Continuing his collaborative compatibility with guitarist Earl Slick, Glen Matlock has released “Consequences Coming,” a rockabilly-flavored single from a forthcoming album he hopes to release sometime this year. Matlock, an original Sex Pistol who played with such artists as Iggy Pop, Slim Jim Phantom, Blondie’s Clem Burke, and Midge Ure after leaving the punk pioneers in 1977, has certainly found his niche in the often overcrowded music world by simply being himself and expanding out from there. His last album, the fun rocking Good To Go released in 2018, was his best solo album to date, proving you can move out of what you’re best known for and make good music.
As Matlock told me last week, he never wanted to be only known for the songs he wrote with the Pistols. “I’m always more interested in the next song that I write and not one I wrote forty years ago.” Forty-plus years ago, Matlock was a teen working in a shop owned by Malcolm McLaren and joining up with some guys starting a band. Although his tenure in that band, which also featured singer John Lydon, guitarist Steve Jones and drummer Paul Cook, was very short-lived, Matlock formed the Rich Kids, recording one album, Ghosts Of Princes In Towers in 1978, before contributing bass to Iggy Pop’s 1980 Soldier album, that also featured several songs he had co-written with Pop and one sole original, “Ambition.”
Matlock was also in the International Swingers and Hot Club, did some reunion tours with the Sex Pistols, toured and recorded with the Philistines and wrote a memoir, I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol.
So while Covid has caused musicians to stay home, Matlock is ready to be back out on the road. I spoke with him about working with Earl Slick, booking the first Sex Pistols gig, being an artist of many musical colors, remembering Sylvain Sylvain and who he thinks is better than Elvis.
You’re working with Earl Slick again. Was this all planned before or after Covid?
We’ve been playing together for a few years now. He played on an album of mine, my last album, Good To Go. And we actually made, a year ago now, another album but it’s not out yet due to Covid and stuff. We’d been touring last year, and the year before actually, till the beginning of last year. Then lockdown happened and he got stuck here. For a few months he was staying with me and we did some online things and then we also recorded some things, just at home, you know, like in a basement tapes kind of way. I dug out a couple of tracks that we recorded and we’ve put out an acoustic single. Simple as that, really. No big deal, just fun.
You mentioned an album. Is this a solo album for you or is this an actual project with you and Slick?
No, I think it’s a solo album but we do shows as Glen Matlock Band Featuring Earl Slick so it’ll probably be like that. But yeah, it’s mainly my songs with Slick’s contribution and other people’s contributions. I got a few different people playing on things. I’ve got a regular band over here but I’m actually going to put out an EP soon with a couple of tracks from the new album that’s not released yet. There are a couple of new songs I’d written earlier this year and I was talking to a friend of mine in Los Angeles, Clem Burke, the drummer from Blondie, and he’ll play drums on these new tracks, which he’ll do online, but you can do that these days. And I’ll probably get Slick to play and maybe another friend to play too. So yeah, it’s just kind of loose and see what happens. We seem to work well together. It’s good, you know.
You guys have such a great chemistry together. Would you say working with Slick has been the most natural or easiest musical partnership in your career?
I don’t know about the most. I’ve been lucky to play with some very good people but he’s a great guitar player. When I first met him I was doing a session with him in upstate New York in a place called Rhinebeck. There’s a good studio up there, actually where we recorded the Good To Go album, but it was a project with Clem Burke and this other guy, a mutual friend, and he kind of got me and Slick together, really. But the very first song we did, Slick said, “What key is it in?” and I told him and he got his capo out and I said, “Are you going to use that?” and he said, “Yeah,” and I said, “Well, that’s cheating, isn’t it?” And he said, “Oh, if you’re going to be like that,” and I said, “Yeah, I am going to be like that.” “Fair enough” (laughs)
But I’ve known Slick now for about ten or twelve years now. I’ve done a few different projects with him and we’ve got a relationship kind of like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau (laughs). He’ll ask me how it should go and I tell him and then he does something totally different (laughs).
The new single, “Consequences Coming,” has a rockabilly kick to it.
Well, the last album, the Good To Go album, see I’d been doing lots of acoustic shows for many years, around the world, different venues and things, and I’d written a bunch of songs. And I also went to see Bob Dylan at the Albert Hall and as much as I can appreciate Bob Dylan, I think live he’s dreadful. He’s got a real disdain for the audience, he looks like he doesn’t want to be there. So I kind of concentrated on the band and the band he had was fantastic. It was Charlie Sexton on guitar, who is actually friends with Slick, Tony Garnier on bass, and the drummer, I can’t remember what the drummer’s name was, but he played everything with brushes and stuff. And I thought, all these songs I want to do, I don’t want to keep doing this same old rrrrr punk thing. If I want to do that I might as well do it with the Sex Pistols.
