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Steve Jones: ‘I’m tired of the Sex Pistols – I’d rather listen to Steely Dan’

“Once again,” starts Steve Jones from his Los Angeles home – his gruff West London voice untarnished by a 40-year residency in the US – “I fall in s___ and come up smelling of roses.” 

The founding guitarist of the Sex Pistols had a bad pandemic. He was let go by KLOS-FM, the Californian radio station that hosted his long-running, celebrated show Jonesy’s Jukebox. But now, 45 years after the release of their only studio album, Never Mind The B______, Here’s The Sex Pistols, the punk pioneers are back in the public eye.

Their story is about to be told in Pistol, a six-part biopic series written by Moulin Rouge! writer Craig Pearce, and directed by Oscar winner Danny Boyle, based on Jones’s 2016 autobiography Lonely Boy.

Four largely unknown actors were chosen to portray the band: Jones by Toby Wallace, an Australian whose credits include a brief stint in Neighbours, Anson Boon plays Johnny Rotten, Louis Partridge plays Sid Vicious while Christian Lees plays Glen Matlock. The supporting cast is a starrier affair, including Maisie Williams and Thomas Brodie-Sangster from Game Of Thrones, Elon Musk’s ex-wife Talulah Riley, Iris (daughter of Jude) Law, and Derry Girls’ Dylan Llewellyn.

Lonely Boy is made up of three parts: Before, During and After his time in the Pistols. The first documents Jones’s growing up as a largely neglected kid in West London, and the sexual abuse he suffered from his stepfather aged 10, which he had never spoken about before. “There was a lot of personal stuff in there that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to share with the world,” the 66-year-old admits. But writing the book allowed him to deal with the trauma. Memories of his early years, rife with kleptomania, petty misdemeanours, and prodigious amounts of sex, give way to the rise and fall of the Pistols in the second part, then Jones’s solo pursuits from the ’80s to the present in the final part. 

All of which made the book ripe for adaptation. And so Jones found himself on Zoom calls with Boyle in the summer of 2020, as the director outlined his plans for what would become Pistol. The ball was rolling, when suddenly things got complicated.

Cook – “the sensible one,” according to Jones – bears no grudge for missing out on the early stages of Pistol’s development, instead viewing the programme’s success as beneficial to the interests of the group as a whole. “I don’t really know what John’s thinking was,” the 65-year-old says of Lydon, “and it’s a shame he wasn’t involved. I think Danny reached out to him a good few times to try and engage with him, but he couldn’t get past his people… John was just on a no-no from the word go for some reason.”

“If the shoe was on the other foot,” adds Jones, “me and Paul and Glen, we’d have been over the moon if Danny Boyle would have done John’s book [instead]. No problem. It’s only good for everybody… I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making a bit of coin, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with keeping the Sex Pistols legacy going. I don’t know what the problem is.”

That none of Lydon’s three autobiographies were chosen as Boyle’s source material may suggest the singer’s resentment, but any concerns he has of a character assassination by Boyle, the guitarist assures, are unwarranted. “I don’t know if John was thinking that was our intention, that it was all going to make him look stupid,” Jones says, “but that ain’t the case, at all.”

Boyle, for his part, has welcomed Lydon’s criticism: “I want him to attack it,  I think that’s his absolute right. Why would you change the habit of a lifetime?” That said, there’s a reverence to Boyle’s treatment of the band in Pistol. “That was his period when he was a kid,” Jones says of the director. “I think we’re kind of a similar age, and that was important to him: the Pistols and punk.” Mindful of Boyle’s reputation, Jones was happy to submit to the director’s vision. “Sometimes you just gotta trust and have faith that whoever you’ve got to steer the ship knows what they’re doing, and I completely had faith in Danny Boyle.”

His trust was justified. Though some factual corners were cut for the sake of narrative, the Pistols’ story is told fairly accurately, covering the evolution of Jones’s musical aspirations following his encounter with the band’s soon-to-be manager Malcolm McLaren, and the Sex Pistols’ short, volatile career. From Lydon’s enlistment to the group’s expletive-laden appearance on Today with Bill Grundy, which catapulted them to national notoriety, it goes on to show Matlock’s dismissal, the self-destructive co-dependency of Sid Vicious and girlfriend Nancy Spungen, and the lead up to the band’s acrimonious split. 

Each character is competently rendered, Boyle ensuring that their inpidual virtues and vices are disclosed evenly, leaving the viewer to pass their own judgement. Any nit-picking on Lydon’s part would undoubtedly have less to do with his portrayal by rising star Anson Boon and more to do with the reimagining of conversations that may or may not have happened. 

“He’ll never be as good looking as me though, that’s for sure,” he adds with a grizzly cackle.

One issue that rankles Cook is the show’s suggestion that McLaren was the group’s arch manipulator. “I don’t like the way it’s been portrayed over the years that we were just these puppets and he had this great vision and these blueprints of where we were going to go,” the drummer states. “That wasn’t the case at all; we made it up as we were going along.”

While conceding that McLaren’s anarchic ideologies may have been aired in private, they were never discussed with the band as a manifesto by which to create chaos. “He had his own agenda, which he sort of fitted in around the band at the time, but we were the ones out there putting our neck on the line,” Cook says, referring to the abuse the Sex Pistols faced from a ’70s Britain unprepared for such vulgarity. 

“It wasn’t him that had to go out there and face everybody and get beaten up down the streets and attacked and gobbed at on stage and watching our backs everywhere we went.”

The group’s vilification, which intensified after their confrontation with Bill Grundy in December 1976, put an inordinate amount of pressure on them. “It was no wonder it all imploded after just two-and-a-half years,” Cook says. “There’s no way we could have stuck that through what was going on at the time.”

The Sex Pistols split during an ill-fated US tour in January 1978, amid strained relations, cancelled dates and Sid Vicious’ debilitating heroin addiction – a “very dark” time, Jones recalls, which he didn’t want glossed over in the show. “There was some talk of making [the finale] Disney-friendly,” he says, referencing Pistol’s PG financier. “But Danny came through in the end.” 

Lydon would later form his own band Public Image Ltd, which is still ongoing, while Cook and Jones’s next outfit, The Professionals, lasted almost as long as the Sex Pistols. Jones has since played sessions for the likes of Bob Dylan and Iggy Pop, and even attempted a solo career, before debuting Jonesy’s Jukebox (now a weekly podcast) in 2004. What Jones is most proud of, he says, is getting sober: he kicked a heroin habit and has been drug and alcohol free now for over 30 years.

Having reunited three times since 1996, despite what success Pistol may bring, it seems last year’s fractious trial put cold water on any further collaborations between Lydon et al. 

Fortunately, we can still enjoy one more act of sneering subversion from the Sex Pistols, as their treasonous classic God Save The Queen – originally prevented from reaching Number One in June 1977 – is reissued this week to coincide with Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee.

The band famously celebrated her Silver Jubilee by performing on a boat as it sailed down the Thames, before police forced them to dock. Forty-five years later, and Jones, who “couldn’t give a f—” about the monarch’s milestone, won’t even be marking the occasion by playing his own song.

“I never really listen to the Pistols’ music anymore,” he explains with suitably explicit honesty. “I’m f—ing tired of it, to be honest with you. I’d rather listen to Steely Dan.”

The compilation Sex Pistols: The Original Recordings is released on May 27 on UMC. Pistol streams from May 31 on Disney+