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Pistol – anyone (not) going to watch this?

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Just seen the trailer.

It looks truly awful.

Talcy Malcy would surely approve.

I’ll be bingeing it the moment it appears next Tues

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  4. I’m going to watch it, and pick holes in the narrative and chronology.
    But then it is a drama based on a biography – I’m expecting more drama (or predictable and misplaced caricature representation) than biography.
    Looking at the trailer I reckon it’s more the untold story, that might not be true, but the one wee want to tell.
    Whatever, the court case, the social media denials and put downs between band members, and the Disney money can only be helpful to Glitterbest Limited / Sex Pistols Residuals.

  6. It does look predictably risible & even though I have zero time these days for Lydon, he may well have a point by slagging it (exactly as he did with Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy) as a ‘middle class fantasy’ bearing almost no resemblance to what happened.
    I like Danny Boyle & I really enjoyed Steve Jones’ book, but it does seem that the book was just the ‘in’ to retread all the stuff that virtually everybody already knows. A pity, because if it did actually focus on a Steve Jones’ story & his angle on the myth it could be very interesting. Maybe it will & I’m slating it prematurely, but judging by the trailers seems highly unlikely.

    • Completely agree with this. Steve Jones’ book is by far one of the best punk related music books out there and he had a terrific, as well as troubled tale to tell. Surprised at Danny Boyle.

  10. I suspect Mrs. T will nix this in our household anyway, but these rock biopics never really work to my mind. I may watch out of curiosity, but I have low expectations!

  13. Will try and watch, will it have stuff like a teacher or somebody telling a young Johnny Lydon that one day he may want to go for a “Holiday in the Sun” so knuckle down with your studies?

  15. Let’s see if, not having seen it, we can predict the cliches, bits of incorrect received wisdom, and historical rewriting.

    As above, plus

    a few song titles in telling dramatic moments ;
    Margaret Thatcher as key politician or PM despite Jim Callaghan, leading a Labour government until May 79 and the pistols splitting in January 1978;
    a band member gate crashing a middle class party where they are playing ‘nights in white satin’ or similar limp prog and they say “this is really boring”;
    Smokeless pubs;
    Audiences in perfect punk attire (in the punk gigs I went to in 1977, there were plenty of flares, shoulder length hair, etc, );
    Steve jones being significantly less uncouth than he was;
    Sid Vicious being deeper than the tragic berk he was;
    Not a lot of speed use;
    A significant lack of 70s grot.

    One could have Pistol cliche bingo (there’ll be three more from them later).

      • Bill Grundy interview on nation-wide TV.

        Pistols play second Manchester gig at sold-out G-Mex, with audience comprising everyone who ever claimed to have been at Lesser Free Trade Hall debut.

    • The audience one you mention is so spot on it’s painful.
      Even in the trailer, the briefest of glimpses of the audiences are chronic – far too old, far too well kitted out (in the sense of being a coordinated look) & FAR too enthusiastic.
      The actual original footage, such as it is, clearly shows handfuls of ‘look at me’ types that the camera inevitably lingers on, in a sea of flares, Kickers & decidedly non punky clobber.
      The full on punks I had any acquaintance with back then (older kids & friends’ older brothers & sisters) were very much a charity shop dead man’s suit & badges lot, with the odd edgy t shirt. There was no established look.
      The Seditionaries, Boy & similar crowd were almost universally derided as rich kids dressing up & anybody fully ‘kitted out’ was considered extremely suspect, sometimes for no other reason than a general prejudice. ‘ OK for you to dress up like that in Chelsea a couple of hundred yards from home, but wander around Woolwich or Lewisham, a kicking is guaranteed.’ The exceptions were the originals, Siouxsie, Severin & co, who were deemed so weird, that most people gave them a wide berth.

      • exactly.

        They don’t have many real working class people in acting and media now, either, and 70s’ version working class people and minorities would terrify media types.

        I was once telling a tv production crew about New Cross and Peckham in 1981, and you’d think from their reaction that it was Hell’s Kitchen in 1978. These folks dont cross the Thames to the proper side.

        • That has cracked me up, as it’s so on the money!
          Being from south of the river, it’s obviously baked in that south is the *real* London & that points north of the Thames were jokingly referred to as ‘faraway places with strange sounding names’.
          Looking back, it definitely could be pretty wild (on both sides of the SE/SW London divide) but I was unaware of the mythology it seemed to generate until I was older.
          At drama school (get me!) there was definitely a type of tutor & student who had me taped as the Artful Dodger because I dropped the odd aitch & assumed any book I’d read must have been pilfered in some kind of ‘caper’.
          I was a suburban grammar school boy ffs!

              • Definitely that. I wore a grandad t shirt the dog had chewed and my school blazer. With flared jeans, the flares made straight legged with clothes pegs. And shoulder length hair / nhs John Lennon glasses. In may/ June 1977 (my o level year), I saw the damned, adverts, the white riot tour, and genesis at Earl’s Court. Confused, me?