So who do I know who won’t be so overbearing as a drummer? And I’d been friends with Slim Jim Phantom for like forty years and I said, “Would you play some drums on it?” And he said, “I’d love to.” I said, “Do you have any ideas for a guitarist?” and he said, “How about Slick?” I didn’t know that he knew him. I’d already done a bit with Slick before so it all kind of fell into place, really. But by playing with Slim Jim, I knew he wants to swing all the songs so it’s a bit more rockabilly. So I think the rockabilly bit came from Slim Jim but I don’t mind that cause I kind of like that anyway, cause it’s a bit of a different style for me.
But on the new album that we made, Slim Jim isn’t on because he was doing his Stray Cats thing when I was doing it and I got my guy on it. So it’s a slightly different thing but using Earl, the songs kind of come out a bit edgier. But lyrically, “Consequences Coming,” you’ve had the whole Trump thing over there and I don’t know what you feel about that. I know what I feel about it. But we’ve got the whole Brexit thing going on over here and I don’t like it. I think they’re going to come unstuck so basically I’m saying in the song that I hope there’s going to be some consequences coming down the line.
Do you like your Prime Minister?
No. I think he’s a nasty piece of work who poses as a buffoon. He’s made it really complicated for people in the arts and music and actors, people in production, to work properly, all so they can protect their offshore banking. It’s evil. Boris Johnson is a nasty piece of work.
Why did you choose “Constant Craving” as the so-called B-side?
Well, on the last album I actually did a cover of “Montague Terrace,” which is a Scott Walker song, a big ballad. I’ve always loved “Constant Craving,” I’ve always liked kd lang, and it was just something that was knocking around and it’s got quite complicated chords. I like the lyrics of the song and I think it kind of applies to what was going on in lockdown and other things going on and we all had kind of a yearning for something a bit better and I think the song encapsulates all those things. And it’s the last song I think people expect from the original bass player for the Sex Pistols to be coming up with. And to me, that’s a good reason for me to do it than not do it
When you were a kid growing up, were you ever into the rockabilly and the music coming out of Sun Records?
Oh yeah, yeah, I was aware of it and hip to it and before punk in England when there wasn’t a lot going on, there was a little sub-genre of rock & roll bands, maybe sort of tribute acts and rockabilly things. The first gig I ever did was at my art college and the band we supported was a band called Bazooka Joe, who were named after the American bubblegum, and they were a rockabilly band. There was another band called Brent Ford & The Nylons, and there were older rock & roll bands like Shakin’ Stevens & The Sunsets, doing old rock & roll covers and I liked all that. It was a much simpler version of all the progressive rock that’d been going on, which was very Shakespearian, to the fact that it was much ado about nothing really. So yeah, I’ve always liked those songs. I’ve also liked, you know, when you’re a kid sitting there with your mum and dad watching Tv, some variety show, and you have Anthony Newley on or Jack Jones or Frank Sinatra or Judy Garland, things like that. The songs were fantastic. So I’ve got a bit of that in me somewhere as well and it all comes out in the mix.
What did you think of Elvis?
I liked his early stuff but if you put Elvis next to Gene Vincent, I’d vote for Gene Vincent. I think it’s maybe because Gene Vincent was a little bit more rock & roll somehow. I mean, I know his early recordings are fantastic and probably one of the first records I actually physically put on when I was a kid was probably “Hound Dog.” But to me, Gene Vincent is a bit cooler than Elvis. Elvis always had a bit of showbiz, too much showbiz in him. I’m not denying he’s a great singer and he had some good songs and had a great team around him.
What concerts were you going to see back in your teens?
I really started going to see bands when I was about sixteen. There was the Marquee Club here and I’d go if there was a band I really liked, like the Sensational Alex Harvey Band, who I kind of followed from when there was only like ten people watching. I was a big fan of a band called the Faces, which you’ve probably heard of, with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood. I was actually lucky about ten years ago cause I got to do some gigs with them. That was a buzz. I liked the Small Faces, I liked older early Mod rock bands, like the early Who and the Kinks and the Small Faces and the Yardbirds and the Stones. I liked the Dave Clark Five. I didn’t see a lot of those bands cause I was too young but I saw the very original New York Dolls supporting the Faces at Wembley with Billy Murcia, who was the original drummer, about two weeks before he died. I used to go to a lot of things I could get into for nothing, no matter who they were (laughs).
Did you ever see John Mayall?
