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The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle
Fortgang
The urge to self-mythologise is written into rock's DNA and in 1978 the Sex Pistols' story - who did what for whom, and why - was still up for grabs. The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle is manager Malcolm McLaren's attempt to write himself into history as the band's creator, manipulator and ideologue while stealing back from the music industry what he maintained it had stolen from rock 'n' roll.
It is, for all its faults, one of the most fascinating rock movies ever made. It's candid, inaccurate, partisan and polemical. Director Julien Temple, a film student in 1977 and friend of the band, sold the project to McLaren but inadvertently ended up as his stooge. Johnny Rotten refused to participate, Sid Vicious was dead and even among loyalists there were those who questioned the wisdom of Paul Cook and Steve Jones' collaborations with exiled con Ronnie Biggs, who turned out to be neither the heroic bandit McLaren had hoped for, nor a very effective frontman. Like the Pistols' one album proper, 'Never Mind The Bollocks', the film is both a statement and its own commentary - celebrating and satirising the group while acknowledging that 'No Future' referred more to the band than it did to Britain.
The film's episodic structure is built around McLaren's Embezzler - a Brian Epstein / Larry Parnes-style Svengali - as he presents a series of lessons on how to screw the record industry for all its worth. "Do not play," runs lesson four, a crafty attempt to maintain the media outrage that stoked the band. "Do not give the game away." "Cultivate hatred," says lesson seven. "It's your greatest asset."
Originally trash titan Russ Meyer was to direct, working from a script by the man who'd go on to become the most widely read movie critic in the world, Roger Ebert. Financial problems brought that curious collaboration to an end after approximately three seconds had been shot, but the dramatised sequences hint at what might have been. Temple's opening sequence, set in the Gordon Riots of 1780, locates the Pistols in a tradition of populist radicalism but culminates with the lynching not of the Queen, but effigies of the band.
Thereafter guitarist Steve Jones is a sleazy private eye sloping through Soho in search of McLaren's money, which had in fact all gone on the film. Animated sequences make the point that the Pistols were evolving into a cartoon (and bridge those gaps in the story that Temple was unable to film), and scattered throughout is most of the live footage of the band that exists.
Dotted among this are some bona fide spine-tingling moments: Rotten on stage at the end of the band's final gig at San Francisco's Winterland, peering out at the audience with a mix boredom and disgust and intoning, "Ah-ha-ha. Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" Sid Vicious' version of Sinatra's 'My Way' dispenses with the original's inflated self-regard and replaces it with murder. (This, more than any other, was the moment Sid became an Iconic Dead Rock Star.) As for the tracks that don't appear on Bollocks, 'Silly Thing' and 'Lonely Boy' are bubblegum classics in anyone's language, while Edward Tudor-Pole gurns his way through the title track and serenades Irene Handl with 'Who Killed Bambi?'
In 1980 the film's adverts for a drink called 'Anakee-ora' and Rotten Bars ("remember how Johnny got his name") were making a pertinent point about the commodification of punk but were still steeped in irony. Twenty-five years on and reality has overtaken the satire. There would be years of acrimony between Lydon and McLaren, and Temple himself would return to the story for his 2000 documentary The Filth And The Fury - redressing the balance, he felt, in the band's favour. Of its time yet strangely timeless, The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle is messy, contradictory, loaded with ideas, damned from the start and occasionally inspired - and in that respect at least, an accurate portrayal of the band.
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