There’s more to me than just being a bass player from 45 years ago.” “I’m kind of like the punk rock Bob Dylan, as it were, kind of thing.
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” he says in his thick London accent. But he has spent years performing his songs unaccompanied, on acoustic guitar, he says, just as he writes them. He first shared bills with the Dropkicks a couple of years ago, when they asked him to open a series of tour dates through Europe. Matlock, who formed the post-Sex Pistols band Rich Kids and has performed with Iggy Pop, the Damned, and his teenhood heroes the Faces, has released several albums with a group he calls the Philistines and, most recently, a solo album under his own name. The show was postponed because of coronavirus fears just as this story was going to press. You wouldn’t have found Matlock at the roulette wheel before or after his scheduled gig Friday at Encore Boston Harbor, when he was to play solo as an opening act for the Dropkick Murphys. I get paid.” Record companies, he notes, have been historically notorious for shielding accurate royalty figures from musicians, “unless you get paid enough to take ‘em to court.” That’s a gamble he has declined to take. Nobody I met had much to say so I didn’t learn anything.“I’ve done OK out of it,” he says matter-of-factly. I didn’t find much, apart from a mouse pie and a couple of pints. A chap in my position (between jobs) has to occupy his days in some way or another. Intrigued, I went off to Acton to have a look.
I didn’t realise that people said such things any longer. Glen thinks that this social change had an effect on his music. In the words of the blurb, ‘Matlock describes how chief Pistol Johnny Rotten and svengali manager Malcolm McLaren plotted the downfall of the rock establishment and how by hard work, good timing and brilliant PR, the Pistols shocked the nation.’ Pete got some other things from Glen’s mouth, including a fierce description of working-class community, which he believes to be now destroyed, in his native Acton. I guess that Pete pretty accurately represents Glen’s voice, as well as his ambitions.
Young Glen, though he can’t be so young today, had a good ghost writer in Pete Silverton. Have you read Glen Matlock’s I was a teenage Sex Pistol? In its own way this is an enlightening book and I like the manner in which the words appear, splattered in a typeface that’s like a modern memorandum or a press release.
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