Original subtitles

[Iggy Pop]: Previously on Punk...

♪ Ah-na-na-na ♪

Bonk!

I just wanted to shock people out of their normalcy.

[Legs McNeil]: I mean, come on,

the greatest fuckin' lyrics in the...

Well, besides the Ramones.

Hello.

"Kick out the jams, motherfuckers."

The grown-ups were fucking this up big time.

[Johnny Rotten]: I've learned that telling the truth

is a very good way of life...

...but there's this mediocrity that journalists create

that still want you to believe

that this is something of a sham and a joke.

[David Vanian]: When all this first started,

there was no word "punk."

As soon as the word "punk" went up in Britain,

it was something to be disdained, you know,

it was something terrible,

and the press just made it worse.

The cult is called punk, the music, punk rock.

Basic rock music, raw, outrageous, and crude.

I mean, they just looked at us

as though we were kind of weird,

like, why were we doing this?

And we were very, very aware of a few bands

across the sea in New York

who were sort of in the same mindset.

[Terry Chimes]: And we weren't trying to be like them,

and they weren't trying to be like us.

It was just two parallel things.

[Joe Strummer]: We are the real McCoy.

We're not going to just fold up,

and in a few weeks,

you'll wonder what all that was about.

We're going to be here,

and continuing to get harder, and rougher, and tough.

That's what music is supposed to be teaching us.

Have you been taught?

[♪♪♪]

[screaming and cheering]

[♪♪♪]

[drum roll]

["God Save the Queen" plays]

[♪♪♪]

[song ends with a drum roll]

[Johnny Rotten]: Finsbury Park was the area I grew up in.

We'll call it North London.

At seven, I contracted meningitis.

I went into a coma.

When I came out of that,

which was something like three months later,

I had no memory at all.

I remembered nothing of anything.

Not a knife, a fork,

no physical co-ordination,

and I'd be having intense, nasty visions

and nightmares.

Well, I went through that.

Four years it took to fully recover my memories,

but all the way through, still, music was there,

because my mum and dad,

they were really avid record collectors,

so I grew up with reggae

just as well as I did with The Kinks,

just as well as I did with Irish folk dancing,

and the traditional Irish singers,

and everything,

everything and anything,

and classical music too,

and somehow Iggy Pop's in there.

[♪♪♪]

♪ Yeah! ♪

[♪♪♪]

♪ Dance to the beat of the livin' dead ♪

♪ Lose sleep, baby and stay away from bed... ♪

I loved that growly voice.

Oh, my God, I'd never heard that in rock music.

That "rawr"...

just rippin' it up,

and there was this, like, hardcore, in your face,

violent sound

that absolutely upset everything inside your head.

Loved it.

I thought it was the essence of pure, hardcore rock.

Not rock 'n' roll. Rock.

[Viv Albertine]: Iggy Pop was very revered,

and he embodied the whole punk spirit for me,

and when he came across to London,

it was so exciting.

[♪♪♪]

But if you trace everything back, man,

all roads stop with Iggy Pop.

He struck a chord with the UK punk movement

like no other American band.

[♪♪♪]

♪ Everybody always trying to tell me what to do ♪

At the time that punk was starting to re-emerge

through The Damned and the Sex Pistols in London,

I was on the continent

thinking in a whole other direction.

[David Bowie]: There was something with Jimmy

that I hadn't seen in rock and roll,

an unleashing of the animalistic kinds of rock

that you never really see.

It's always usually safeguarded,

and very, very safe.

Do you feel you've influenced anybody?

I think I helped wipe out the '60s.

[laughter]

[applause]

[Pop]: And so everybody was having a good time,

but in England,

the whole subject was taken much more seriously,

and it wasn't until

they actually had to deal with the Sex Pistols

that all of a sudden the cat was out of the bag.

♪ ...and we don't care... ♪

[♪♪♪]

♪ Don't ask us to attend 'cause we aren't all there ♪

♪ Don't pretend yeah, we don't care ♪

♪ I got no reason it's all too much ♪

♪ You'll always find us ♪

♪ Out to lunch... ♪

[Rotten]: We weren't liked,

but then again,

all of our early gigs, we weren't liked.

I never heard myself,

just like in rehearsals,

because we had no monitors, you know?

Our genius of a manager never thought that, you know,

a lead singer might like to hear himself.

So for me, it was just a puzzle in that band, really,

right up to the first time we actually had monitors,

of why they were telling me I was awful.

I was imagining I was, oh, my god,

Roy Orbison, you know?

That ain't what was going on at all.

The first time I did hear myself with monitors

was at the 100 Club,

supporting a band called Eddie and the Hot Rods.

They had monitors,

and they were very, very, very kind to loan them to us,

and that backfired really badly,

because the second I heard

what I really, really sounded like,

it made me furious.

So rather than blame myself,

[chuckling] I blamed the monitors...

and the mic stand went through,

and I caused some damage to their personal property,

and I still feel very bad about that,

but not really.

