After the last show of Iggy Pop’s 1979 US tour, his pal David Bowie offered to give the band a lift to New York’s Mudd Club in his Lincoln Continental executive stretch limousine. “We piled into his limo, and it was such a tight squeeze I had to sit on Bowie’s knee,” former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock recalls. “I noticed small paintings hanging up inside. ‘Hang about,’ I said, ‘Isn’t that a Picasso?’ Bowie said yeah. I said ‘Well, you’re a flash ****’ and he laughed. The other one was a Matisse.”

When Iggy first introduced them, Bowie had quipped, “Oh, the noble savage.” Insulted, bassist Glen, 69, retorted, “Your mics didn’t half come in handy…” and explained that the Pistols famously light-fingered guitarist Steve Jones had stolen Bowie’s equipment from his 1973 Hammersmith Odeon show, including cymbals, a bass amplifier, and Bowie’s personal microphone. “The bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar,” he added, quoting the star’s own lyrics. Bowie bristled but the pair eventually made up in the wings of a Talking Heads show, also in Manhattan. “He knew all the songs and sang them in his best David Bowie voice,” Glen tells me. “I told him I’d loved his Low album and the single from it, Be My Wife. He said ‘The Laughing Gnome sold more than that’. He wasn’t up himself, he was genuinely interested in what you had to say.”

Contrary to all expectations – especially theirs – the Sex Pistols are still going strong 50 years after their first shambolic live show on November 6, 1975. “We’re supposed to be touring America but Steve went to watch Chelsea play Fulham, slipped and broke his hand in three places and we’ve had to postpone it,” Glen explains. “We’ve played fifty shows this year.” They’re old-age punks now. Jones is 70, drummer Paul Cook is 69. Singer Frank Carter, ex-Gallows, is the baby of the band at 41. Only John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, is missing. “There’s no way back for John,” Glen says bluntly. “He’s has painted himself into a corner, over politics and Trump.” Lydon, also 70, famously told the Sunday Express Review that “Trump is the Sex Pistols of politics” earlier this year.

The Pistols’ electrifying early years are celebrated in new Sky Arts documentary, I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol (also the title of his 1990 memoir and subsequent one-man show which Glen took to the Edinburgh Festival in 2014). “It gives me a chance to tell my side of the story,” he says. “The premier was last night at the Barbican – it was weird watching yourself thinking I wish I’d had me Barnet trimmed.” The film features vintage footage and all-new interviews, including luminaries like Cook & Jones, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, Billy Idol and the late Wayne Kramer (of The MC5), plus Alex McDowell who booked the Pistols’ first ever headlining gig at the Central School Of Art on November 7 1975 (and who went on to be the production designer on Tim Burton’s Charlie & The Chocolate Factory).

Punk rock hit the music business like an ice bucket challenge. Why? “There was a death of stuff that meant anything to kids. All the great bands – Roxy Music, The Faces, Mott The Hoople, Bowie’s Spiders From Mars – had gone to the States or just gone. Some pub rock bands were good – Doctor Feelgood and Kilburn & The High Road – but progressive rock was the dominant force and it was horrendous. People wanted change.”

Punk’s first flame burned brightly but briefly. The highlight, says Glen, was headlining the 100 Club’s two-day Punk Festival in September 1976. “It was rammed but it was still only about 400 people. Our greatest gig was Finsbury Park when we reformed in 1996, we had 36,000 there. Afterwards we came backstage to find Liam Gallagher going through our drinks, trying to nick a bottle of whisky. “The only trouble was I’d made the mistake of watching Spinal Tap the night before – where their bassist Derek Smalls got stuck in an alien pod – and we had to burst in stage through a thick screen of paper with our ‘filthy lucre’ backdrop, I had visions of the same thing happening to me…”

When the Pistols played Japan that year the promoter laid on two days in a luxury ryokan lodge by a lake on Hokkaido – a far cry from Kensal Green, London NW10, where only child Glen had grown up. His father was a shop steward at a factory making milk floats. He describes his upbring as “pretty working-class” and brightened up by QPR and Jamaican ska. “We were just down the road from Ladbrooke Grove. In the summer you’d just hear Laurel Aitken and bluebeat, it was kind of cool. My mum and dad went into big band music which I thought it was a bit cheesy at the time, but now when I listen to Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Glenn Miller it’s pretty cool. The first record I ever played were my uncle’s 78s – Elvis and Little Richard. I bought a LP at Rock On Records in Portobello Road because it looked similar, and it was The Faces’ second album, Long Player, a real door opener for me.”

