Anson Boon got so into playing Johnny Rotten that he hurt himself rocking too hard.
“If you look at frontmen, they hold the microphone and they stand still. It’s beautiful. It’s great. But Johnny Rotten never stood still. He never retreated from the audience,” the British actor, who plays the Sex Pistols’ foul-mouthed, foul-teethed lead singer in FX’s miniseries “Pistol,” told the Daily News.
“This band, in a way, they were part of the audience. They were part of the people. They weren’t these removed superstars. That was fresh. They shook things up, and they had a unique approach to what they were singing about. These were working-class boys, and they were singing about their surroundings and they weren’t filtering it and they weren’t watering it down or making it nicey-nicey.
“They shocked a lot of people, but they shook things up.”
“Pistol,” which premiered Tuesday on Hulu, created by Craig Pearce and directed by Danny Boyle, attempts to capture the chaos that was the Sex Pistols. Based on guitarist Steve Jones’ 2017 memoir, “Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol,” the six-episode series plays the hits, the skyrocket ride to fame and their almost as quick downfall, fueled by drugs and death.
The show, much like the band, is loud and angry. They spit and crack bottles over people’s heads, and Boyle’s camera, reminiscent of his early work on the 1996 British black comedy-drama film “Trainspotting,” shudders and glides around passed-out druggies and hopped-up fangirls.
The Sex Pistols, made up of vocalist John Lydon (Boon), known by his stage name of Johnny Rotten, guitarist Steve Jones (Toby Wallace), drummer Paul Cook (Jacob Slater) and bassist Glen Matlock (Christian Lees) before being replaced by Sid Vicious (Louis Partridge), weren’t supposed to be anything. So they became the centerpiece of a culture shift.
“You were young, and then you were old and there didn’t seem to be any gap in between. Suddenly you looked like your parents before you’d begun to think you might not want to,” Boyle told The News.
“Suddenly these guys appeared with music that you could just go crazy to, and they spoke like you and they didn’t care in the way that you don’t when you’re 19. You don’t care what’s laid out for you. You don’t care about following your father into the factory. ... They said ‘don’t do that, do what you want.’ That was the wonderful thing that appeals to you when you’re 19: if you want to be vacant, be vacant. Be futile. Be stupid. It doesn’t matter. It’s yours. Do with it what you want. And it was so liberating.”
London in the mid-1970s was defined by the Sex Pistols, and the Sex Pistols were defined by London in the mid-1970s, melding into a punk culture that shifted the fabric of society into one where it was OK to be a little bad. The band took it too far — Vicious was arrested in New York City in 1978 for the murder of girlfriend Nancy Spungen, and died of a heroin overdose the day after being released on bail from Rikers Island — but that was what they set out to do.
In “Pistol,” the bandmates are not rebels for show and the attention, but because they were lashing out at the world.
“We’re so used to seeing them as demigod figures, but they were just young kids at the time,” Slater, who plays Cook, told The News.
“Life isn’t always easy when you’re a kid. You’ve got these insecurities, these normal things that are amplified massively when you’re in the Sex Pistols, and suddenly you’re on the world stage. It was kind of balancing their notoriety and everything we already know about them with their vulnerabilities as people.”
The Sex Pistols’ vulnerabilities came out in anger. Anger at a world that hadn’t picked them up and spat them back out again, but one that hadn’t even picked them up because they were too poor or too dirty or too depraved.
“Society deemed them as having no future and nothing to add. And they proved them wrong. They changed the way people thought of that whole generation,” Pearce, known best for his collaborations with Australian director Baz Luhrmann, told The News.
“It doesn’t really matter how you say it or if you have the resources to say it, but if you have something to say, you have the right to say it. Be brave in finding the way to say it. Sure, the playing wasn’t virtuosic, especially in the beginning, but they learned on the job because that was the only way they could. They had something to say, and they passionately wanted to say it.”
———