No, I would have liked to have seen him but it just wasn’t my circuit. Funny enough, I’m quite good friends with his two sons, Jason and Gaz. We’re kind of sort of neighbors and I see them around. But talking about the early blues stuff, one of my most treasured records is Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated Live At The Marquee. It’s got Cyril Davies on it and he was like a contemporary of Mayall’s. Those two bands, that’s where people like Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker and Charlie Watts and Mick Taylor all came out of that early Blues scene. I was too young for that. That was only something I picked up on in retrospect.
What attracted you to the music that would become punk?
Well, to be honest, punk didn’t exist before we did the Sex Pistols in this country. It’s kind of funny really, we learned how to play and it just kind of came out that way (laughs). You’ve got the backdrop of bands like Jethro Tull and Genesis and Yes, who were doing all these big convoluted songs about angels and demons and fairies. It was just all nonsense. We all initially came from a background in rock & roll and were around at Malcolm McLaren’s shop, which was a rock & roll teddy boy shop, and when Rocky Horror Picture Show was on in London, before it was made into a movie it was a stage play, and that was on down the road and we were quite hip seeing some of those people walking around. It was all somehow in the mix and maybe it was the tail end of the Glam rock thing and we liked the Spiders From Mars and early Roxy Music. There was a little bit of all that in there somehow.
I talked to Chris Spedding a few years ago and he told me there was nothing unusual about the Sex Pistols except their attitude, that they were a rock & roll band but a lot of people didn’t get that part. Do you agree with that?
Yeah, maybe. I’ve known Chris for years and he produced our very first demo, which you probably know. He was like the go-to session guitarist around at the time. But yeah, Chris knows what he’s talking about and he’s a fantastic guitarist. I played with him and Slim Jim with Robert Gordon and he’s a pretty crabby guy. I like Robert but he’s Walther Matthau’s Walter Matthau (laughs).
Is it true you found the Sex Pistols their first gig?
Yeah, I booked it at my art college. I booked the first four or five shows. I was at art college and had some connections there and I’d just go around there and see the social secretaries and ask them to play. The second gig we did was at a place called Central School Of Art. The social secretary, who I am still friends with today, was called Alexander McDowell. He did very well in the art world and he lives in Los Angeles now. But he called me up one day and said, “I’m here,” and I said, “Where are you?” And he said, “At Pinewood.” It’s a big studio where they do James Bond movies and lots of things. I said, “What are you doing there?” And he was art directing Star Wars 9. And he was the guy who actually booked the first Sex Pistols show. He never ended up doing that movie in the end because that was when Carrie Fisher died and the whole script was based on Carrie Fisher so the whole production team had to rewrite the whole script and he said he couldn’t continue because he had other commitments in Los Angeles and he had to split.
But you know, out of that whole punk thing, lots of people, from the very first people who were around, nearly all of them went on to do something of consequence. Billy Idol was one of the guys, Siouxsie from the Banshees, photographers and fashion designers and publicists and stuff. It was a very, very creative period and more than being part of the Sex Pistols, I’m kind of proud being part of that little core of people.
You often do “Pretty Vacant” in your live sets. Is there another song off the Bollocks album that you also enjoy doing live?
I know we do “God Save The Queen” but that kind of lends itself to having a bit more rockabilly feel to it. It’s a bit of a tricky thing. I know people want a Sex Pistols song or two. I don’t really want to have to do one, so I kind of just do it for the people who are there that night. The problem for me is then people take a video and put it up on YouTube. We’ve got no control of that and then it looks like you’re just trying to cash in. But I don’t look forward to doing it but once I’m playing it, I always do everything I do do to the best I possibly can. But I’m always more interested in the next song that I write and not one I wrote forty years ago.
I want to ask you about your relationship with the acoustic guitar. How far back does that go with you?
That’s what I started out playing. Being a bass player was secondary. What I found out with acoustic guitar is that if you’re trying to learn somebody’s song when you’re learning, sometimes you get some sheet music and the chords are too hard – and this is when you’re younger – they’re too hard so it doesn’t necessarily sound like what you’re trying to play. But it sounds so different from what you’re trying to play you’ve got a new idea. So it’s easier to continue with that and write your own song. That’s how I got into songwriting, really. It was cause what I was trying to play was a bit too hard (laughs).
But I’ve always played the acoustic guitar. All the Sex Pistols songs that I was involved in writing, I wrote at home on my acoustic guitar. Then I’d take that idea into the rehearsal room and you knew it was going to be beefed up a little bit and that’s how it came about. But I like playing acoustic. Even doing gigs now I try and play acoustic but it all depends on how good the sound system is at the gig cause we got Earl Slick blasting away and the drums and bass all turned up to ten, it all starts feeding back.
