Pistols pack a punch

Matthew d'Ancona

Wednesday, 14th November 2007

Well, if we’re honest, we’ve all put on a few pounds since we last convened. The constant--in 2007 as in 1977--is the awesome power and authority of Jones’s guitar-playing, which holds together a string of favourite numbers, from ‘Problems’, ‘Liar’ and ‘EMI’ to ‘No Feelings’, ‘Submission’ and ‘No Fun’. Malcolm McLaren, the group’s former manager, always claimed that the essence of punk was to ‘make sure they can’t play’. Nonsense, of course; this lot always knew what they were doing.

Glen Matlock and Paul Jones form a tight rhythm section, while Rotten does what he does best: strutting like a marionette plugged into the mains, arms aloft, the eyes of childhood meningitis staring frostily into the crowd he both loves and disdains. Olivier’s Richard III (‘deformed, unfinished’), Arthur Askey, the Hunchback of Notre Dame and Ken Dodd: they are all in there.

He is in a good mood because McLaren, his old enemy, has dropped out of the jungle reality show, I’m a Celebrity, before its official start. ‘What a f***ing w***er!’ he crows. Then, to the crowd: ‘You may kiss me now.’ His throat is giving him trouble and he doses himself with Chloraseptic throughout the gig. But the voice is still mesmeric, the howl of an Irish, Arsenal-loving banshee from north London. ‘When there’s no future, How can there be sin? We’re the flowers in the dustbin, We’re the poison in your human machine, We’re the future, your future’: nobody has ever written or sung lyrics remotely like that.

On paper, these occasional reunion concerts--transparently and unashamedly staged whenever the band needs a bit of cash--ought to be just an embarrassing nostalgia-fest. But they are no such thing. The reason, I think, is that, as Rotten has said, the Pistols are the last great music- hall act. ‘Sing-a-long-a-Johnny,’ he declares to the mob, ‘because you’ve been pretty f***ing pedestrian so far.’

In the pulsating drum intro to ‘Holidays in the Sun’, he gets us all singing ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’. This is Rotten as Archie Rice or Tommy Trinder, the beer-stained Brixton Academy transformed into The Good Old Days.