'Suddenly all of Fleet Street were chasing us'

AFTER THE last show of Iggy Pop's 1979 US tour, his pal David Bowie offered to give the band a lift to New York's Mudd Club. “We piled into his limo, and it was such a tight squeeze I had to sit on Bowie's knee,” former Sex Pistol Glen Matlock recalls.

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“I noticed small paintings hanging up inside. 'Hang about, I said, 'Isn't that a Picasso?' Bowie said yeah. I said 'Well, you're a flash bugger' and he laughed. The other one was a Matisse.”

When Iggy first introduced them, Bowie had quipped, “Oh, the noble savage.”

Insulted, bassist Glen, 69, retorted, “Your mics didn't half come in handy...” explaining that Pistols guitarist Steve Jones had stolen Bowie's equipment from Hammersmith Odeon.

“The bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar,” he added, quoting the star's own lyrics. Bowie bristled.

They made up in the wings of a Talking Heads show.

“He knew all the songs and sang them in his best David Bowie voice,” Glen tells me.

“I told him I'd loved his Low album and Be My Wife. He said 'The Laughing Gnome sold more than that'. He wasn't up himself, he was genuinely interested in what you had to say.”

Contrary to all expectations, the Sex Pistols are still going strong 50 years after their first shambolic live show.

“We're supposed to be touring America but Steve went to watch Chelsea, slipped and broke his hand in three places and we've had to postpone it.”

They're old-age punks now. Jones is 70, drummer Paul Cook is 69. Only John Lydon is missing. Singer Frank Carter, ex-Gallows, is the baby of the band at 41.

“There's no way back for John,” Glen says bluntly. “He's has painted himself into a corner, over politics and Trump.”

The band's electrifying early years are celebrated in a new Sky Arts documentary I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol (also the title of his 1990 memoir and subsequent one-man show).

“It gives me a chance to tell my side of the story,” he says. “The premiere was last night at the Barbican - it was weird watching yourself thinking I wish I'd had me Barnet trimmed.”