Glen Matlock wrote all the Sex Pistols anthems, only to be ousted to make way for Sid Vicious. He tells Pete Clark about punk, Rotten, McLaren and the sheer madness of it all.

I'm sitting in a small rehearsal studio just off Kensal Road, watching Glen Matlock and the Philistines power through the title track of their current album, Open Mind. Glen thrashes away at an acoustic guitar, smilingly intent on the music. In London, at this time in the late afternoon, there will be 100 other newish bands whipping up a frenzy in front of an audience of a couple of mates at most. You could be forgiven for thinking that Glen was just another hopeful face in that crowd. But the man who was born in Kensal Green in 1956 has taken an exciting route to this nondescript room just down the road. You might say that he's been round the block a few times on the way.
After the rehearsal is over, and the other musicians have dispersed, Matlock sits outside a pub round the corner, by the canal, and mulls over the strange way his life has turned out. From time to time he takes a sip from a glass of orange and grapefruit juice. He is courteous, self-deprecating, humorous, and perhaps a trifle sad. Glen talks about the state of modern music: "A lot of it doesn't seem to me to be of any real consequence. This might sound like some old bloke talking, but I like music where you can appreciate that somebody's playing something. I can see a place for some of the modern stuff, but everybody's doing the same thing all the time, using the same sounds out of the same boxes. I like playing and I think the travelling troubadour is an honest occupation. I'm under no illusions that I'm going to be the next big thing."
Once upon a time, Matlock was part of the next big thing, one of the biggest next big things in pop music ever. Glen was a founder member of the Sex Pistols, the group that emerged in 1975 with the intention of giving the music world a kicking. Johnny Rotten was the focal point, a malevolent study in bad posture and worse dentistry. Behind him lurked Steve Jones and Paul Cook, members of the "no airs and graces" school of rock 'n' roll, laddish going on thuggish. And then there was Matlock, blessed with one of those classic English pop faces that can be seen in bands from the Small Faces onwards.
As befits a member of an iconoclastic combo, Matlock will have nothing to do with the often repeated legend of the Sex Pistols. "You know people have always said about the Pistols that it was 1976, year zero, and music started all over again. Well, that's absolute bollocks. In terms of music, everything inches forward a little bit at a time. The reason the Sex Pistols got together in the first place was that me, Steve and Paul loved the Faces. We didn't want to be the faces, but that was the common ground." Whatever the merits of the group, it cannot be denied that Matlock's tenure as exciting, brutish and short. By 1977, he was out of the group, pursued by the taunts of the rest of the band and manager Malcolm McLaren that he was too fond of The Beatles to have any future in outrage. From a position as part of a social phenomenon, Matlock was suddenly required to take up a position as a footnote to a history that would now be made without him.
I wondered if he felt cheated by this sudden fall from fame. Glen gave the matter a little thought, "I don't feel cheated," he began, "but I do feel annoyed that it happened at a time when I was young and too green to know the ropes. I have no problem with Sid (Vicious) taking my place. I wouldn't say he wasn't talented - he was a perfect media figure."

He pauses for a sip of fruit juice. "I get miffed that Sid was supposed to have done everything. All the songs of any consequence stem from when I was in the band. You have to keep saying it because certain people would like to rewrite history. I remember Mick Ronson once telling me that people never care who writes the songs, the great mass of the public just don't know. It matters to me."
When pressed on his relationship with the other three Pistols, Glen describes them as acquaintances. "Me and John didn't get on because he was the last one in the band. He thought I was with Steve and Paul, three against one, and he wanted to upset the balance of power. Later, it turned out that Sid thought John was a bit of a tosser and he sided with Steve and Paul. The irony was that there was a balance in the first place, but John didn't realise it. That's why it imploded."
Matlock is also remarkably fair-minded about Malcolm McLaren, the would-be Machiavelli with a host of artistic pretensions. "He love to think of himself like that," laughs Matlock, "but I'll tell you a little story. We had a song with a chorus and a first verse, but it needed some more lyrics. Malcolm told us to leave it with him while we rehearsed. A couple of hours later, we came back and he was sitting in this room with hundreds of bits of screwed up paper on the floor around him. That was it - his contribution to popular music !."
Matlock then balances the books. "The good thing about Malcolm was that he provided a scene. 'Let It Rock' (later 'Sex') was the hippest place in town, down the World's End. He called the people there tossers, and as he was like our big brother, we did too. We didn't have a pot to piss in, and we're standing around laughing at Keith Richards, Bryan Ferry and Freddie Mercury!"
Matlock is now a father and has given up booze that threatened to destroy his liver. He's comfortably off from royalties, but no multimillionaire. His was the inspiration behind the Sex Pistols reforming in 1996 for the Filthy Lucre tour - "I felt I had the last laugh in the end." He searches for some final words on the subject. "I suppose I was too much of a nice guy. I just wanted to be in a band. But I wrote Anarchy in the UK, God Save the Queen and Pretty Vacant. Every Sex Pistol record has my name on it. Not Sid's, mine."

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