The legendary inventor of the Sex Pistols and therefore to a large degree punk rock — give or take The Ramones — has sadly passed on from a rare form of cancer at age 64. He was most definitely a showman at heart and the man for whom the phrase “shameless self-promoter” was pretty much invented was, quite naturally, attracted to the movies.
Below is a longish but intriguing and funny scene from the film that Pistols fans felt he somewhat hijacked, Julien Temple’s “The Great Rock and Roll Swindle; it’s somewhere between a documentary and an entirely fictitious musical comedy. But how can a star hijack his own movie, anyway?
And where does an old publicity hungry inventor of an subversive art form intended to destroy culture as we know it end up in his delayed adulthood? Hollywood, where else? What’s he doing? Selling out, but on his terms — another concept he kind of invented.