[♪♪♪]

Malcolm.

It's not complicated, really.

There was a man

who wanted to grab all the attention for himself

and be seen as a genius.

[Vanian]: The Clash, The Damned,

and the Sex Pistols

all had people working for them,

or managers,

who were maybe 10 years older, and had been in the rag trade,

so they were all very similar,

but they understood that something good

and interesting was happening,

and they wanted to get a piece of it, basically.

[Rotten]: We did all the work,

us, the band.

We wrote the songs.

We went out and endured the audiences,

and he would sit in an office

and plan on buying a new lampshade,

or things like that,

but never really interested

in what the runnings of all of this was,

until, of course, good reviews started coming in.

I played the part of being a manager.

I didn't do much managing.

I did a lot of mismanaging.

[laughs]

[Vanian]: Malcolm.

We used to call him "Malcolm What-Can-I-Do-You-For,"

basically, because he was a...

he was a very Fagin-type character to us,

I thought, you know.

He's not the kind of guy

I would want to have as my manager at the time,

or anything.

He was just the guy who ran the clothes shop,

as far as I knew.

[♪♪♪]

The only reason I think I ever went to his shop

was that I had a girlfriend at the time

that wanted to buy a pair of high-heeled shoes.

I suppose I was no different than any young guy back then.

You know, it wasn't so much an angry time,

but a hell of a lot of frustration.

The worst thing, I think, was

you've come out of school, you're...

and there's no work,

and I hadn't signed on the dole

because I thought I'd like to work and make some money,

but it came to a point where I had to,

and I was walking down this hill,

and there was an old cemetery,

Heath Lane Cemetery,

and there was a guy in it,

and he was digging a grave whilst whistling to himself,

but very happy...

[whistling]

...and I thought if I did that job temporarily,

it wasn't a job where I'd have to think about anything.

I could get the work done

and get down to London,

and see if I could do something,

whatever it was going to be,

and so I ended up being a gravedigger,

and it was the perfect...

the perfect thing,

'cause I had some money in my pocket.

London at that time was...

you know, you didn't know what it was, even,

but everybody was very frenetic with excitement,

and there were writers and artists

and people that would become bands and musicians.

You'd end up going down, and you'd meet up with someone,

you'd end up in some house,

or a gig, or whatever,

and then eventually,

I suddenly ended up in The Damned.

♪ One, two, three! ♪

♪ Oh, she's so ♪

♪ Messed up ♪

♪ She don't even ball ♪

♪ Well, she's so messed up ♪

♪ She has no fun at all ♪

♪ She's a sad case ♪

♪ Of hit and run ♪

♪ I think that I ♪

♪ Would rather fuck her mum... ♪

[Vanian]: It was funny, because in those early years,

you would meet people with similar interests,

and they invariably would look different

than the normal person on the street in some way.

The Kings Road became a place where people congregated,

and bands used to go there

because they would shop in that area.

There was really weird designers and clothes.

It was no longer about wearing the uniform.

It was "do whatever you want.

Be your own person.

Create your own style.

Make your own clothes."

It was the beginning of all of that.

I think it scared the shit out of the adults,

but for the kids, they loved it.

[horn honking]

[laughter]

[Rotten]: Before the leather jackets and the studs

was true punk, which was a mismatch of things.

Maybe one designer piece,

but you'd have to make sure the designer was the right one,

and the right one at that time

was Vivienne Westwood.

[Vivienne Westwood]: You can undo the hooks

and tie them together if you want to.

There's also a hole here.

I could put my arms through there,

and use this sleeve as scarves, right?

[Albertine]: A couple of days a week,

me and my friends, we'd go up to Sex,

Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren's clothes shop

at the end of the King's Road.

How she was about clothes and fashion

absolutely influenced me,

and gave me the courage to start to try and write songs,

because Vivienne would take something like a t-shirt,

she'd get a batch of t-shirts from India.

They didn't look right.

The collars weren't right, the sleeves weren't right,

and so she'd say, "Right,

I'm going to cut the collars off,

cut the sleeves off, cut the bottom off,

can't be bothered to sew them,

leave them frayed,

and write something really powerful, shocking,

that's going to grab attention across the front,"

and what that taught me

was it doesn't matter if you sing a bit out of tune,

out of time.

What have you got to say?

[Don Letts]: The style, the look,

her kind of a visionary take

on the possibilities of what you can do with clothes,

and the statements that they can make.

I mean, listen, in England, you know,

clothes and music, they're like this, man.

You really can't separate them,

much more so than in the States.

[Pam Hogg]: When I went to New York,

I was expecting to walk down the street

and see everyone looking like the New York Dolls,

and like... you know?

When I was in London, you know, it was a mental scene.

Everybody was dressed up, ripped up.

Nobody wanted to look like one another.

They did their utmost

to actually look completely different.

[♪♪♪]

Clothing was a big thing in the punk movement.

