Sex Pistols Play Huge Punk Festival Outside LA
Published September 17, 2002
The Sex Pistols headlined a punk festival at the old home of the US Festival, the Glen Helen Pavillion in smoggy Devore, about 50 miles east of LA. Shockingly, a few fans got rowdy:
- In true punk spirit, rowdy music fans pelted the Sex Pistols with beer on Saturday as the one-time scourge of the British establishment played its first U.S. concert in six years outside Los Angeles.
The hailstorm may have been meant as an homage to the band's own anti-establishment roots, but drenched singer John Lydon was having none of it, labeling one thrower a "turd" and a "wuss," to the delight of the 50,000-strong crowd.
....In July, the quartet dusted off their instruments for the first time since November 1996 to play a London show marking their 25th anniversary. Guitarist Steve Jones told Reuters before Saturday's show there were no plans for the group to perform again although he was eager for more action.
The band originally broke up during a calamitous American tour in 1978. It reunited in 1996 — with original bass player Glen Matlock subbing for his replacement, the late Sid Vicious — for a five-month world tour.
Saturday's show saw the Sex Pistols top a bill that included other British punk veterans such as the Damned and the Buzzcocks as well as young U.S. upstarts such as Blink 182 and Unwritten Law.
During the band's one-hour set, the irascible Lydon, 46, also managed to squeeze in pointed comments about the festival's sponsors, Levi Strauss & Co.; a local radio station; MTV; a long-haired fan; the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame; and even his own drummer, Paul Cook, 46, for getting the beat wrong during the tasteless Holocaust satire "Belsen Was A Gas."
The band played most of the tracks from its one studio album, the 1977 opus "Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols," and ended with a cover version of "Silver Machine," a 30-year-old hit from British psychedelic rock band Hawkwind.
Matlock, 45, told Reuters backstage the Sex Pistols would be "daft" not to capitalize on their momentum and play more shows. Additionally, he said it would take only a week to make an album. "It's just finding the right week."
Even though the band members are hardly friends, Matlock said the musical chemistry was unmistakable.
"It's like an old comfortable shoe — with a nail coming through it," he said.
- Sex Pistols Play Huge Punk Festival Outside LA
- Published: September 17, 2002
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- Section: Music
- Filed Under: Music: Alternative Rock, Music: News
- Writer: Eric Olsen
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hey nigel, shut up and die. that concert was horrible and if i saw johnny rotten i would beat him to death with a stool. How much did they pay him to play with "young U.S. upstarts such as Blink 182 and Unwritten Law." and let us not forget new found glory. well i hope he gets a heart attack and dies, and i hope he reads this. He is a loser, an old bob seager type fagot and he will surely get his.
I agree with johnny d here. Nigel you should die. But i would also like to see all the people in the world die that think blink 182 and new found glory is punk. punk came and gone. but its dead. well at least all this new ages crap.. bloody cunts.
i hate the idea of this concert but the i dea i like is a revolution through the robo band a band dedicated to two things the movie robo cop and a revolution of blind militant white trash kids following around the roboband from show too show and beating up these little pop trash peices of shit.
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Yeah, stick 'em in the Hall of Fame if that means they'll go away, forever. Lydon has spent the last two decades being twice as boring and pointless as any of the rock dinosaurs he (rightly) ridiculed in 76/77. At least the other three became honest jobbing musicians. Since the under-rated Flowers of Romance, Lydon's just been a chatshow parody of the iconoclast he briefly was, and this reformed act is just pantomime, the equivalent of old geezers playing trad jazz in a pub.
However, I'm always surprised by how good most of Never Mind the Bollocks is whenever I overhear it being played anywhere. It's very much part of the rock 'n' roll tradition of the time rather than the explosive new thing we imagined it to be at the time. But crass antics like this tour make it hard for me to even maintain a mostalgic fondness for the Pistols these days.