The Great Rock N' Roll Swindle

"You ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" John Lydon (1978)

The Great Rock N' Roll Swindle is a rather poor product put together by Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren to cash in on the waning success of his musical enterprise, the rather nauseating and overrated band The Sex Pistols, who left a grim, ugly legacy behind them in the form of musical dissolution, disaster, and even murder. Nothing is inspiring or even funny about the Pistols or their legacy, so it is curious that this movie is a kind of obnoxious, dribbling-in-your-ear uncle telling the same grotesque, dirty joke over and over again at a party. Perhaps drunk with a lampshade or a pair of bondage knickers on his head. Grotesque it is.

Johnny Rotten has been canned from the group. They're auditioning other singers, a succession of them, and none quite fit the bill. Steve Jones returns from Rio or some damn place, where he has been hobnobbing with train robber Ronnie Biggs, posing as a 1940s detective in several mildly amusing skits (most of which include him having non-stop sex). McLaren wanders the width and breadth of the English countryside with a midget punk, "Helen of Troy", explaining point-for-point his process of getting together a group of "foul-mouthed" yobs to form a punk rock group so vile, they would be banned and the record company would buy off their contract for an exorbitant amount of money. (The titular "Swindle" referenced.) He gives little pointers like cultivating "as much hatred as you can. It's your greatest asset." In between we get documentary and news file footage of Sex Pistols performances around England, of religious protests, of audiences in America reacting violently, and violence following in the wake of something that was, unsurprisingly, birthed with a violent, negative mindset.

The Sex Pistols were created to be a "fuck you" to the establishment. If they play the Queen's Silver Jubilee and get arrested by brutal cops as a result, should anyone be surprised?

There are also animated bits. Johnny Rotten getting brutally beaten and knifed (which the insufferable, tartan-kilt-wearing McLaren says was "Wonderful really"), the Sex Pistols at an A and R party behaving like cretins, and, of course, the ending animation of them as pirates, singing "Friggin' in the Riggin'".

Sid Vicious wanders down a street in Paris, abusing old people with a knife, stealing pastry, and buying a gun. He later shoots audience members at a lip-synched rendition of Sinatra's "My Way," which was a scene recreated for the movie Sid and Nancy. Sid Vicious was no one to admire.

Tadpole Tudor is a movie concession stand clerk, idiotically singing a song called "Who killed Bambi?" which, I guess, was the original name of the picture. What else? Nancy Spungen, who was undoubtedly KILLED by Sid Vicious, puts in a brief appearance, right before Sid "rides" a motorcycle, belting out a punked-up version of "C'mon Everybody!" by Eddie Cochran. Earlier he jumped out of bed wearing a filthy set of skivvies and exposed his ass, fondling or adjusting his balls while looking in the mirror. Seems more pathetic than shocking. (Note: I don't have to tell you it is highly unlikely that Sid Vicious, whose real name was John Simon Ritchie, could ride a motorcycle in real life.)

The most dynamic footage is of a young John "Johnny Rotten" Lydon, yarbling his vocals in his own inimitable style; but, as re: "punk rock", there are a million bands that were far better than the Pistols ever dreamed of being, regardless of a few good songs. Never Mind the Bollocks is the sort of album I listen to once in about every five years, before putting it away again and forgetting it for a long while.

More distressing is the presence of someone walking around in a Nazi uniform, playing "Martin Borrman" and performing with the band (at this stage, punk rock "fashion" had yet to drop the swastika as impolitic, pointless, and just plain stupid to wear on the street), singing a song called "Belsen was a Gasser." I think this is supposed to be pointed satire, but, along with the rest of the band's inevitable crash-and-burn, it comes off as nauseating and vile.

As does the kissing-up to talentless "singer" and fugitive train robber Ronnie Biggs (who was also the subject, several years later, of a movie with Phil Collins); who, as John Lydon has pointed out, robbed a train of a payroll that was going to WORKING CLASS people--not "robbing from the rich to give to the poor." Literally, Biggs and cohorts robbed the poor. And gave to themselves. What the hell is "punk" about that?

At the end of the film, it's become tiresome: McLaren comes across as a slimy, two-bit huckster, a kind of P.T. Barnum of the slam dance set, and the movie ends on a grim note, with the arrest of Vicious for murder and a silent collection of headlines about his drug overdose shortly after, at the age of 21, in 1979. His brief life was made the subject of Alex Cox's biopic Sid and Nancy.

What was amusing when you were sixteen often does not remain so. The movie, as well as the group, can be said to have little value. They exude a whiff of phoniness, despite all their cretinous and foul habits, shocking words, and bad behavior; something put together to cash in on the artificial perception of what punk rock was supposed to be to the conservative, working-class citizens of Great Britain and America. Not what it actually was, or could become.

The end?

No, because of the mid-Nineties reunion tour (has there been one since? ), and the nostalgia for a different day and age, when even punk rock was less loaded with cultural caveats or weighted down with ideological attitudes and political posturing. The Sex Pistols were specially bred to be the "shock value" tabloid sensation, one that left a small musical legacy in their wake.

But not much of one.

It's almost a swindle.

The Great Rock N' Roll Swindle (1980)