowd sings Anarchy in the UK like it were the words to Blake’s Jerusalem. I am a Anarchy. The Jamaican patois mixing in with the angelic chorus of football hooliganism at its zenith. Jones conducts with his index fingers, Cook bangs away on the drums, Matlock looks like Pete Best at a Beatles reunion and Lydon struts about, his once ferretty frame now in podgy middle life.

They finish with Problems and the show is over. Fifty five minutes running time, as the advance publicity had indicated. That’s about a  dollar a minute, customers. But no-one’s bothered. In the nineties theme park we’ve just had “The Sex Pistols”. They now play in inverted commas. Not only is there no future, there is also no past. The Sex Pistols have become their own tribute band.

The Adelaide Review, No.158, November, 1998, p.38.