Glen Matlock: Left Field Rock n Roll (2024)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

WHERE does one start when interviewing Glen Matlock? The founding member of one of the most influential bands of all time, he’s currently touring in the line-up of another act just as important and has played with, alongside or contributed to the work of more bands than there are words in this sentence. 

In the end, he actually makes it easy to kick things off. 

“You’re a bit blurry!” he says, puffing on a dart on the balcony of his home. He makes a remark about how cold it is, and moves inside as I wipe the lens of my phone’s forward-facing camera. 

In the mid-seventies, Matlock’s band Sex Pistols agitated the rise of the British punk movement with their raw and aggressive “left-field rock and roll” as he calls it. Fifty years on, the dapper and animated Matlock has half a dozen things going on, including touring as the bass player with Blondie. It’s a role he’s had for a couple of years since the medically-related retirement of Leigh Foxx. This week he’s in rehearsals for their tour of Australia with Pandemonium Rocks.

“I enjoy playing with Blondie,” he says warmly. “Great body of work. I’ve been friends with Debbie, a little bit, for a long, long, long time. Blondie these days, though, out of the original guys, is only Clem [Burke] and Debbie.”

Founding member Chris Stein is still technically part of the band, but is no longer able to tour due to a heart condition. 

“It’s a bit like, especially with me joining … it’s a bit like Dr Who,” Matlock says of the current incarnation of Blondie. “They keep regenerating. Their guitarist is Tommy Kessler, who’s been with them for a while, and they’ve got a new guy – who I thought had been in a lot longer than me but he’s only done one more gig because lockdown happened – called Andee Blacksugar, who’s really great and modern, and there’s a great keyboard player, Matt Katz-Bohen. They’re a good bunch.”

The Blondie gig is but one of many for Matlock, who never seems to be wanting for work. His tour itinerary is full right up until he gets here with different bands. The flight to Australia will be one of the few that offers him a break from gigging.

“Not long back, I got back from California playing some shows promoting my album Consequences Coming”, he explains, “which is coming out physically in Australia, It came out over here last year. There might be a couple of solo shows over there at the end of the Blondie stuff – we’ll see. I played a couple of shows (in the US). Clem played drums for me, and that was great, and Gilby Clarke from Guns N’Roses, and Steve Fishman was playing bass. Then I’ve got the Lust for Life [Iggy Pop tribute, also with Burke] tour, I have one day off, and then I’m rehearsing with my English band and opening some pretty big venues here in the UK for Stiff Little Fingers. So I’m busy right through until the end of March, and I can’t wait to fly on a plane, probably to Singapore airport and have a two-hour layover where I can go on the roof and have a Silk Cut before I get on the plane to Melbourne.”

With that sort of workload, Matlock is busier than people who have regular jobs. Except that for him, and for many others, playing music is his regular job. He is a professional musician who makes his living with his art. He takes issue with those who don’t understand that concept.

“A thing that people forget about musicians is, you do these things and you might enjoy doing them and they might have artistic merit – well, hopefully it does – but it’s work! It’s a job! People always forget that. They think that the minute you say you’re a musician, you’re a millionaire. It’s just bollocks!”

As anyone who’s tried to make a go of it as a musician – and even those who have succeeded – will understand, it’s as tough a grind as any other occupation. In many respects, even tougher. There’s no rulebook or guidelines, no guaranteed career path. It’s a vocation plagued by insecurity, bouts of inactivity and non-creativity and a great deal of it depends entirely on luck and the individual.

“It’s a job,” he says again. “You get paid for what you do – now! I’m 67 and I’m supposed to be a retired, old-age pensioner in England, but I’m not going to let that stop me.”

What it is about the creative arts, then, that people don’t see as work? Why are there people who tend to see work in music and the arts as little more than fun or a hobby?

“People who see it that way tend to be right-wing Tories,” Matlock says with disdain. “They attach no value to the arts whatsoever. They think music just comes out of some little black box…well, they probably still have cassettes!”

While humans are the only lifeform we know that creates art as a means of expression and communication, much of it is decidedly undervalued. It often seems that art – music in particular and, importantly, rock music especially – is considered something very lowbrow and not worthy of support or patronage.

“I can’t disagree with that!” Matlock says after a pause. “What gets me with music though, is … what’s that quote from Hunter S Thompson? I can’t remember the exact quote, but the music business is the most capitalist thing going. If enough people don’t turn up to your gig, you don’t get paid, you don’t eat. But even so, we still manage to be a bit more socialist and caring for other people then a great deal of fat cat businessmen. If we can do it, why can’t they, and look after people a bit more?”

The quote Matlock’s after is actually: “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” While I’m not across what HST’s thoughts on the Sex Pistols or Glen Matlock may have been, there’s no doubt they’ve often been on the same page. Hunter may well have enjoyed the sentiment of Glen’s recent solo album, Consequences Coming, where he takes a few broadsides at conservative politics and narcissistic populism.

“A lot of it was written just before lockdown, then through lockdown and it coincided with [Boris] Johnson, Brexit, the rise of Trump and the crazy lurch to the right across the world, which I think isn’t doing anyone any good,” Matlock observes, ruefully, “and the polarisation of politics. And it’s my view on that, really. Hopefully nothing too po-faced. There’s a lot of tongue-in-cheekness to it, but there’s some kind of message. The lead single is called ‘Head on a Stick’. Now, I’m not a violent man, but I think some people should be brought to account and made to stand on the naughty step for a little bit longer.”

He’s obviously a master of understatement, too. 

“A lot of them make their decisions based, not on what’s right,” he continues, “which is what they should be doing, but on all the vested interests they’ve got, which we as a populace never really benefit from, and maybe would rather not benefit from, if people aren’t doing the right thing.”

With the spectre of another Trump administration and the return of David Cameron, there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of things for him to write about.

“There’s never a shortage of things to write about,” he agrees, “and it seems to me that nobody learns. The world is worse when it should be better. It’s backwards.”

Half a century ago, Matlock and the Sex Pistols had a generation of youth on their side as they spearheaded an anti-establishment rebellion, opposed to conservatism, laissez-faire capitalism and repression of individuality. These days many of those same people seem to have become the very thing they once rebelled against.

“I dunno,” Matlock says with a sigh. “I think that people, especially in Britain where they’ve had hundreds of years of experience in pulling the wool over people’s eyes, and people fall for it. And in the media, with one of your ex-pat guys, Murdoch, behind things, it makes it hard. You get a quiet press that’s no more than cortisone for the powers that be. I think in England they’re going to come unstuck. One thing I have to do before I go away is organise a postal vote or I’ll get my son to go vote on my behalf, because I do not want to be away and miss the chance of seeing the Tories come unstuck in this country.”

“Music, ultimately, is a way of communicating with people”, Matlock says early in our interview. It’s important to him that the music he creates has a strong message to it, as long as it can also be fun

“I think good music should reflect something, and you should be able to make a point and have a laugh – not at someone else’s expense, but at least they’re not at having it at your expense.”

Glen Matlock is touring with Blondie as part of Pandemonium Rocks alongside Placebo, Alice Cooper, Deep Purple, Wolfmother and more.

PANDEMONIUM ROCKS

20/4: Caribbean Gardens, Melbourne

25/4: Cathy Freeman Park, Sydney

27/4: Doug Jennings Park, Gold Coast