Matlock at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s 430 Kings Road shop and Duffty at Steph Raynor and Helen Robinson’s PX in London’s Covent Garden. Glen Matlock and Keanan Duffty were, at separate times ‘Saturday Boys’.
GLEN MATLOCK IGGY POP MODS
Carnaby Street, the Kings Road and Covent Garden created a hotbed for many subcultures, from Mods to Hippies, Punks to New Romantics. During those decades the English capitol proved to be the most inspirational, controversial and innovative of places. Only a few capitol cities have inspired youth culture as much as London did in the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
For this, Glen Matlock, we salute you.Sex Pistols founder and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Glen Matlock and Council of Fashion Designers of America member Keanan Duffty will visit Polimoda on January 11th, 2017 to discuss the fascinating intersection of fashion and Music and it’s effect on modern culture, opening the Polimoda Rendez-Vous cycle for 2017 with a guest lecture entitled The Saturday Boys. The Sex Pistols came to burn down rock and roll, but this Ex Pistol is doing his bit to keep music live. It’s a long hard road from angry young man to cheesy crowd-pleaser, but it should be noted that this small crowd was genuinely pleased. The set ended with a rowdy version of Matlock’s signature tune, Pretty Vacant, delivered in the style of a cheeky cockney Chas & Dave knees up. It takes the vocal charisma and lyrical talent of a Graham Parker or John Hiatt to transform this kind of over-familiar raw material into something worth paying attention to. His microphone technique could be described as giving it bit of welly and hoping for the best. But Matlock lacked the singing voice to take it up a level. The set was a mixture of spirited Matlock originals in over-familiar garage and blues forms, interspersed with choice covers including melodramatic Scott Walker ballad Montague Terrace (in Blue), a rough-and-ready version of The Jackson Five’s I Want You Back and a rousing take on The Faces’ All or Nothing. With Joe Stummer’s regular drummer Chris Musto and Stereophonics’ producer Jim Lowe on bass, they looked like the kind of band you might have stumbled across in bars from Newcastle to Nashville since the late Fifties, and played like that too, chopping out familiar riffs and licks with the cheery élan of old pros. Matlock’s quiff was outshone by the brylcream sculpture of Neal X (aka Neal Whitmore) from Eighties new wave one-hit wonders Sigue Sigue Sputnik, who knocked out tasty lead on a white-hollow body Gibson and posed like he was auditioning for the cover of the Clash’s London Calling. He wore a cocked straw boater over his long grey quiff and goatee beard, playing deft rhythm guitar and fronting a quartet dressed in loose suits and ties. Hallelujah! Lord be praised!Īt 64, Matlock has grown into a rakish rhythm’n’blues trouper. And honestly, it was great just to hear the raw juice of a Gibson Les Paul with P90 pickups plugged into a valve amp.
But Matlock’s was the only show in town, perhaps the only rock show in the whole world. I’ve seen bigger audiences in the backroom of a pub, and, frankly, much better bands too. Let us call it the first gathering of Rockers Anonymous, where hardened gig-goers assemble to assuage live withdrawal symptoms by watching any old dodgy line-up a venue can cobble together. Before the lights went down, it resembled a sparsely attended church hall meeting of old punks. It has a capacity of 1,500 but on Thursday it was laid out to accommodate a fraction of that, with a tiny audience of around 100 paying £30 a head to sit in bubble groups of free-standing chairs and wooden bench tables. With a high ceiling above a wooden floor, the two-storey Camden venue has always been an adaptable space, hosting clubs, roller discos, wrestling tournaments and indoor markets as well as staging shows by artists from The Clash to Prince. “Pretty vacant” would be a fair description of the Electric Ballroom for Matlock’s one-off socially distanced show. Always the most musical of the original punks, Matlock famously composed Pistols’ anthem Pretty Vacant by basing the classic four-note riff on SOS, by ABBA. You can get away with a lot when you co-wrote an album as seminal as Never Mind the Bollocks. For the subsequent 43 years he has been a jobbing musician, in and out of forgotten groups, guesting with Iggy Pop, The Damned and the Faces, and occasionally participating in lucrative Pistols reunion tours. The Sex Pistols couldn’t get far enough away from him after he was kicked out for “liking the Beatles” in 1977, only to be replaced by the musically incompetent Sid Vicious.Īt 22, Matlock was bassist in the most exciting punk band on the planet. Glen Matlock should be used to social distancing by now.
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