Sex Pistols and Frank Carter

Frank Carter and the Sex Pistols
Manchester Academy One
Sept 24 2024

Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

Especially if the past is celebrated and cranked into the future as the former ex-Sex Pistols do tonight, grabbing their own legacy and reminding everyone that they were not just a cultural force that changed the landscape and soundscape of our Seventies youth, but also one of the greatest rock bands the UK has ever produced.

Once upon a time, a band coming around again would be greeted with trepidation and groans. But as rock ‘n roll gets older, it gets to celebrate its own volatile history, and none comes more volatile than the Sex Pistols. 

The schism between the band and their former frontman, John Lydon, is well documented, and the passing years have not made it any better. Post-Pistol TV series, the former singer took the other three to court over the dramatisation of Steve Jones’s Lonely Boy book, a move that seems to have been the final nail in the coffin. Yet instead of letting sleeping dogs lie, the band have defiantly returned, maybe empowered by that TV series that also underlined that there was also a powerhouse rock ‘n’ roll group in this narrative as well.

The Pistols story is, of course, one of the great fables of our times. A brilliant, chaotic, artful dodger of pop culture genius and madness. A Robin Hood rags-to iches revolution and a combination of exotic Day-Glo pop culture ideas driven by the band and a pool of people like Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood, Jamie Reid and others adding their genius into the pot. It’s been celebrated and picked apart forever, but the only part of this dreaming England that never seems to get celebrated is just what a brilliant powerhouse unit Matlock, Cook and Jones always were. 

And tonight, they are here to prove it.

Despite knowing all this, it still shouldn’t be this good, but as Frankie and his ex-Pistols slam dunk through the Pistolian classics, it’s a timeless romp through just what rock ‘n’ roll should sound like. One big notable is the sheer joy oozing from the stage. The songs retain their tension and release, but the band seems to be having fun. 

That helps.

The sound they make is still classic high decibel futurama and still oddly sci-fi futuristic. The Pistols’ glorious noise threads melody to psychodrama, glorious riffola to mania, and a wall of sound to drown in as it transcends its decades with its pyscho-churn. 

Despite Steve Jones’s guitar perhaps being a touch too quiet in the overall mix, we’re still swamped by its glorious sound. Has anyone ever got close to this distinctive tone? It’s an iconic sonic statement that was as much part of the Pistols thing as Bill Grundy/Rotten’s glaring eyes/the brilliant clobber/the fuck you attitude/Jamie Reid’s iconic artwork…all great rock ‘n’ roll is teamwork, no matter how dysfunctional this team can often be. A band can have the best ideas and styles, but it means fuck all without the tunes and the noise; and Steve’s guitar sound is one of the wonders of our world.

Generations of punk rock guitar players have tried but Steve Jones remains the king. His whole beautiful noise is a work of art as he almost casually deals it out, swamping the room with its tsunami of sound. This, combined with his playing and his box of signature tricks, is so distinctive. The hammer-ons, the bent notes, the drone strings, the powerhouse chords, the chugs, the catchy as fuck lead lines –  are all cranked through his powerhouse playing.

The guitar sound is one of those perfect mysteries – its tone is something else – perfection; and the off-kilter styling is far more artful than he would ever let on. The Pistols were never rama-lama thrash; there was sex, style and subversion to the texture of their sound, and Steve’s armoury of tricks. From the melodic lead licks to that classic churn from the perfect chug to the hanging chords, they are all on display tonight.

This guitar filth and fury connects symbiotically with his decades-long brother-in-arms, Paul Cook, whose distinctive drum style is instantly recognisable; with its perfect groove tightness and those rumbling toms, to its incessant kick drum, creating the steady perfect beat that never cranks to thrash, because the Pistols always understood that mid-pace creates the most tension for the power and fury. And that swampy ooze was always one of their calling cards.

Holding it all together is Glen Matlock, forever the melody man who wrote a lot of the tunes. The suave bassist who once worked in Malcolm and Vivienne’s shop has the modish modern elder statesman air about him, and his bass drives the whole thing. Tonight, the three of them celebrate their pop/noise and the near 70-year old Pistols have, against all expectations, grown into perfect silver-haired elder statesmen.

Of course, we miss Rotten, but he doesn’t want to play with the band or us anymore. In the late Seventies, he was the greatest frontman ever. Every quip, every wild and brilliant outfit, every slash and burn haircut, every lyric, every nuanced sneer and every staring moment was an electric shock to our systems. He was transfixing and thrilling, and his wild intelligence was a wake-up call for a generation.

2024 is not an either or. 

It’s not Frankie v Johnny. 

Johnny changed most of the lives in the room by simply being there and being that wild-eyed charismatron all those years ago, but he wasn’t the whole story. 

There is a new story in town.

And Frankie is no chancer.

He’s got form this boy – Gallows were a great band and he’s been doing good “frontman” for decades. It may be a few decades less than his new comrades in arms, but he knows how to own the stage by doing the opposite to Rotten. There are only two ways to deliver the pop sermon – you either embrace the audience or push them away. The Seventies’ Pistols were an addictive mix of nihilism and antagonism – they pulled you into their vortex and threw you out the other side, and Lydon was the charismatic and complex ringleader. 