                • With a couple of pals & a 6th former from my school, we saw The Jam at the 100 club, & were all wearing our school uniform with the badges torn off & substituted black ties. I was the only one with straights, a pair of school trousers passed to my mum from a family friend (presumably from the early/mid ‘60s) Collectively, we got in huge sh*t when our cock & bull cover story was blown & we missed a vital train home & the parental ‘phone calls’ began…

  16. Despite best efforts, all the actors just look too middle class and confident. Not enough spots, too attractive, too obviously putting on a cockney accent.

  19. This looks rubbish, but I always make the same comment whenever we all pile in to slag off rock biopics, to remind people there are some good ones:

    – Nowhere Boy
    – Love and Mercy
    – Telstar
    – and Backbeat is all right as well

  20. Turned this on last night with rock bottom expectations and was very pleasantly surprised
    by how enjoyable it was – well the first two episodes anyway.

    A “punk panto” it may very well be, but pantos when done well are usually hugely good fun.
    And this is no exception. This being on Disney and having to cater for a broad audience than
    the likes of those of us who were there, there are the inevitably clunky bits of exposition.
    But the live music bits are handled well, and apart from the rather OTT portrayal of Talcy
    Malcy and Vivienne W, the acting is pretty good – Aussie actor Toby Wallace’s Steve Jones
    being especially good.

    Forget your preconceptions, give it a chance.and you might just have fun.

    • Only watched one episode so far but quite enjoyed it. I’m not a fan of the panto / cartoon style but it didn’t detract that much from fun. It’s worth a look if you can approach it as a dramatisation rather than a documentary.

      • Slight expansion: it’s really terrible and only of interest to people who have a stake in the myths of punk already, IMO. As Archie observed on Twitter, the two characters you’ve got to get right are Rotten and McClaren, and they’re both very ropey here. Also the Steve Jones bloke looks like Jamie Oliver, which is deeply offputting.

        I think my problem with it is, it takes as a given that punk was RILLY RILLY IMPORTANT, MAN, and more or less fails to interrogate any of the mythology at all. Fanfic makes for crap art every time, and this is no exception.

        A handful of good turns, mind, particularly Talulah Riley and Maisie Williams. The Chrissie Hynde actor is good too.

        • If punk meant something important to someone, I can’t contradict their own experience. But at the time, it wasn’t that simple. I was a student then and lots of us were interested in music. The Sex Pistols were pretty much regarded as old-fashioned show business – musically backward looking, and with a carefully contrived image, along the lines of Showaddywaddy. The thuggish part of the image didn’t impress any of us who’d had to deal with this at school.

          I know people say that it encouraged working class kids to think they could do something creative, but popular culture had been doing this for a long time. Skiffle had only been twenty years before.

          But I have to say that I do know that it did make some people see that they could do something different. I had a friend whose brother was a sort of roadie for a local punkish band. They weren’t up to much, but the singer had real stage presence, realised that this was his real strength and went on to be a pretty well know actor. The guitarist put in the hours and became a regular session man. The other two went back to the day job. The story of many youthful artistic endeavours.

          • McLaren saw them as the new Bay City Rollers, nothing to do with rock music at all. He didn’t want a cult, he wanted the mainstream. The music having any actual value wasn’t part of the original plan.

          • That panto aspect is basically what the show is, to my eyes. Nothing interesting except as a showcase for impersonations – but as I say, these are bad ones. I’m at a loose end so I watched the whole thing, and it was just flat, really. A big nothing, obviously in hock to its creators’ uncritical fandom. It even managed to make Vicious’s murder of Nancy Spungen a pure “oh my head, what a night… NOOO WHAT HAVE I DONE” excuse, bypassing the violence and mutual abuse of their relationship – two horrible fuckups – entirely in favour of a sort of “bless em” attitude in which you feel like every disgusting thing they did to each other and others somehow makes them the only victims – sort of ingenues on smack. Bleurgh. Pure Blackpool rock tourism.

            (If you’re going to do that, btw, I think it behoves you to have one magic “bloody hell” performance, a la Bohemian Rhapsody. This can’t be arsed even with that.)

        • Wow… hold your (flogging a dead) horse(s).

          There is nothing known to man as off-putting as the facial features of Steve Jones… if I was Jamie Oliver I’d be contacting my lawyer, forthwith.

  21. Yes, I kept on expecting the whole ludicrous edifice to collapse in on itself each time they introduced a new character or reached a pivotal moment in the Pistols’ history but they always managed to keep everything intact.

    Hope they keep it up for the four remaining episodes

  23. Just preparing my cynical mind to be free of seeking out historical and chronological inaccuracies before I dive in.
    It’s a drama telling “a” story, not “the” story – don’t go shouting at the telly.

