THE SOUND OF MUSIC HERO OF THE PEOPLE: Steve Jones – What A Fucking Rotter.

As a teenager, I read the music papers religiously. Different papers for different things. As young as I was, I could just about see that each publication had its own angle, their own agenda to put forward, their own readership and how to appease it.
In the space of a few weeks in early 1976, punk rock had reared its ugly head and elevated itself to the screaming front pages of the Sunday press.

Like, the Rolling Stones was one thing, but this? What is happening to our nation’s youth? When you’re 14, headlines and stories like that just make you more curious. I was never that overawed by the kid from South Wales on the cover of the Sunday People who had a chain from his pierced ear, to a ring in his pierced nose. (Steve Strange?) But when I heard that all this ballyhoo had a focal point, a rock group who couldn’t really play that well and had nothing but utter disdain for their audience? I was hooked. What could possibly be better than a pop group that outraged parents and newspaper editors alike, something that made the Rolling Stones look like the washed up has-beens they really had become? Heaven can only begin to imagine what it sounded like, but if being a bit leery to your audience was a pre-requisite, before you even plugged in, then this was
something my over inquisitive fourteen year old self would be interested in.

The first time I can remember seeing the words “Sex Pistols” was in a review of Eddie & The Hotrods at the Marquee, sometime in the spring of 1976. They had been the support act and they had berated both the audience and the headline act from all accounts, and were ushered off stage before their set had finished, following damage to gear and property. Every word of the few short sentences drew me further and further into this mad idea. I had no idea of
how it worked, what it sounded like, or more importantly, what was required on my behalf to take part. Like all teenagers, I was desperately looking round for something to be a part of, a group of peers who would accept and understand me without my need for explanation.

I didn’t understand nihilism, never even heard the word before, but putting two fingers up to all around you and saying you don’t care, seemed like a perfectly plausible way of getting through your teenage years. Where do I sign up?

Like a lot of my northern peers and contemporaries, the first time I clapped eyes on the Sex Pistols alive, was on Tony Wilson’s Granada TV rock showcase, “So It Goes” in July 1976. By this time – still months before the Grundy episode – the Sunday papers had ramped up that lovely sense of false outrage they do so well, in the name of protecting the nation’s morals. Punk rock seemed further confirmation – if it were needed – that the country would be going to hell on a high speed train. Without any stops, if they could get the trains actually running.

I was never one for guitarists – in the 1970’s I didn’t quite understand what Eric Clapton or Steve Howe of Yes were trying to do, so they were beyond my “measured criticism”. In the early months of 1976, I’d gone to see Deep Purple at the Liverpool Empire. It was the David Coverdale/Tommy Bolin version and they were absolutely terrible, painstaking guitar and organ solos at every available opportunity. What Steve Jones had to offer seemed light years away. Just listen to any Sex Pistols record, the sense of nihilist adventure is there. Nobody ever played electric guitar like Jones. Nobody. His style – if he had one – was somewhere between Johnny Thunders and Faces era Ronnie Wood, with an added unidentifiable frisson that carries it over the line. At the time, he was vilified for not being able to play – all the leading lights of serious musicianship, who were shitting themselves about what was round the corner, came out in unison to pillory Jones and his punk contemporaries for having the audacity to be a bit amateurish and incomplete. Wankers.

The lad didn’t realise it but he was at one with John Coltrane’s ‘space between the notes’ and how to feel them. Take your energy and creativity and deliver them to exactly the spot where you need them to be. Jones did this, many times, manifold. Chris Thomas, who produced “Never Mind The Bollocks”, and who worked with everyone from the Beatles to Roxy Music, said he never came across a more creative, diligent guitarist. Jones invented his own anarchist soundscapes that redefined music and the attitude of youth forever – every song is like a clarion call, the pied piper giggling as he leads the children from the comfort of their mother’s breast into a world fraught with danger and no discernible future.

He led as many youth down the path of the electric guitar as Chuck Berry and Keith Richards put together. On December 2nd, 1976 he called TV presenter Bill Grundy a “fucking rotter” on live, early evening tv and single-handedly ushered in the modern age. History began the day after – everything that has happened since is because of Steve Jones. Believe me, I tell the truth. He’s 70 years old now and has been a deejay on the radio in LA for years. He is my hero – more than anybody else in life he gave me that inkling of what I didn’t want to be. I never knew what I wanted to be, just didn’t want to be that.

• Love You Jonesy. X