There was an explosion of craziness.

You'd see all kinds of colors and different things.

That wasn't my particular thing,

but a lot of guys would go down to all these shops.

I was more into the music.

Well, Mick knew everything about rock and roll.

He was like an encyclopedia of rock,

and knew who was who, and what was rock.

Then you had Paul that only listened to reggae,

and Joe listened to all kinds of weird and wonderful stuff,

and I was into hard rock at the time,

so it was a melting pot, really, of different things.

Well, the way we see it, like, this is like,

you start up, and you go, "We're The Clash,

and we got something to say."

[Chimes]: I was talking to Joe about this,

and he was explaining to me that the rock bands of the day,

their music's all about nonsense,

irrelevant nonsense,

whereas these reggae bands talk about real-life things

that affect them.

That was why he liked reggae.

[♪♪♪]

[Letts]: One of the most interesting things

about the UK punk scene

was their love of Jamaican music.

You know, that gave the English thing

a slightly different angle

to what was going on,

which was straight-up Caucasian shit,

stateside.

Over here, people like John Lydon and The Clash guys,

they were embracing the musical lessons

that they had heard from Jamaican music.

There was this cross-fertilization of ideas

where we were actually turning each other on

through our respective cultures.

As far as I was concerned,

the punk scene wasn't inclusive at the beginning.

It was something that developed in time.

The Clash were very instrumental

in taking the reggae sound

and mixing it with a rock sound

that could actually cross over

into both young black people and young white people.

It just seemed all so exciting,

and for that,

I have undying respect for Joe Strummer.

[♪♪♪]

[Chimes]: Joe felt

that the song should be about something worth singing about

rather than tra-la-la-la-la.

It should be something... a message worth giving out.

I didn't care about politics at all.

I think most drummers are like that.

If you ask them, they don't care about that.

They want to get on the stage and play music,

but Joe cared very deeply about it,

and everyone else was more or less on side with that.

That aspect of The Clash,

you know, being so political,

being so vocal about things that they saw,

was really down to Joe Strummer.

It's no secret he was the son of a diplomat,

traveled a lot as a youth,

and he had this great empathy towards his fellow human being,

and he believed in music as a tool for social change.

Yeah, I think you definitely can change.

I mean, look at the '60s, you know.

What do you remember from the '60s?

Right?

All I can remember was the music.

Music is what people are turning onto

in this last 30, 40 years,

not books or art,

and so we've got more chance than anybody

to change things, you know?

I mean, it's all too easy

just to say, "No, it doesn't change anything."

[Chimes]: We'd been rehearsing forever.

It felt like years.

So we were clamoring to get on stage

and do a gig,

and the first gig we ever did was in Sheffield,

which is a hell of a way from London.

We got up at silly o'clock in the morning,

and drove there in the dark,

and got there about eight hours early

because we were so desperate to do our first show.

So we got there and just hung around all day,

waiting for the show,

and, um, we played our show,

which wasn't great, I don't think, as a first one,

but your first one's never going to be perfect,

but it was okay,

and then we sat there

and watched the Pistols do their show,

because all our first gigs were supporting them.

I sat with Joe and watched it.

They'd been playing for quite a while,

so they were a well-oiled machine by then.

It was kind of a moment, really,

when Joe and I thought, "Yeah, this... this is working,

and we can do this as well."

All right, cool it.

Simmer down, control your temper.

[microphone feedback]

We've still got another fucking song to do yet.

It's been a while since I've got a vinyl disc

on the turntable.

All right, here we go.

[♪♪♪]

Tune sounds good.

[♪♪♪]

♪ Yankee soldier ♪

♪ He want to shoot some skag ♪

♪ He met it in Cambodia ♪

♪ But now he can't afford a bag ♪

♪ Yankee dollar talk ♪

♪ To the dictators of the world... ♪

It's political, but it's catchy.

It has a melody,

and that's what I like about it too.

♪ I'm so bored ♪

♪ With the U.S.A. ♪

♪ I'm so bored ♪

♪ With the U.S.A. ♪

♪ I'm so bored with the U.S.A. ♪

♪ But what can I do? ♪

[Joan Jett]: When The Runaways went to England in 1976,

I saw a Clash show,

and I went over dressed kind of as a glam kid,

came back dressed as a punk.

Seeing the kids in the audiences,

it was definitely life-changing.

Even if you don't think The Runaways' music was punk,

which I don't, necessarily,

the idea of girls playing rock 'n' roll,

and doing it,

that's as punk as you get.

[♪♪♪]

♪ Blue-skinned sleeping boys ♪

♪ Man, you're looking wasted ♪

♪ Greasy wheels ♪

♪ Streets of steel ♪

♪ No tellin' what you tasted ♪

♪ Good guys, bad guys... ♪

[Jett]: Rock 'n' roll is sexual,

and that's why people have a problem

with girls playing rock 'n' roll,

because basically you're saying, "Okay, well,

girls have to talk about sex,"

and people are uncomfortable with that,

and once you put on the guitar, yeah, I mean...

