Glen Matlock And The Philistines
Open Mind
PEPPERMINT

Gruffly melodic fare with its tongue in its cheek from the ex-Sex Pistol.

LEGEND HAS it that Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren sacked Glen Matlock from the Sex Pistols because he was too enamoured of The Beatles. Truth is - and it's borne out again on this enjoyable album -three-quarters of the band who were supposed to destroy all that had gone before were more than a little besotted with the Mod movement and its offspring.

Open Mind is stuffed full of ringing, gruffly melodic fare that has its roots in Small Faces-related doings, but has its tongue just far enough into its cheek to rule out particularly rigorous criticism of this retro bent - Sound Of Swinging London starts with the chimes of Big Ben played on electric guitar, far goodness sake. The ghosts of punk also hang out in the back bar: the superb Catatonic tips its hat to The Damned, while Speed Of Sound is pure Clash. Not innovative, then (once a lifetime's enough), but bloody good fun.

There are a couple of musical quotes from the Pistols on the album Was that deliberate?

"Are there? (Laughs) Nah. You write the way you write and that just comes out. You're always borrowing from people, but you have to disguise it if you're clever. I bet NoeI Gallagher wishes he'd done more of that. When I played the finished album to Mick Jones [who contributes to a couple of tracks], he said it sounded like a Small Faces album - which I took as a compliment There's no point in me trying to put dance bits in; that's a slippery' slope."

Your singing seems a lot stronger now, like a Cockney Bob Dylan.

"I'll go with that! When I was younger my three favourites were Lennon, John Fogerty and Noddy Holder. What you've got is me trying to sound like them and failing miserably. I suppose the knees-up-Mother-Brown bit is not the coolest thing in the world, (but it's there deep within one's psyche(!)) -and I don't particularly want to sound mid-Atlantic, though some people have accused me of it."

So are you happy with Open Mind??

"I'm happier with it than I've been with anything far quite a Iong time. On Who's He Think He Is When He's At Home? [Creation, 1996] the songs were there, but we had a Chad VaIIey production and I hadn't got my voice together. This is my grown-up album - or perhaps that's growing up."

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