I liked the early Spiders From Mars, with Mick Ronson and Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey and Bowie. But the rhythm guitar on that is Bowie playing acoustic and it sort of gives it a sort of rockabilly kind of swing. And when it locks in with a hi-hat on the drums, it all starts kicking off. That’s why I do it, to kind of get that across really. I mean, I could pick up an electric and do like Steve Jones but Steve Jones does that really well so why not do something different.
Of all the records you have recorded, which one do you think you had your best bass sound on?
“Anarchy In The UK” but I had a thing after the Sex Pistols called Rich Kids and we had some good stuff on that and while doing the Rich Kids album I got to work with Mick Ronson, who produced it, and that’s not a bad thing. In fact, he even plays piano on a track called “Ghosts Of Princes In Towers,” which is good. We had started doing demos for a second album, which we never made in the end, but I was in this little recording studio putting an idea down and Ronson came down and I said, “You want to play on something?” He said, “I’m not going to play guitar,” so he played drums instead. Somewhere in my box, I’ve got a cassette tape of the song Mick Ronson played drums on. Not many people can say that, but you know what, he couldn’t really play drums (laughs).
We lost Sylvain Sylvain this year. Any special memory you can share with us?
He was just a lovely, lovely kind of guy. I like what he said about the New York Dolls, he said, “Most bands have success. There’s people that like the fashion, people like the influence you make, people like the records that you made. And then there’s the money you make from doing it. That’s maybe the four things that make a successful rock & roll band. We didn’t get the money but we got the other three right. People love us so three out of four’s not bad.” And that was his kind of way of looking at life.
But there’d been some talk about him coming over to play with the very early Sex Pistols, even before John was in the band, cause Malcolm McLaren had met him in New York and they wrote to each other. But it didn’t happen. When I was playing with Iggy Pop in New York in 1979, we had a night off and I went to some art gallery opening and I met David Johansen on the street and then somebody said, “Oh, let’s go and eat.” So somebody took me and a couple other people to this restaurant in Little Italy called Puglia and there was a guy playing the Hammond organ, family favorite tunes, and there was a tap on the shoulder and I turned around and it was Sylvain Sylvain. He’d seen me walk in and he introduced himself and we’ve been friends ever since. Not really great friends cause we didn’t live in the same country. But I did a couple of acoustic shows with him, like a double-header tour, along the East Coast and up into Canada. It was just me and him in a van. I was doing the driving and he’d do it another day.
Then he got ill and it was hard to get in touch with him and it was all a bit sad, really. The last time I saw him was maybe two and half or three years ago. He’d put a book out [There’s No Bones In Ice Cream] and he came to London to do some promo and I went down and we chatted and said we’d keep in touch but didn’t really. But a lovely, lovely guy; very influential in music. I’ve never found one person who had bad words to say about Sylvain. Oh and the other thing is when I did some shows around about that period, he just turned up. I was doing some shows with Earl and he turned up at the show. I only saw him after the show. If I’d seen him at the beginning I’d invited him up to play with us but he didn’t tell me he was there.
I saw him only once, when the New York Dolls were opening for Motley Crue in 2011.
I saw the New York Dolls open for Alice Cooper probably round about the same time. I went down with my young son to the Alexandra Palace and I think it was coming up to Halloween and we were there for soundcheck and the Alice Cooper band were playing and they started playing “Fire.” I wasn’t really paying attention and then I thought, that don’t sound like Alice Cooper. And I looked around and they actually had Arthur Brown up there. Alice Cooper had invited Arthur Brown up to sing for the encore and they did “Fire” and Alice Cooper stood at the back of the stage and sang backing vocals and it was really cool. The Dolls were supporting him but as I was watching The Dolls in the early evening, I’m standing next to this bloke in a red track suit and it was Arthur Brown and he was dancing to the New York Dolls (laughs). Then recently I did a charity record that Clem played on, I put some bass on it, Chris Spedding did the guitar, and we did “All Right Now” and Arthur Brown sang it. So I’m actually on a record with Arthur Brown (laughs).
Anything with the International Swingers?
That’s kind of been and gone really. It was a little project with friends that I liked and it was fun while it lasted. But I’m sixty-four now and I know I’m not the best singer in the world but I think I’ve got some good songs and unless I do them myself then nobody else is going to so I might as well do it. It was a drag about lockdown last year cause we had quite a lot of work that we had to put off. It was just beginning to pick up with me doing my own stuff with Slick in tow and some other good players so hopefully later on this year we can tour in the UK and Europe and I’d love to come back to America. And I want to get this new record out. It’s really good actually.
Top photo courtesy of Glen Matlock