[♪♪♪]

I really feel it.

My crotch is up against the wood.

Pussy to the wood.

[♪♪♪]

Coming from a female perspective,

it's very sensual.

Not just sexual.

It's just a full body thing,

and I'm sure people know what I'm talking about.

When you hear a certain sound,

you just go, "Oh, god."

[♪♪♪]

[Albertine]: The only girls I'd ever seen play guitar

were the band Fanny and the band The Runaways,

who felt maybe a bit glamorous,

but those two bands

didn't make me feel like I could do that.

It wasn't until I saw the Sex Pistols,

North London boys,

badly educated,

not trying to be glamorous.

They were just this bunch of ordinary failures

and ragamuffins from the street.

Even though they were boys,

that made me think, "I'm going to pick up a guitar.

I don't care if I can't sing, can't play,"

and I think that was a real advantage of the Slits.

We made it up as we went along.

We started, you know, at ground zero

and built it from there.

♪ Vindictive, aggressive, that's all you can be ♪

♪ Vindictive, aggressive, don't try it on me ♪

♪ You're wasting your words don't expect it from me ♪

♪ I know that it hurts but my love died quickly ♪

♪ Vindictive, aggressive, that's all you can be ♪

♪ Vindictive, aggressive, don't try it on me ♪

♪ You're wasting your words don't expect anything ♪

[Palmolive]: There we were,

four crazy girls,

and we managed to come together

and put these songs together.

Now, we didn't know how to play, neither,

so many of the times,

we were playing different songs.

I thought we were playing that one,

and we were playing...

But it was this chaotic,

beautiful noise,

and people were into it.

[♪♪♪]

[Rotten]: Them all-girl bands,

they could take us to the cleaners,

some of them bands,

if they really wanted to,

and that was so excellent.

I remember all of them.

They trace back,

but the Slits were a phenomenon.

[♪♪♪]

♪ Don't know what to say ♪

We were definitely very provocative,

but we felt it was our right to be provocative.

That didn't give someone the right to punch you

or cut a slit on your pants with a knife...

but there was violence.

We got assaulted.

I got punched on my eye one time.

This guy was just so mad,

basically mad,

and I said, "Okay, you're out of here."

♪ Let's do the split and I'll shit on it ♪

♪ Let's do the split ♪

♪ And I'll spit on it ♪

It's fuckin' useless.

It's crap.

[Palmolive]: You know, I feel like in a way,

the Slits, we were a revolution within the revolution.

We wanted to have the reins of our destiny.

The gender neutrality,

the gender balance that was happening in punk rock

was really significant at that time.

It wasn't a boy's music, it wasn't a girl's music.

There were bully boys

who still had this way of looking at women

as a lesser proposition in what they were doing,

but that's because they were idiots.

The most powerful players in punk rock were female.

It was Patti Smith, it was Debbie Harry,

it was Siouxsie Sioux.

[Debbie Harry]: We were trying to find our niche.

I mean, I was a girl singer,

and the Ramones actually really appreciated the fact

that I came out of a real girl group,

R&B kind of thinking,

or sound.

Debbie is the only female

on a Ramones record.

She sings on Little Camaro.

Go, little Camaro.

Go, Lil' Camaro, Go.

and it was about my car, because I had a Camaro.

I think I almost ran one of them down one night,

and that's when they took me seriously.

Maybe.

[laughs]

[Rotten]: Women had never been allowed that opportunity

up until punk rock,

and, wow, did they have a story to tell...

Possibly a more interesting story

than any of the moldy old men,

including myself.

[Albertine]: It wasn't like

they were an enlightened bunch of punk men

who said, "We'll let women in."

No, us girls,

us Slits, we booted our way in.

Our first gig, we went to a pub,

and there were a bunch of boys playing there.

We jumped up on stage.

We pulled their leads out,

plugged our guitars and our leads in,

and we got through half a song before they pulled us off stage.

That is the epitome of how the Slits made their way

into something that's now called punk.

[♪♪♪]

When the group of us started to get together,

you know, I was entering an industry

which was made up of virtuosos in the '60s and '70s,

people who'd been playing for years,

could do really fast guitar solos, you know,

learned music since the age of god knows what,

but the Ramones were minimal.

You know, there were no guitar solos.

Every song was short.

We were absolutely enthralled,

and we couldn't wait for them to come over to Britain.

[♪♪♪]

[Legs McNeil]: At the time,

no one was listening to the Ramones,

and nobody wanted them.

No one wanted punk in America.

It didn't sell,

except for maybe 200 people

that hung out at CBGBs and Max's.

I mean, the Ramones could not get a break

beyond that circuit,

so Linda Stein said to Danny,

"I think we should try to get the Ramones some exposure

in England,"

and they played on the 4th of July, 1976,

in London.

