Pistol (Danny Boyle's Sex Pistols Programme)

[Pauline Walnuts]

I saw the episode of So it Goes where the Pistols first appeared, and on the whole show the difference between the Pistols and the other acts, and the show itself was quite marked.

_{I'm not going to say where I saw it, for the lulz like.}

Spoiler alert

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[SteveDave]

Here's the 100 Club one...

Steve Jones looks great in this. Like a mobster about to go into hiding.

[markburgle]

I loved that interview, listened to it and just thought, Rotten is a brilliant guy. He was warm, friendly , hilarious

How did he go from that in 2006, the mean old prick he is today
Shame

I think he's always had both sides to him. You can see interviews from the early PiL years where he obviously already has a massive chip on his shoulder. There's this fascinating bit from Steve Jones' book, I think this incident was from 2008, about what happened when the pilot of their plane wouldn't let him smoke:

"Rotten goes absolutely ballistic. He's like a fucking baby having a tantrum – banging on the pilot's door, trying to open the windows and doors in the fuselage, basically risking all our lives cos someone's told him he's got to wait a couple of hours to have a fag... a man in his fifties has gone into a full-on meltdown about not getting his own way.

I think what I hate the most about these situations is that I can't be myself around him. With anyone else, you could just tell them to fucking pull their head in, but because in recent years he's surrounded himself with people who don't just tolerate his childishness and aggression, they actively encourage it, anyone who dares to prick that bubble will just be making life unbearable for everyone else. So you have to kind of go along with it – Yes, John, no, John, three bags full, John."

He does have this fascinating duality where he's massively pompous about how people should behave with decency and yet he's prone to being an unbearable, unrepentant arsehole

[Johnboy]

Watched all of this, very entertaining.

Full of flaws but a lot of it surprisingly accurate and it belted along - lots of energy.

[George White]

As the son of a darts fanatic, I've been fascinated by the fact that apparently the scenes set in Atlanta were actually shot at the Lakeside.

[grainger]

I'm not familiar with them, but reading up on Wiki...yeah, the girls could be a weird composite (or whatever the multiplication rather than deduplication version of that is) character for her.

Speaking of all things Pistols lore, one of the few things I do know about them is the Manchester Free Trade Hall Gig. Was it a massive oversight to not include that in the program, or was that gig not as influential as I have been led to believe? To my understanding it, everyone and their dog from the music business in the late 70s and onwards claims to have been at the gig despite the venue not being big enough to accommodate the claimants...and yet the show made no mention of it.

That's not quite true - many notable people from Manchester claim to have been at the gig. But I was reading recently a book about the Leeds music scene, and something similar happened there when the Pistols played on that tour. It's probably safer to say that the tour was inspriational in general, not just the Manchester gig, although that's the only one that usually gets the coverage.