“I helped make the sign,” he says, “the big pink sign outside. He was there when they changed the name of the shop to SEX, shifting from selling Teddy Boy styles to the battle dress of punk rock. Matlock, an art school student, first met the other members of the future Sex Pistols while working in Let It Rock, the London clothing boutique run by Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood. Walking past his son’s room, he spotted the gold jacket, which was once his. After someone broke into his car, making off with a couple of guitars and a favorite white corduroy jacket, Matlock needed something else to wear for the photo shoot. On the cover, he posed in a cropped gold jacket, running a comb through his salt-and-pepper hairdo “like Billy Fury,” the British rock ‘n’ roll star of the early 1960s. But Matlock also paid his respects to the arch ‘60s pop star Scott Walker with a cinematic cover of “Montague Terrace (In Blue).” With a little more snarl, some of the songs - “Couldn’t Give a Damn,” “Cloud Cuckoo Land” - could have been Sex Pistols outtakes. On his 2018 album “Good to Go,” Matlock played a stripped-down, straight-ahead brand of rock ‘n’ roll that he took to calling “loud skiffle.” For the recording sessions, he recruited guitarist Earl Slick, who played with David Bowie and on John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Double Fantasy,” and drummer Slim Jim Phantom of the Stray Cats. There’s more to me than just being a bass player from 45 years ago.” “I’m kind of like the punk rock Bob Dylan, as it were, kind of thing.
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” he says in his thick London accent. But he has spent years performing his songs unaccompanied, on acoustic guitar, he says, just as he writes them. He first shared bills with the Dropkicks a couple of years ago, when they asked him to open a series of tour dates through Europe.
Matlock, who formed the post-Sex Pistols band Rich Kids and has performed with Iggy Pop, the Damned, and his teenhood heroes the Faces, has released several albums with a group he calls the Philistines and, most recently, a solo album under his own name. The show was postponed because of coronavirus fears just as this story was going to press. You wouldn’t have found Matlock at the roulette wheel before or after his scheduled gig Friday at Encore Boston Harbor, when he was to play solo as an opening act for the Dropkick Murphys. I get paid.” Record companies, he notes, have been historically notorious for shielding accurate royalty figures from musicians, “unless you get paid enough to take ‘em to court.” That’s a gamble he has declined to take. “I’ve done OK out of it,” he says matter-of-factly.
0 kommentar(er)