That show broke punk in England,

because the Ramones were the band

that everyone was trying to copy in England.

[Vanian]: The Ramones gig,

you had, you know, everybody there

from the Buzzcocks, the Vibrators,

Billy Idol, you know, Gen X, The Damned.

We were all in those front two rows.

It was just this massive wall of sound

that had this really exciting way

of it being for you, you know.

It was suddenly right in your face,

and it was these young kids in leather jackets

going for it.

They were so extreme, the Ramones,

and punk in Britain was aiming to be extreme,

and I think they were the sort of pinnacle

for many of us,

especially the guys.

The guys absolutely loved the Ramones.

It was huge,

especially for Sid Vicious.

They were his favorite band in the world.

They were absolutely the epitome of punk for him.

[Marky Ramone]: I knew they loved the Ramones.

The "One, two, three, four,"

and then, you know, they put on the leather jackets,

and the Converse sneakers,

and the jeans and all that,

and the pins,

which the Ramones started,

but they had their own thing going.

We were American.

We weren't English.

It was two different things.

The American punk rock was more about having fun,

doing what you like,

and not getting so heavily involved

with the political situation.

The English were more political.

We were more about fun.

[♪♪♪]

♪ Twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go ♪

♪ I wanna be sedated ♪

♪ Nothing to do nowhere to go-oh ♪

♪ I wanna be sedated ♪

♪ Just get me to the airport ♪

♪ Put me on a plane ♪

♪ Hurry, hurry, hurry... ♪

The experience of spitting in the UK was gross,

but it was sign of affection for the band.

The more you spit,

that meant the more they liked you,

so that's why there was always a lot of beer around.

You just have some beer in your mouth,

just spit the beer out.

I was the drummer,

so I was kind of in the back,

so I didn't get hit that often,

but when it sprayed off my cymbal, the beer,

and it went into my mouth,

I liked it.

[laughs]

You know, I couldn't wait to have a beer afterward.

[♪♪♪]

In England,

when the kids watch the punk bands,

they spit at the performers,

and that's their show of affection,

which the band themselves don't particularly care for.

I don't know where that came from.

I never really understood it,

because, you know, who wants to stand there

being showered in spittle?

Nobody.

But it did become part of that thing, and I...

Yeah, I hated it personally,

but I dealt with it, shall we say.

Where they came up with the idea of spitting on me

or at me,

I can only really blame newspapers at that time

for implying that that was the situation.

It really wasn't.

To spit at me, I take, to this day,

as an offense of the highest order.

I do not want your diseases.

Now, where were we?

Yeah... Oh, the Ramones.

The major lie

about the Ramones helping us form as a band,

the Sex Pistols,

is that we already were a band.

Right?

It's really, really difficult and annoying

that every time you try to do something honest,

it gets misinterpreted via journalism,

one way or another.

It's very upsetting.

Here's the major answer to it.

Listen to a Ramones record,

then listen to a Sex Pistols record.

Spot the difference.

That's all you gotta do.

[record changer clicks]

[record drops]

[♪♪♪]

[mouthing along with recording] ♪ Right... ♪

♪ ...now! ♪

♪ Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha... ♪

It's such a good song.

[♪♪♪]

♪ I am an antichrist ♪

♪ I am an anarchist ♪

♪ Don't know what I want ♪

♪ But I know how to get it ♪

♪ I want to destroy the passerby ♪

♪ Because I ♪

♪ Wanna be anarchy... ♪

The Sex Pistols forced music to change,

radio to change.

♪ No dogsbody... ♪

That band was the shot heard around the world.

♪ Anarchy for the UK ♪

♪ It's coming sometime and maybe... ♪

[Ramone]: What they were singing about,

a lot of Americans probably wouldn't understand,

but we liked the music.

♪ Because I ♪

♪ I wanna be anarchy... ♪

[Rotten]: Songs about anarchy are just,

they're vital to my very existence.

They absolutely have to be written and put down.

[♪♪♪]

Nobody stood up and said anything at all

about the Royal Family.

It was sacrosanct.

[♪♪♪]

Amazing that people will try to ignore

how we changed Britain overnight really

with that record.

It was quite astounding.

♪ I use anarchy ♪

♪ 'Cause I ♪

♪ Wanna be ♪

♪ An anarchist ♪

♪ I get pissed ♪

♪ Destroy! ♪

[song ends]

[cheering]

[interval between songs playing]

[vinyl crackling]

Well, it's all right, innit?

You know?

[bagpipe plays]

[applause]

[Vanian]: I think there was a backlash

against the Royal Family at that time

because, you know, as I said, times were hard for everybody,

and then you're trying to make ends meet,

and there's the Queen with everything.

[bagpipe playing]

[Chimes]: In London at that time,

there was a lot of political unrest.

People were unhappy and angry with each other.

To me, punk is the challenge that our generation threw out,

saying, "We're not going to have this status quo.

We're going to create something where we do things ourselves

which are accessible to the world."