Young Matlock loved Rudyard Kipling, the Kinks, Hancock’s Half Hour, Round The Horne and Anthony Newley – another connecting point with Bowie. He was a sixth-former at St Clements Danes Grammar School when Malcolm Mclaren employed him to work Saturday shifts in Let It Rock – the Kings Road shop he owned with Vivienne Westwood later rebranded as Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die before becoming SEX – punk rock’s nucleus. “Originally it was brothel creepers, Teds and a rock’n’roll jukebox – anything to not be a hippy.” He met fellow Faces fans Steve and Paul there. “I’m proud that the 25 people who hung around Malcolm’s shop all went on to do something of consequence. Jamie Reid, Siouxsie Sioux, Chrissie Hynde…”

The Pistols’ live appearance on ITV’s Today in December 1976, when tipsy host Bill Grundy provoked them into swearing, changed everything. Chaos and council bans ensued. “We’d already been on the front pages of the music papers but now all of Fleet Street was chasing us. It was funny to begin with, but we were going round the country not being out to play. That was a bit boring. Then Malcolm turned it into a cartoon strip…I was still being offered gigs by promoters but when I’d tell Malcolm, he’d say ‘You’re banned’ – a bit of dishonesty.”

Glen had co-written ten of their first songs, including the two Top Ten hits Pretty Vacant and God Save The Queen, (he adapted the bassline for the former from Abba’s SOS and the intro to Anarchy In The UK from the opening to ITV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium). But internal relationships were fractious. “Me and John were like chalk and cheese. John thought it was him versus me Steve and Paul. It wasn’t, it was a triumvirate – him, me, and Steve and Paul…” And John wanted to bring in his pal Sid Vicious, who couldn’t play. Danny Boyle’s Pistol TV series repeated McLaren’s lie that he’d fired Glen. Untrue. Matlock left of his own volition in February 1977, with Malcolm then opportunistically claiming that he’d been thrown out for being too keen on Paul McCartney. Two weeks later McLaren tracked him down to the Blue Posts pub in Central London to say Sid wasn’t working and would he come back. Glen’s reply is unprintable.

He formed the Rich Kids with Midge Ure, Rusty Egan and Steve New that March and notched three hit singles before splitting in 1979. Not longer after, he joined Iggy’s band. Seeing their 6000-strong New York Palladium audience dressed like horror film werewolves, ghouls and gargoyles threw him. Talk about Never Mind The Warlocks… “I didn’t know about Halloween, so to me it looked crazy. Afterwards Iggy introduced me to Debbie Harry, who was dressed as a witch. She kissed me on the cheek. I didn’t wash it for a week.”

In 2022 he was at home making a risotto when the phone rang. “It was [Blondie drummer] Clem Burke saying it wasn’t working with their bass player, was I interested.’ I said, ‘When? A couple of months’ time?’ He said next week… Of course I did it.” Glen and Clem, who died this year, had been pals since meeting at a 1978 charity gig. He was also chums with the late Faces’ keyboardist Ian McLagan. “In 2010, Ian told me Yes had asked him to play. He said, ‘Why the f*** would I want to play with Yes? I like songs with a beginning, a middle and an end.’ I asked what he wanted to do. He said, ‘Reform The Faces’…” And they did, with Mick Hucknall standing in for Rod Stewart and Glen replacing Ronnie Lane on bass. “I said don’t worry, I know these songs backwards…it’s just forwards I have a problem with.”

Glen is not your usual tabloid folk demon. He’s smart and sober, with a dry wit, and relaxes by going to art galleries and watching tragedies at Loftus Road. His adult sons Sam and Louis are musicians, with Louis doubling as the Pistols’ stage manager. “It was him who suggested we get Frank in.”

Matlock still seethes about Boris Johnson not agreeing a post-Brexit freedom of movement deal for musicians with the EU. “Young bands used to be able to get in a van and play gigs around Europe breaking even by selling merch. When I toured with Iggy, the Human League pretty much did that. You can’t do it anymore. It’s tragic.”

Glen lives in Maida Vale, with a framed poster for Tony Hancock’s film The Rebel hanging next to early Pistols gig posters. He recalls them appearing on Dutch TV show Disco Circus in January 1977 performing Anarchy In The UK accompanied (at the producer’s insistence) by juggling dwarfs. The band might even record an album next year, which would be their first proper studio album since Never Mind The Bollocks, released in October 1977. “I’ve got ideas for songs…we have to have a conversation, but we’ll definitely gig. “No other band I’ve been in eclipses the Pistols. It’s a double-edged sword. I see myself as a songwriter but I’ve been a Sex Pistol or an ex-Pistol all my life. “No matter how much you try and do other things, it is always there.”

*Glen Matlock’s documentary, I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol, airs on Sky Arts on November 8. His latest book Triggers: A Life In Music was published in 2023.