Dave Simpson on the legacy of the Sex Pistols, 45 years on

“We were in the queue for swimming and he started talking about this group he’d seen – or it’s possible he’d heard about them – and the singer was supposed to be doing cartwheels onstage and vomiting, and they were called the Sex Pistols. It just stuck with me because it was not the sort of thing that you would normally hear about,” Simpson remembers.

Although both claims about Pistols singer Johnny Rotten are dubious, the band’s notoriety was certainly beginning to spread, firing the imaginations of rebellious teenagers across the land.

The next time Simpson heard of them was the following year “when the same lad, who was by now calling himself Mark Mutilation and had got a sort of Sid Vicious haircut, brought in Anarchy in the UK”.

“At the end of the music class we were always given the opportunity to play our own records and he put this on and it hit me like a thunderbolt,” he recalls. “It was ridiculously exciting, I’d never heard anything like it.”

Fast-forward 45 years and Simpson, now living in York and a music journalist for The Guardian and Uncut as well as author of several books, has written a heavily illustrated history of the band called Sex Pistols: I Wanna Be Me.

Although he readily admits the Sex Pistols haven’t been a life-long obsession of his, in same way that the subjects of two previous books, The Fall and Leeds United, have always been, they nevertheless are “hugely important” in his life story.

“In a lot of ways, for better or for worse, my life was probably changed in that moment I heard Anarchy in the UK because that set off a trajectory,” he says. “But there were other key events along the way.”

He was approached “out of the blue” to write the book when a friend pulled out; the problem was he only had six months in which to produce 32,000 words. “The thing the sealed it for me in terms of wanting to do it was often when books are put together quickly you just recycle endless old quotes; I didn’t want to do that,” he says. “Obviously part of that is inevitable because key players in the story (such as Sid Vicious and Malcolm McLaren) are dead or inaccessible for other reasons; equally I wanted to dig into historical quotes that people had said at the time, especially MPs and broadcasters, but equally I realised I was sitting on this enormous archive of interview with punks or people around punk going back 20-odd years including people like John Lydon and Jah Wobble and Julien Temple (who made the Sex Pistols films The Great Rock and Roll Swindle and The Filth and The Fury), people right at the centre of it and I thought why don’t I just use the archive? So I just started delving into my garage and my memory disks.

“Ideally I would have loved a full two years to track down loads more people myself but within the constraints of the time period I did track down people that were on the fringes but played quite important parts in the story. I spoke to Andrew Logan, who put on one of their very first gigs, and we had a fantastic conversation about the time he put them on for his Valentine’s ball in London.”

His other aim with the book was to “tell the lesser-told story of the impact on kids like me up and down the country in the regions”.

“I wanted to find people that had seen the Pistols playing in weird little enclaves like Keighley and Scarborough and Penzance to find out what on earth that would be like to see a band that were at the time banned from playing, they were playing under these assumed names like Acne Rabble.

“They were one of the most important cultural phenomenons of the last 50 years and yet they were playing places like Nikkers Club in Keighley to 30 people. I just thought what a strange period that must have been and there’s very little out there documenting this. I wanted to try to find people that went to some of those gigs, and I did. That was really amusing and entertaining.

“People have this idea that there was some kind of grand masterplan, that Malcolm McLaren fiendishly put this group together and pulled off this great stroke. I think what you realise when you actually dig into it, that’s no what actually happened at all. If anything, it was a litany of flukes and disasters and really living from one moment to the next and there was very little planned about it, which in a way makes it very exciting because it’s much more anarchic than people realise.”

Even the appearance on Bill Grundy’s TV show that catapulted them to infamy was “a total accident”, with the band filling in for Queen after Freddie Mercury developed raging toothache, Simpson points out. After the band swore live on air McLaren reacted with “pure panic”. “It was only probably about 24 hours later on that he actually realised this was a good thing. ‘The Filth and the Fury’ front pages of the Daily Mirror etcetera all hit the street and he quickly did a volte-face and thought ‘let’s go for controversy’.”

Guitarist Steve Jones later came to think the incident had been the worst thing that could have happened to the band at such an early stage in their career. “They might have made three or four albums, we’ll never know,” Simpson says. “Again because nothing was planned, there was no real rule book for how it was going to pan out.”

Over the course of 1977 the Sex Pistols would go on to score three top 10 singles and a multi-million selling album before a messy split in January 1978 after a show in San Francisco, which is where Simpson chose to end his book, rather than delve into the subsequent death of Sid Vicious while on remand for the murder of his girfriend Nancy Spungen, the welter of Sex Pistols cash-in albums, the million-pound court case with McLaren or the reunions in 1996, 2002 and 2008.

“I wanted it to end when the band ends, to kind of leave it in aspic, if you like, because by then their work had been done and other people were picking up the gauntlet and running with it,” he says.

Sex Pistols: I Wanna Be is published by Palazzo, priced £25. Dave Simpson will be in conversation about his book at Louder Than Words festival in Manchester on Saturday November 12. https://louderthanwordsfest.com/