[Rotten]: This is why I like terms like "punk."

"What does that mean?"

"I don't know."

So I go home to my dictionary,

and I find out that "punk" is Mr. Big's toy boy

in an American prison system.

Well, I'm afraid I don't quite fit that agenda,

but somehow the term stuck...

but what's really important to me

is what punk turned into.

Honesty, originality,

and a genuine feel for my fellow human beings.

I think the word is "empathy," really,

and there it is,

and then punk took off.

[♪♪♪]

[Vanian]: Weirdly enough,

The Damned were the first band of that first group

to go out and tour,

and then the Anarchy tour came along,

and that was an amazing line-up,

because you had us, you had the Sex Pistols,

you had The Clash,

you had Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers,

and you had Wayne County, too.

It was an incredible bill of the best bands, really.

So when we were rehearsing for the show,

the Sex Pistols went to do the Grundy TV show,

and it's amazing that it actually went out.

I suppose if it hadn't gone out live,

it never would have gone out at all, but...

there you go.

Punk, the new craze, they tell me.

Their heroes,

not the nice, clean Rolling Stones.

You see, they are as drunk as I am.

They are clean by comparison.

They are a group called the Sex Pistols.

The Bill Grundy interview.

Wow, that was an odd one.

Queen had canceled an interview.

Would we rush over to do it as a replacement?

Of course, Malcolm's thinking, "Oh, this would be great.

Oh, oh.

Imagine the...

[whines derisively]

...the chance to promote your new single."

That's my best Malcolm impersonation.

I am told that that group

received 40,000 pounds from a record company.

Doesn't that seem to be slightly opposed

to the anti-materialistic view of life?

The more, the merrier.

Well, tell me more about it.

We fucking spent it, ain't we?

It's just their tough shit.

[Grundy]: It's what?

Nothing. A rude word.

Next question.

[Grundy]: No, no.

What was the rude word?

Shit.

Was it really? Good heavens.

I think young people watching that now

would say, "What's the big deal?"

But you didn't swear on TV in those days,

so when they started swearing,

and Bill Grundy got angry and made them swear more,

everyone was a bit shocked.

...or are you just enjoying yourself?

I'm enjoying myself. I always wanted to meet you.

- Did you really? - Yeah.

[Grundy]: We'll meet afterwards, shall we?

Doubt it.

[Steve Jones]: You dirty sod. You dirty old man.

[Grundy]: Go on, again.

You dirty fucker.

- What a clever boy. - What a fucking rotter.

[Grundy]: Well, that's it for tonight.

[Vanian]: When they came back,

Malcolm was shouting at them

because he thought they had ruined their career.

After that, he would say

that he had instigated the whole thing,

and he'd, you know... he wanted that to happen,

but in actual fact,

he thought that that was going to destroy them,

but the next day,

they were on the front page of every newspaper

across the country.

[Letts]: That Bill Grundy program

kind of signaled the end

of one part of the punk rock story in the UK,

because all of a sudden, people think, "Okay,

that's what punk's about,

being outrageous, saying 'fuck you, '

all the negativity and nihilism."

I mean, it's interesting, the media's role

in kind of driving these subcultural movements,

because what they do

is they create these urban folk devils,

you know what I mean, and kind of kill something

before it's had a chance to really grow and develop.

[Albertine]: That was the beginning of the end,

because I think probably from that day on

was when the label "punk" came out,

and when a whole load of out-of-towners

started turning up at gigs,

and we weren't underground anymore.

[Vanian]: We had a few gigs

where people came to the shows just to destroy the show,

and just to probably kill us as well.

So you'd end up...

One particular one was us...

everything was being thrown,

chairs, all kinds of stuff,

and then we were outside trying to get back in our van,

and there was a line of guys

with chains and hammers and God knows what else

coming down the road,

and they were going to sort us out, basically.

You know, they had the Anarchy tour lined up,

I think 20 dates.

I think they ended up playing, like, four dates.

You know, people were coming out in their hordes

singing hymns outside the venues

to stop their kids getting in.

And all of them said,

"We don't want this on our stages.

We're banning it,"

so it was banned across the country.

I mean, John was literally the antichrist

for about a week,

and, you know, I mean, it sounds funny now,

but, you know, it ended up

with him getting kind of attacked on the streets, man.

You know, people were slashing him

with knives and things.

I mean, that's why he had to leave the UK.

He couldn't stay here.

["The Star-Spangled Banner" plays]

[Rotten]: When the Pistols first went to America,

well, my God, I mean,

there were no gigs open to us, really.

No promoter wanted to deal with us,

at least that's what the manager was telling us,

so we ended up doing really

the country and western tour of the South,

and they loved it.

[Bob Gruen]: When the Sex Pistols

came to America,

they did Malcolm's idea of playing across the South.

He wanted to play in front of people

who didn't know who they were

that would get really riled up and insulted and angry,

which worked in the South.