    Can’t be any worse than Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy – shirley?

  24. Sex Pistols being discussed on the One Show right now.
    A peculiar circularity perhaps, as they were also being discussed (in quite a different light) on Nationwide around the same time 45 years ago

  26. We watched the first one and spent the episode explaining to Mrs. T who everyone was, where I knew! Not knowing a lot about the genesis of the Pistols myself other than the obvious bits, this intro episode was interesting, and I assume the Jones story is pretty much accurate as it is based on his book. I was never much of a fan, although I did buy two early singles, so any innaccuracies probably don’t grate as much as in some biopics. The music soundtrack is good – getting clearance for all of that must have been interesting. We will stick with it.

  27. I watched the first episode…

    …. Seconds to a shot of bin bags in Leicester Square – 6!

    It was crap but strangely watchable crap. the cast and Director are all working flat out to make it a damn site better than it should be,

  28. So I’ve now watched all six episodes, and I have to say I enjoyed it tremendously. I watched most of the last episode with my wife and every few seconds she would ask me “who’s he?” and “is he still alive?”

  29. Just finished this. I thought it’d be awful but ended up enjoying it. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s interesting and a laugh. I liked most of the actors, especially Steve Jones and Chrissie Hynde. I thought Thomas Thingummy-Whatsit was really good as McLaren, though he looked far too young for the part – younger than his charges. I wasn’t at all aware that Chrissie Hynde had a fling with Steve Jones and taught him guitar (I haven’t read the book). Definitely worth watching. Three stars from me.

    • There was a relationship of sorts between Chrissie Hynde and Steve Jones, not to the extent shown in Pistol, but the bit about marrying Steve Jones to stay in the country is true (she also nearly married John Lydon for the same reason).
      Not sure I believe the amount of antagonism between John Lydon and Steve Jones as portrayed, and I think Glen Matlock got a rough deal in the early episodes.
      The last episode I though the best – apart from the closing conversation between John and Steve which seemed over-contrived.
      True to form though – Paul Cook hardly said anything throughout the 6 hours

      Three Stars feels about right

      I know it’s called “Pistol”, but would’ve liked it if they’d gone into The Professionals, arriving skint in New York, and then how he ended up on Jonesy’s Jukebox – a straight to DVD sequel perhaps

  30. It think it depends or your view of punk. Life changing social and political activism via a musical revolution or just another version of pop music’s dressing up box no different to glam or Blitz or The Bay City Rollers. I’m in the second category and haven’t seen it yet but will get around to it. My expectations are set at low so hopefully it will be a good bit of fun especially Grundy…

    • I’m kind of in the first category. I often see middle class Italian mummy’s boys wandering around with their ripped jeans and face piercings and wonder if that would have happened all the same had young Lydon not existed.

      Having said that, I wouldn’t say enjoyment of the series depends on your view of punk. It’s interesting with regard to both the musical and the wider cultural history, but it’s also a pretty interesting little drama in itself.

      • Indeed, it is a drama not a BBC4 documentary’.and a Disney drama so it’s aimed at as big an audience as possible. No requirement to have even have heard of the Sex Pistols. It contains events that didn’t happen. None of this matters. It is what it is and hopefully lots of people will enjoy it.

        What is funny is that those people whose noses were so put out of joint by the very existence of punk are still seething about it 45 years later.

  31. I enjoyed Jonesy’s book more than I thought I would and the same goes for Pistol. Naturally, the book goes into more detail, about the abuse he suffered, the cloak of invisibility (astonishing what he stole and how he mostly got away with it) and the formation of the band. Recommended reading if you enjoyed the series.

  32. We are up to Ep 4 and are really enjoying it. I think I said elsewhere that I actually knew very little about them – living outside London at the time, they seemed to just appear from nowhere…..my memory is of the early singles and the album coming out, and then it imploding around the ridiculous Sid Vicious. I guess I must have read stuff in the NME, but this fills in the gaps and presents the human story. I just saw punk as part of the wider ‘back to basics’ movement that was happening in pubs and so on. I didn’t go along with all that ‘year zero’ stuff, but just thought there were some good records coming out. We did have a great band that appeared in Bristol in the wake of this (The Cortinas), and I loved them, but there was a lot of rubbish!

    I’ve listened to a few interviews with Steve Jones in the wake of the series, and that’s been really interesting….here is one, with Paul Cook as well…

    https://youtu.be/I31xJG2lSVg

  33. Has any other band apart from the post-Matlock Pistols used all their band members as lead vocalist? After Johnny left, Sid, Steve and Paul all had a go as vocalist.

  38. Late to the party, I know, but I watched this yesterday and do believe that was Elvis Costello’s dad walking down the King’s Road with the hippy gear on five minutes in to the first episode

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