There is no point in even attempting that, and Frank Carter does his own thing, cajoling and embracing the audience like an energetic fireball scamp that cranks the energy levels in the room – a wild-eyed cheerleader that gives the Pistols charabanc a whole new energy just when it was needed. 

Of course, they play through Never Mind The Bollocks (album title courtesy of Jones), and also add the great post Rotten pop Pistols of Silly Thing because, without the totemic Rotten in the lineup, they are free to go where they want. They even deliver a great version of My Way, which extends the song’s outro and the glorious Jonesey lead line into a chiming anthem.

Holidays In The Sun kicks off the set, building the tension with the steady kick drum before the landslide of bass and guitar, which is like a rush of pure molten rock ‘n’ roll energy and a reminder of just how potent this musical form can be in the right hands. Bodies is still the terrifying and brilliant musical and lyrical psychodrama, with its dark and twisted lyrics matched by the churning and terrifying riffola. God Save The Queen is now updated to King and is as potent as ever, with its incendiary lyrics delivered with a generational sneer from Frank as he slams across the stage powered by the song’s distinctive surging riff. Deeper cuts like Satellite take the band’s juggernaut boogie to its max before exploding into the haunting “I love you” refrain. 

It sounds enormous.

No Feelings really leaps out, sounding like the single it could have been; Lazy Sod is gonzoid hilarious and surges through its huge chorus, whilst Submission remains a menacing hypnotic chug and a reminder that the Pistols never sped up after the Ramones played their debut gig in London in 1976. The Pistols always understood the oozing power of perfect groove and medium paced menace. No Fun is still reinventing the Stooges classic into a pulverising stomp, with Paul Cook’s drumming a metronomic shuffle that is dead on but also swings. The song is also used as a chance for Frank to introduce each of the classic trio, which brings the house down. 

They return for the encores with the aforementioned and oddly touching version of My Way, a nod to the ghost of Sid Vicious and his deliberately gormless yet moving takedown of the classic that its lyric writer, Paul Anka, always said was the best version. The band then exit to a pile driving version of Anarchy In The UK, that comes in with its landslide riff and is arguably still one of the greatest debut singles of all time. 

What a statement start that single was. Lyrically brilliant but also sonically stunning. Every trick in the Pistols musical armoury is employed in the song, which tonight surges towards its climax and remains the Pistols anthem, and also the anthem for a lot of us at the time. The song was not just a pop single but an escape route; a chance to break out and live our lives the way we wanted to. The anarchy in the song is not so much a manifesto but the anarchy of youth and the anarchy of ideas, and that brief moment in time when you are free from the responsibilities of life – an idea as potent as any political theory… The anarchy of rock ‘n’ roll and wild youth.

The Pistols whole trajectory has been weird. Perhaps the most documented and most misunderstood band ever. They were at the vortex of a revolution, an art movement, and a youthquake, and they were gone before they could reap the awards. They sparked a revolution of the every day that reverberates to the now. They were surrounded by maverick genius, from Malcolm and Vivienne’s haute couture anti-fashion nous and wild vision to Jordan’s sussed smarts and Jamie Reid’s astonishing artwork. They were the vortex and the soundtrack.  

Malcolm had a brilliant vision. He saw the big picture, but the one thing he seemed to miss was that it wasn’t just his machinations that could make any band big, because the Pistols were not just any band. His glorious belief in chaos creating creativity and space to run amok in was pretty cool, but he didn’t seem to realise just how great the band actually was – and they then turned out to be one of the greatest bands the UK has ever produced.

None of the fancy ideas would have worked without the sonics, and this is what is celebrated tonight. This may not have chimed with the nihilism and the self destruct button of punk, but Sex Pistols wrote a glorious clutch of songs with brilliant melodies and lyrics, and their sound was a unique high decibel melodrama with huge churning anthems that sounded sensurround-enormous once Chris Thomas produced them.

This was no amateur hour. This was a band at the top of its game from day one. The fact that they imploded after one album was a drag for them but set their legend in stone. There have been intermittent comebacks, and there have been legendary fallouts with the schism between Rotten and the rest of the crew growing by the year – which brings us back to tonight and its joyous romp throughout the saucy saucerful full of secrets of songs that are tattooed into our memory banks.

Where do they go from here?

They could play these shows and disappear again, but there feels like a longer-term plan to all of this. They will be a shoo-in for all the festivals next year, of course, and their jukebox set of punk rock gold will be enough to create the right amount of good time havoc in the fields and halls of Merrie England, and beyond.

Will they dare to write new songs? There is certainly the talent in the tank to do this despite the pressure of being custodians of one of the great British legacies. It would be cool to hear that iconic sound twisted into new shapes just for the hell of it and somehow, like tonight, see ‘no future’ turned into ‘another future…’

For now, we have this live show, and it’s a thrilling night of rock ‘n’ roll, and that’s already all we need. 

Never mind the bollocks…

This was the rest of the Sex Pistols…

~

All words by John Robb

Lead photo by Naomi Dryden-Smith