I think I heard one time

that they urinated on the audience one time.

Why, I don't know.

It just sounds goofy.

They kind of upset me.

Fuck, no. They're garbage, man.

They're garbage.

[McNeil]: When the Pistols came to America,

all of a sudden, overnight,

America discovered punk music.

Every night on the news,

Walter Cronkite was saying, "And the Sex Pistols..."

and they'd show helicopter shots

of the tour bus driving through the deep South,

and, you know, there'd be all these people protesting,

and the Pistols were causing pandemonium.

Because punk is not a valid form of music here

in the States.

That's the first time you saw UK punks,

and they were just, like, throttling each other,

and pogoing, and spitting, and all this kind of stuff.

These are really important signifiers.

I mean, they kind of make you want to know more,

and, like, with that name,

like, what band would call themselves "Sex Pistols"?

The Pistols are just out of sight.

I think they got a lot of balls.

One night on stage,

somebody had said something or threw something,

and Sid actually hit the guy with his guitar.

Later, after the show,

Malcolm ran up to me

and said, "Do you have a picture of Sid hitting the guy?"

And in my normal life,

if a guy in a band had hit somebody in the audience,

that was something that you would want to hide,

and you wouldn't want to publicize,

but Malcolm was dying to get a picture

to put it on the front page of the English paper

to create more controversy.

America was a divided country,

and in a weird way,

the Sex Pistols united it.

[Gruen]: But the fact that it was news anywhere

really surprised me.

I think the first surprise, actually,

when I got to Atlanta,

there was a representative from the LA Times,

from the New York Times,

from Rolling Stone,

from several different magazines,

all my colleagues.

Like, serious photographers were there,

and I didn't know that they even knew

who this band from England was, you know?

So I was very surprised

that there was so much news about them.

Well, after the show, as they were leaving,

and everybody was getting on the bus,

I was saying goodbye to Malcolm,

and I said, you know, "Have a great trip.

I'm sure you're going to have a lot of fun.

It's too bad I can't come along,

but I'm sure it's going to be great.

Goodbye and good luck."

And he said, "Oh, well, Bob, you can't come

because we're only allowed 12 on the bus,

and there's Sophie, and the band,

and the guards and me.

Oh, that's only 11, Bob.

Why don't you get on the bus?"

And I was like, "What?"

And the guy next to me, another photographer,

said, "Oh, I'll come, Malcolm,"

and Malcolm said, "No, sorry. Bob asked first,"

and I didn't remember asking,

but I got on the bus,

and ended up in San Francisco 10 days later

after a wild ride across America.

[♪♪♪]

Being on the bus, we were kind of insulated.

It was really calm on the bus.

We were basically smoking pot and drinking beer

and listening to reggae music,

so basically, we were just sitting there, you know,

having a pretty mild buzz, watching America go by,

and then we'd get to a venue, and the door would open,

and there would be press people out there.

I remember one time

some TV cameras right outside the door.

Steve Jones kind of looked at 'em,

and he cleared his throat and spit on the ground,

ready to talk or answer a question,

and the press said, "Oh, my God, he's spitting at us!"

So they never even asked a question,

but there seemed to be chaos around them.

Looking back,

there's very little footage actually of Sid Vicious...

you know, where you can actually see Sid being Sid,

and in the few interviews there are,

he's a junkie who's kind of mumbling and drooling,

and barely audible.

He's just fucked up.

I mean, he's been sick for three months

that he's been on the road.

[Chimes]: The thing is, when you're on tour,

you're stuck together so closely.

You're working every day together.

You're traveling together.

It's like being married to three or four people at once,

so it does create tension,

and the tension can get out of proportion.

What's your impression of America

at this point?

Load of shit.

[♪♪♪]

[Penelope Houston]: At the Winterland show,

people came from Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles,

all over the west coast.

[crowds cheering]

[Houston]: I mean, it was more people

than the Pistols had ever played to.

I think it was between 5,000 and 6,000.

[crowd screaming]

[Gruen]: The kind of clubs they were playing

was a few hundred people,

and all of a sudden,

it seemed like a few thousand people,

so it was a much bigger, kind of intimidating place,

and I remember the stage actually being as big

as most of the clubs that they had been playing

on the whole tour.

[Houston]: People came there

thinking they were going to a punk rock show,

but had never been to a punk rock show,

so they were going to act as "punk rock"

as they thought they should,

therefore they were throwing things,

and spitting on the stage,

and giving the finger,

and just behaving as, you know, "punk" as they could.

[crowd screaming and cheering]

And then when the Pistols played,

I went out into the audience to see what it was like,

and I got as close as I could to the stage,

and it was just so packed tightly with people

that immediately you're covered in sweat,

but it's not your own sweat.

It's everybody else's sweat,

and people were kind of

getting squeezed out of the crowd,

and handed over the top of the crowd

and thrown onto the stage,

and then dragged away.

It was a... fairly intense scene.

