Glen Matlock on 'I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol' doc: reclaiming his place in punk history

Glen Matlock documentary Sex Pistols: a story told in first person

Glen Matlock co-wrote 10 of the 12 songs on the Sex Pistols' 1977 debut, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and yet for decades he has been, as he puts it, "the guy from the Sex Pistols that nobody knows." That is the problem the new documentary I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol sets out to fix. According to Billboard, the 94-minute film begins streaming on May 26 on Apple TV and Prime Video.

A DIY project, not an MGM production

The documentary is based on Matlock's 1996 memoir of the same name. It is directed by Andre Relis (Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar Icon) and Nick Mead (Who Do I Think I Am?), and Matlock himself co-produced it. He describes it as "a little bit more of a DIY project" that took a couple of years to piece together after he met Mead and Relis.

One of the film's strengths, Matlock suggests, is precisely Relis's outsider perspective on punk. "He asked people questions that may be a bit naive, but he gets a more straightforward answer out of them than somebody who knows it already."

A cast that reads like a punk hall of fame

The contributors are a serious cross-section of the era. Billy Idol, Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and the late Clem Burke of Blondie all appear, as does Spandau Ballet's Gary Kemp, Rat Scabies of the Damned, Slim Jim Phantom of Stray Cats and Kenney Jones, who played with both the Faces and the Who. John Lydon, the late Malcolm McLaren and the late Sid Vicious are present through archival footage and audio.

Matlock has been touring with Blondie since 2022, a detail that underlines how active he remains more than four decades after leaving the Sex Pistols.

Setting the record straight

The film addresses directly the question of who really built the Sex Pistols' sound. Matlock demonstrates on camera how "Anarchy in the U.K." and "God Save the Queen" came together, walking through the bass progressions that anchored both songs. "I always tried to get Steve doing something on the root progression," he explains, comparing his approach to John Entwistle's counterpoint work on the Who's "My Generation."

As Joe Escalante of the Vandals says in the film, the public narrative has long centered on Sid Vicious, who replaced Matlock in February 1977 and, in Escalante's words, "could not play bass, did not play bass."

For fans looking to dig deeper into the Sex Pistols' catalogue, the documentary is a useful corrective, not a hagiography. Matlock is candid about the ideological splits inside the band and the complicated dynamics that have since softened, partly through the Filthy Lucre 20th anniversary reunion tour in 1996 and his continued work with Paul Cook and Steve Jones.

After the Pistols, Matlock formed Rich Kids with a then-unknown Midge Ure and later worked with Iggy Pop, the Damned and the reformed Faces, among others. The documentary covers that arc too, giving a fuller picture of a career that has never really stopped.