by Chris Harris
In 1996 the Sex Pistols reformed and the reaction from large parts of the music press was swift and sniffy. Sell outs and hypocrites. A nostalgia act cashing in. The very name of the tour, Filthy Lucre, was treated as an open confession and therefore an open invitation for moralising by a media seemingly unable to get what it was all about.
Johnny Rotten made it clear he did not like the other members of the band, travelled separately, kept his distance, and barely bothered to disguise the fact that this was a transaction as much as a reunion. For a culture that still wanted to pretend rock music was about purity and brotherhood, this was unforgivable.
Yet the irony, which seemed to pass so many critics by, is that the Sex Pistols had never been about ethics, purity or good behaviour in the first place. They were not a band built on shared values or collective warmth. They were not the Clash. They were a collision of personalities, ambition, contempt and noise. They sang openly about money, exploitation and opportunism. They did not pretend to be saints. They never asked to be role models. To suddenly hold them to standards they had spent their entire existence mocking was either wilful misunderstanding or bad faith.
Years later Johnny Rotten would appear on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, and say plainly that he was doing it to fund a Public Image Ltd album. That caused another round of outrage from people who still seemed to think he owed them something. But the logic was exactly the same as 1996. Use the system, take the money, make the work you want to make. There was never a betrayal because there was never a promise. Sex Pistols fans got it, but I guess that was all that mattered.
What matters, and what was routinely ignored at the time, was the quality of the performances themselves. I can vouch for that because I was there. I saw them headline the Phoenix Festival in 1996, a huge bill with genuinely massive acts. Foo Fighters. David Bowie. Manic Street Preachers. It was not a lightweight lineup and it was not a nostalgic crowd. I went with a large group of people, most of whom were not Sex Pistols fans at all. By the end of the set there was no debate. They had blown everyone else off the stage. None of these people were sneering, sell out, they were blown away by four musical icons smashing the big beasts off the stage.
The wall of sound was immense. The band were ferocious, tight, relentless. Rotten was magnetic, confrontational, funny and venomous in exactly the way he always had been. There was an aura to them that no amount of polite professionalism from younger or more virtuous acts could touch. This was not about technical perfection or fashionable relevance. It was about presence, force and the sense that you were watching something that did not care whether you approved of it or not.
At the time much of the press criticism came from people who quite clearly had not been to the gigs. They were reviewing the idea of the Sex Pistols reforming, not the reality of what was happening on stage. This was called out very directly by Alan McGee, who famously took out a full page in the music press to say exactly that. He contradicted the prevailing narrative and said plainly that the band were outstanding live and that many of those attacking them had not even bothered to witness it. It was not subtle and it was not polite, but it was accurate.
That moment matters because it exposes a wider problem that has only got worse since. If people dislike what someone represents, or what they think they represent, they now feel entitled to dismiss the work itself without engaging with it properly. Shows are condemned by people who have not seen them. Books are attacked by people who have not properly read them with an open mind. Television series are written off by people who have decided in advance what they mean. The Pistols in 1996 were an early and very clear example of that phenomenon.
The Sex Pistols did not reform to make anyone comfortable. They did not reform to teach lessons or tidy up their legacy. They reformed to play loud music, assert their power, and yes, to get paid. That honesty, however unfashionable, was part of what made the shows so potent. They were not pretending to be anything else. They did not need redemption. They turned up, they played, and they reminded everyone why they had mattered in the first place.
History has been kinder to the Filthy Lucre tour than the commentary surrounding it. The gigs stand up. The footage stands up. The memories stand up. What looks threadbare now is the moral panic around it. The Sex Pistols were never about being good. They were about being undeniable. In 1996, in front of tens of thousands of people, they still were.
#Sex Pistols #Punk Rock # Phoenix Festival #Musical Review #Music Blog
The Rights of Fans. 