[crowd screaming]

Every time I walk on stage,

I'm dying seven deaths backstage

of fear and self-doubt,

and I'm-not-worthiness

that you could ever imagine.

All of us do that.

The making of you is if you can endure that

and still go out and face the music.

[crowd screaming]

[band begins playing "God Save the Queen"]

♪ God save the Queen ♪

♪ A fascist regime ♪

♪ They made you a moron ♪

♪ A potential H-bomb ♪

♪ God save the Queen ♪

♪ She ain't no human being... ♪

[Rotten]: Winterland was a strange one.

♪ ...there is no future... ♪

[Rotten]: Every song felt unfinished...

and I think if you listen to it,

it shows that.

It shows that lack of industry.

[Houston]: The Winterland show was exciting,

but it did seem like, you know,

it wasn't the easiest show for them.

It's hard to know how they felt about that night.

[crowd screaming]

[Albertine]: Sid...

you could see he was on a downhill roll,

and drugs had got ahold of him.

You make excuses for members in your band

indulging in the more hardcore-y drugs, you know,

the heroins of... shall we say.

But you don't be doing that before you go on stage.

Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?

I think they were all pretty burnt out at that point,

either with being on tour or being in the band.

[Gruen]: I came back to New York

as soon as the tour was over.

I spent about the next two or three days

developing my film and making lots of prints,

because there were so many magazines

that were going to print so many stories about them,

but I went to CBGBs the next day.

I walked across the city and went to CBGBs,

and I walked in,

and Johnny Rotten was sitting there

with a friend of mine,

and he said, "Have you heard the news, mate?"

and I'm like, "What do you mean?"

and he said, "Well, we broke up, mate.

That's it, the band's over,"

and I was stunned.

I was like, you know,

"But the whole world is watching.

You're the biggest band in the world this week."

He says, "Nope. The band is over. We broke up."

[John Holmstrom]: When the Pistols broke up

in early January 1978,

they sucked all the air out of the room.

They were it.

They were punk rock.

People had forgotten the Ramones,

didn't care about the Dead Boys.

The Damned were on the side.

So when they broke up,

that was pretty much the end of punk rock.

[Vanian]: Well, I think everybody wanted punk to fail.

I mean, that's the thing,

it was such a short-lived period when you look at it.

[snaps fingers] Gone,

but that's the same with anything, you know.

But it didn't die an easy death,

because then you had another nail in the coffin

when the Sid and Nancy thing happened.

A young man who called himself Sid Vicious,

and whose real name is John Ritchie,

called New York City Police late this morning

to say that he had found his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen,

dead at their hotel room at the Chelsea,

a favorite hangout for entertainers.

Police say that he confessed

that he had killed the Pennsylvania girl

during an argument,

and a large hunting knife was found in the room.

It kind of proved what mainstream media

had been saying all along, you know.

"They're imbeciles.

They can't sing.

They can't play their instruments,

and they kill each other.

They kill their girlfriends."

You know, that's what punk had become.

So, you know...

it was a shame.

[Gruen]: And so it was really kind of weird.

I remember Sid coming to a Blondie show

after he got out of jail,

and people not really knowing how to take it.

Like, he was another musician that we had liked.

Just a month earlier,

he had played Max's,

and people were getting to know Sid,

and all of a sudden, Nancy was dead,

and was it his fault or not?

Nobody seemed to know. He didn't seem to know.

You know, we were just a giant explosion,

or like a rocket that was going to the moon,

and we just had to come down at some point.

We just made sure, some of us, at least,

got out of the way before the damage was done.

[news report]: The short, violent life

of a young man known as Sid Vicious,

a British punk rock star,

is over.

He was charged

with knifing his girlfriend to death last fall,

and his death came

as he was apparently celebrating

his release from jail on bond,

but we understand

the catalyst for the celebration was heroin.

Heroin.

[exhales]

Wow.

It kills them all, you know.

And this is Nancy taught him all of this,

and he was too young and dumb to know any different,

and the biggest joke of all was

Sid would never have hooked up with a girl like Nancy

unless I introduced her to him...

which I did,

and so I take

some really serious sense of responsibility

in Sid's demise

because of that.

All right?

I miss my friends.

[Ian MacKaye]: Most of what I had learned about punk,

I had learned from the media,

and the media, of course, was derisive,

and they would focus

on the sensationalist kind of aspects of punk,

and pump that up,

so I thought, "They're just, they're idiots.

They spit into each other's mouths,"

or whatever, you know? Whatever the...

I actually didn't know anything.

So my older sister and some friends

lent me some records.

Sex Pistols' "Never Mind the Bollocks,"

of course,

which is a very intimidating record.

I mean, they were terrifying,

and I think that my tendency

is to go towards the things that scare me,

because there must be a reason,

because really, when you think about it,

it's just a fucking piece of plastic

spinning in a circle.

What's there to be scared of?

It must be the ideas.

[♪♪♪]