Pistol fell flat for me, but there are two things that might make it worth a punt. “He just died, for fuck’s sake,” Lydon says to Temple, his voice collapsing with emotion. I thought of Lydon talking about his friend Sid in Julien Temple’s 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury.
After meandering around the early days of the band, the show careers towards the inevitable implosion: Bill Grundy, the US, drugs, Sid Vicious (Louis Partridge) joining the band and flaming out tragically. It is a big ask of the audience, to throw out equal parts sentimentality and nihilism, and expect it to sit smoothly. It’s Pistols: the panto.Īsks too much of us … Toby Wallace as Steve Jones and Sydney Chandler as Chrissie Hynde in Pistol. When Johnny Rotten finally appears and spends an episode or two trying to write lyrics, he talks in scraps of what will become lines from their handful of songs. He speaks in statements such as “You’re a product of state oppression,” urging the band to “tear into each other like the seditionary sewer rats that you are”. Westwood’s character is wheeled out to explain things, while McLaren sloganeers.
“Ruffians like you excite me,” purrs a predatory Malcolm McLaren (Thomas Brodie-Sangster), when Jonesy is caught trying to steal from his and Vivienne Westwood’s shop, Sex. The first episode is all about Jonesy (Toby Wallace), as Jones is known in the series, and his terrible, traumatic childhood and life as a young thief. The problem with this is that it gives the story a wonky, skewed focus and a frustrating sense of delayed gratification.
It is adapted by Baz Luhrmann favourite Craig Pearce, from Jones’s memoir, Lonely Boy, which explains the Jones-heavy perspective. Danny Boyle directs this frenetic yet baggy six-part dramatisation of the Sex Pistols story, largely told through the eyes of guitarist Steve Jones. Strange, then, that Pistol (Disney+) ends up feeling too fast and too loose. T he Sex Pistols lasted for three years, and it’s fair to say that a lot happened to them in that brief, blinding flash of late 1970s chaos.
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