I wanna be ..... a curmudgeon!!!

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LONDON (Reuters) - "Wanna be an anarchist?"
At least one of the Sex Pistols, now middle-aged and a father of two, no longer does.
Former Pistols bassist Glen Matlock has called for swearing on British television to be curbed, nearly 30 years after the provocative punk rockers sent shock waves through Britain by using derivations of the dreaded "f"-word on live TV.
"It's pathetic when people swear for the sake of it," Matlock told a television show to be broadcast Sunday. "Something ought to be done about it."
Matlock, 48, also told "X-Rated: The TV Shows They Tried To Ban," that he hated it when his young children heard obscenities on the airwaves.

As a teenager, Matlock co-wrote some of the Pistols' most enduring anthems like "God Save The Queen" and "Anarchy In The UK." He left the group early in 1977 and was replaced by Sid Vicious.

― ffirehorse (firehorse), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:22 (twenty years ago)

I'm trying to imagine the context of how this became a story in the first place.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:24 (twenty years ago)

Channel 4 are plugging a new season on Banned or Controversial TV, I assume this is a tacky publicity blurb.

― Ferlin Husky (noodle vague), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:29 (twenty years ago)

this doesn't contradict anything Lydon's said about Matlock over the last twenty five years

― miccio (miccio), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:30 (twenty years ago)

Paul Morley wrote in the Friday Review about this exciting story.

― Alba (Alba), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:34 (twenty years ago)

matlock still has many leagues to go b4 he catches up w.bob "looking out for number one" geldof in this territory

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:37 (twenty years ago)

Further complaints from Matlock: "This new money is too fiddly", "Is it supposed to be a boy or a girl?" and "I'm cold. So very, very cold." Matlock then nodded off face first into his Ovaltine.

― Ferlin Husky (noodle vague), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:38 (twenty years ago)

"eventually punk is going to become three little old men on a park bench complaining bitterly about the weather" — danny baker (a long time ago) (and from memory as i myself am now a little old man)

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:39 (twenty years ago)

But Geldof's always been a dick.

― Ferlin Husky (noodle vague), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:39 (twenty years ago)

well yes but so has glen matlock!!

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:41 (twenty years ago)

*puts on ghosts of princes in towers very loudly*

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:42 (twenty years ago)

True. Rephrase it then: "But Geldof didn't have anything to do with 'God Save the Queen'".

― Ferlin Husky (noodle vague), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:43 (twenty years ago)

Matlock didn't want to, once he saw the lyrics!

― miccio (miccio), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:47 (twenty years ago)

one of the reasons the pixtols wz so unexpected and effective in the first place = its impossible mix of members, jigsawed together as every good boyband shd be, except for volatile inner class crackle rather than appeal-to-everyone-variety

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:50 (twenty years ago)

(haha "pixtols")

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:53 (twenty years ago)

Has anybody called a band The Sex Pixels yet?

― Ferlin Husky (noodle vague), Saturday, 5 March 2005 15:57 (twenty years ago)

jigsawed together as every good boyband shd be

Hurrah! I like seeing stuff like this (as I've said it too and therefore get to be smug). But will 'the Sex Pistols were just a boy band' meme become so entrenched and therefore as irritatingly complacent as 'the Beatles were just...' has done? Even if it's TROO?

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Saturday, 5 March 2005 16:09 (twenty years ago)

no "just" is implied there ned!! some boy-bands (= selected by a smart grown-up) are better than most "proper" rock bands (= selected by their pastyfaced teen selves)

as big brother has decisively shown us since, part of the (eventual) point will always the story of the given collective's shattering

their job after all is to give us records and performances on and offstage, and (indirectly) writing inspired by both: hence occasionally, if the constituent parts are pre-chosen as as to shatter loudly and brilliantly, all the better — the break-up is the last, longest and (sometimes) (cf the pistols esp*) most important performance

*since they seemed to be in the process of breaking up from the moment they appeared, courtesy designated dick and scapegoat glen m

― mark s (mark s), Saturday, 5 March 2005 16:34 (twenty years ago)

http://www.hallmarkchannel.com/data/images/PG_USA_Matlock_1.jpg

― eman (eman), Saturday, 5 March 2005 17:19 (twenty years ago)

Has anybody called a band The Sex Pixels yet?

I believe there was a Lesser/Kid606 side project called the Sex Pixels, but I don't know if they ever recorded anything under the name.

― Ryan WS (fffv), Saturday, 5 March 2005 21:27 (twenty years ago)

I don't know about this boy band thing. It sounds interesting initially, but it seems to me the distinction is between some svengali-type focal point drawing the band members together and forming something new, like a new scene or a massively impactful act or something, versus a group of individuals (in college, hanging out in the same places, listening to the same stuff, whatever) who gravitate toward each other and form a band more "naturally" or "organically". On the surface, this would put the likes of the Beatles and the Pistols firmly in the Spice Girls camp, but then wouldn't someone like Joy Division fit, too? Couldn't you make an argument that (pick one) Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton and Alan Erasmus (Martin Hannett, too? Peter Saville, even?) were the svengali-like fulcrum around which the admittedly pre-existing yet thus-far-unsuccessful Warsaw began to coalesce. And I'm only using JD as one example; this process has occurred time and time again, in ways that mirror the process if not the content, and I wonder why we continue to make the distinction at all. I mean, even the earnest middle class folkie Robert Zimmerman fell under the sway of the more gritty, urbane and astute "Bob Dylan" persona in one sense! (Ha ha, Bob Dylan in boy band shocka?)

Sorry if this makes little or no sense, I'm really just brainstorming... and wondering whether this distinction (essentially between those old strawmen foes the "authentic" and the "manufactured") is yet another r*ck*st trope we haven't gotten around to questioning or deconstructing yet -- i.e. that all art is manufactured, that nothing in the human realm ever grows untended by some kind of agency/action/direction.

― David A. (Davant), Sunday, 6 March 2005 02:30 (twenty years ago)

I don't know if that post was all that curmudgeonly, though!

― David A. (Davant), Sunday, 6 March 2005 02:30 (twenty years ago)

No, we need more curmudgeons on this thread.

― moley (moley), Sunday, 6 March 2005 02:33 (twenty years ago)

However, can I just add, please don't describe yourself as a curmudgeon to the cute girl that's talking you up at the show? It's a word mostly used by cranky jaded indie rock boys to differentiate themselves from the ever-mutable (often art school) hipster thing, and I get that you're different and special but Curmudgeon I will not make out with you. (Two different boys have used that word to describe themselves recently, and it just hit my "oh shit, a date with you would be a date with rob gordon" button so no go.) Keep it in mind. Shit only flies if you can be described as "grizzly".

― Maggie O'Connor (unmitigatedhilarity), Sunday, 6 March 2005 02:44 (twenty years ago)

LOL Maggie. That post just melted my cranky jaded curmudgeonosity for the evening. Thanks!

― ffirehorse (firehorse), Sunday, 6 March 2005 03:17 (twenty years ago)

fourteen years pass...

Dirty old curmudgeon in the corner , reporting in

― calstars, Thursday, 27 June 2019 02:15 (six years ago)

*prince voice* I wanna be a cur-mudgeon

― john. a resident of evanston. (john. a resident of chicago.), Thursday, 27 June 2019 03:18 (six years ago)

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