“Punk and the Pistols”
This film that had a long and troubled gestation – some of which is referred to here. For an informative review by Andrew Graham-Dixon in the Independent go here.
The impulse was simple: to turn a non-fiction book into a television documentary. It seemed easy: as the MS was in the galley stage, all the research and writing had been done. All that was needed was logistical organisation, archive research, some visual/conceptual hooks and, so we thought, we were off. Not so: the whole process – from the first treatments that director Paul Tickell and I wrote to the transmission of “Punk and the Pistols” – has taken four years. If I wasn’t happy with the result, I might think this a cautionary tale.
It’s not as though I was a television virgin: I’d worked in the industry full-time for five years until I finally realised that I was ill-suited to hierarchies and office time. After going freelance in 1984, I’d come to the conclusion that – contrary to the cross-media imperative of the late 80′s – I was a writer first and foremost, and that’s what I should stick to doing. Even better, books offer a depth of control impossible in other media: while the principal responsibility is yours, you can work on a project that will create its own time, that will set its own agenda. After completing the MS of “England’s Dreaming”, however, I thought there was a reasonable chance of getting a good programe out of the stories that I’d uncovered. Having had a satisfying degree of control in one medium, collaboration in another seemed excit ing rather than restrictive.
I’d known Paul Tickell since 1980, when we worked on the Melody Maker. I knew he knew what he was talking about: his PhD was in Rimbaud and Lautreamont, and he’d managed post-Punk pin-up Kirk Brandon in a very early in carnation – a group called the Pack. For my research on the book, I’d uncovered about two hours of Pistols footage, so we knew there was enough to make a programme: archive is the prima materia of any music doc umentary. We’d both been involved in an early attempt at Punk history: an LWT disaster called “A Short Sharp Shock”, transmitted in the ‘tenth anniversary’ year of Punk, 1987. Carried away by the heady atmosphere emanating from the clips, the director went mad in the cutting room and edited together some thing that I couldn’t recognise working on.
That episode summarised two of the problems that we faced while making “Punk and the Pistols”: the peculiar attitudes that many television people have towards pop culture in general, and punk in particular; and the problems that you encounter with archive footage of musical performance. (So much of “A Short Sharp Shock” was uncleared that LWT snuck it out in the early hours of the morning.) Apart from BBC strongholds like “Arena”, TV has been infected with the wider hierarchy of values which places the novel at the apex of the arts pyramid, and pop down in the depths. Here pop is seen as pure performance or promotion: any deeper examination, such as novelists receive as their due, is seen as pretentious, or, worse, unthinkable.
Paul Tickell and I wanted to see our experience of that time – fundamental to both of us – reproduced on screen. We were after the hidden history of a moment, the effect of which went beyond simplistic, rational explanations. Our first memo stressed both alchemical elements – the burning, un-English summer of 1976 – and storylines that accentuated how we felt Punk had come about: not just as a laddish rock’n roll form, but as a coming together of the isolated, outcast, alienated. Apart from the people directly involved with the Sex Pistols and the shop “Sex” – McLaren and Westwood, Jordan, Glen Matlock – we found ourselves zeroing in on a group of stylised misfits called the Bromley Contingent: because they embodied the sexual and social provocations of early Punk, because their stories emphasised the suburban/ inner urban, straight/ gay, middle/ working class fusion that powers British pop.
This was asking a good deal, but as we began shooting in summer 1991 – with an independent production company – we quickly realised that key co-workers had no idea of how to deal with Punk in particular, and musicians in general. As Tickell says: ‘These people live a different kind of life, in which they’re not usually up until after midday. This is not television office time. To some people, being in TV is the most important thing in the world. It’s a juggernaut, but not a juggernaut that some one like John Lydon is going to take any notice of. You have to talk to musicians on their own terms if you want them to talk to you: they’re often suspicious of the media, especially Punks.’ Not everyone is dying to get on TV: if you want someone to perform for you, you have to spend time with them. These courtesies are often lacking in television practice, but they are necessary.
The more serious brake on the programme came from the most obvious quarter: the labyrinth of payments and clearances that you have to make if you’re going to show any non-contemporary music clip – ie outside the pop video’s promotional time span. There are four separate deals that you may have to make: one with the Musicians Union (session fee); one with the Performing Rights Society (public performance of recorded music); one with the record company (ownership of recording copyright); one with the publishing company (ownership of song copyright). Any one of these might prove problematic: “Punk and the Pistols” went into a three year limbo because the Sex Pistols – THE key group – were renegotiating their contract with Virgin Records (after getting back the rights to their material in a January 1986 court judgement). Until it was finalised, Sex Pistols footage was unavailable.
As was one key interviewee: John Lydon. Part of him was suspicious of the whole programme set up (which changed in late 1991, when the production moved in-house to “Arena”). He was also preparing his own book – “Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs” – and was keeping his options open on its exploitation. Without his OK, no Sex Pistols. This question of editorial control was finally solved by Paul Tickell’s persistence (backed up by “Arena”‘s continuing support) in matching Lydon, lager for lager, in a series of evenings in London and Los Angeles. With Lydon’s agreement, drummer Paul Cook fell into place: once they had been filmed in the second half of 1994, Tickell was ready to edit “Punk and the Pistols” into its present form.
My own involvement with the programme has been minimal since the main block of shooting, but I’m struck by how much it remains true to our original ideas: in this respect, it has been a successful collaboration. The programme is an inevitable streamlining of the book’s complex storyline (the Clash are given shorter shrift than we would have liked), but there are many compensations, not the least in some extraordinary super 8 material of the Sex Pistols’ June/ July 1976 performances in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall. As Lydon twists and turns in his savaged yellow pullover, his face still open and ex pres sive before the press barrage of the oncoming months, you can clearly see why people laid down their lives to follow him.