The Sex Pistols – the heroes of a new series featuring Maisie Williams

“Everyone knows that Malcolm McLaren is full of shit.” Like a poisoned arrow, these words were uttered by Steve Jones, guitarist of the Sex Pistols. He was talking about his former manager, whom he dreamt of punching in the face. Johnny Rotten, the band’s singer, continues: “He never did anything but steal my ideas and sell them as if they were his own…”. This is the conversation that opens Julien Temple’s feature-length documentary, The Filth and the Fury (2000), that bears its name well. Using archive footage and interviews, the explosive musicians – in their forties at the time – unashamedly speak their minds, filmed against the light, like shadow puppets. A fine tribute to an emblematic group, the precursor of the punk movement, which poured its rage onto the already inflamed 1970s, caught between riots, unemployment, National Front marches and what was known as the “winter of discontent”, a disorder in full swing that hit the United Kingdom hard from 1978 to 1979…

 

 

There is just one step from the ardour of rock to obscenity. The Sex Pistols remain the most volcanic and foul-mouthed band whose second bassist, Sid Vicious, is best remembered for an overdose in 1979 and whose ashes are rumoured to have been swept away by a mop after his own drunken mother spilled the urn on her tiled floor… A terrible and controversial band that became a genuine societal phenomenon and one of the emblems of youthful counter-culture, quickly banned by the national authorities. Late inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, a symbolic pantheon but also an American archive, the members of the Sex Pistols refused the honours, calling the museum a “bag of piss“…

Almost 50 years after The Sex Pistols’ debut, director Danny Boyle is taking on one of these showmen, with raw material. He’s planning to adapt Steve Jones’ autobiography, Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol (2016), a dark self-portrait without concessions or pathos that evokes everything from the terrible state of London in the 1970s to the band’s trashy Californian wanderings in the 1980s, into a mini-series. According to our colleagues at Variety magazine, the director of Slumdog Millionaire (2009) has signed up with the FX channel – Fargo, Pose and American Horror Story – to do a mini-series with six episodes. The cast includes Toby Wallace as Steve Jones, Anson Boon as Johnny Rotten, Louis Partridge as Sid Vicious and none other than Maisie Williams, Arya Stark of Game of Thrones, to play Pamela Cooke, better known under the pseudonym Jordan, an English actress renowned for her work with Vivienne Westwood and who played a major part in the explosion of the punk movement. For the moment, no release date has been announced.