Anarchy On The TV
The Sex Pistols hit the small screen? Steve Jones and director Danny Boyle explain why and how.
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No future: Sex Pistols (from left, Johnny Rotten and Steve Jones) play their last show, Winterland, San Francisco, January 14, 1978.
Getty, Miya Mizuno/FX (2)
T HE SEX PISTOLS have been portrayed by actors on screen before – briefly in Michael Winterbottom’s 2002 movie 24 Hour Party People, and more fully in Alex Cox’s 1986 film Sid And Nancy. Now new six-part TV drama Pistol promises another screen vision of the group, this time from the direct perspective of one of the main protagonists, namely guitarist Steve Jones, whose extraordinary 2017 autobiography, Lonely Boy, the series is based on.
For Jones, watching an actor playing him on-screen was a strange experience – particularly when that actor was a boy re-enacting the moment the Sex Pistols guitarist was sexually abused by his stepfather. “It is what it was,” he explains down the line from his Los Angeles home. “Which was not a lot but enough to fuck me up in the head. It was weird to watch it – not just that scene, but the whole thing. The first time I saw a rough cut it was bizarre… But I soon got used to it.”