‘Do you remember The Sex Pistols being interviewed by Bill Grundy?’ asked the NME in a retrospective piece chronicling great rock TV moments. ‘No, of course you don’t. Because you didn’t see it, did you? That’s because NOBODY saw it. Nobody at all, except some London jessies.’
If the footage of Bill Grundy’s encounter with the Pistols had been wiped (as was presumably the policy in ’76, certainly with inane early evening magazine programmes), there would be grounds for claiming that said interview either didn’t happen, or that the swearing amounted to little more than goose-booing on the band’s part. Luckily, however, the interview survives intact, and the videotape cannot lie. Which is more than can be said for those who document it...
Here, to clarify matters, is an accurate verbatim transcript of the infamous dialogue, transmitted live on 1/12/76:
A TV studio. The ’76 Sex Pistols line-up (Johnny Rotten, Paul Cook, Steve Jones and Glen Matlock) all sit slumped in chairs. Bill Grundy sits to their left. In the background stand punk hangers-on Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Severin, Simon Barker and ‘Simone’.
GRUNDY (To camera) They are punk rockers. The new craze, they tell me. Their heroes? Not the nice, clean Rolling Stones...you see they are as drunk as I am...they are clean by comparison. They’re a group called The Sex Pistols, and I am surrounded by all of them...
JONES (Reading Grundy’s autocue) In action!
GRUNDY Just let us see The Sex Pistols in action. Come on kids...* [See fourth paragraph from below.]
[Film of The Sex Pistols in action; then back to the studio...]
GRUNDY I am told that that group (hits his knee with sheaf of papers) have received forty thousand pounds from a record company. Doesn’t that seem, er, to be slightly opposed to their anti-materialistic way of life?
MATLOCKNo, the more the merrier.
GRUNDY Really?
MATLOCKOh yeah.
GRUNDY Well tell me more then.
JONESWe’ve fuckin’ spent it, ain’t we?
GRUNDY I don’t know, have you?
MATLOCKYeah, it’s all gone.
GRUNDY Really?
JONESDown the boozer.
GRUNDY Good Lord! Now I want to know one thing...
MATLOCK What?
GRUNDY Are you serious or are you just making me, trying to make me laugh?
MATLOCKNo, it’s all gone. Gone.
GRUNDY Really?
MATLOCK Yeah.
GRUNDY No, but I mean about what you’re doing.
MATLOCK Oh yeah.
GRUNDY Are you serious?
MATLOCKMmm.
GRUNDY Beethoven, Mozart, Bach and Brahms have all died...
ROTTENThey’re all heroes of ours, ain’t they?
GRUNDY Really...what? What were you saying, sir?
ROTTENThey’re wonderful people.
GRUNDY Are they?
ROTTEN Oh yes! They really turn us on.
JONESBut they’re dead!
GRUNDY Well suppose they turn other people on?
ROTTEN (Under his breath) Well that’s just their tough shit.
GRUNDY It’s what?
ROTTEN Nothing. A rude word. Next question.
GRUNDY No, no, what was the rude word?
ROTTEN Shit.
GRUNDY Was it really? Good heavens, you frighten me to death.
ROTTEN Oh alright, Siegfried...
GRUNDY (Turning to Siouxsie Sioux’s gathering) What about you girls behind?
MATLOCKHe’s like yer dad, innie, this geezer?
GRUNDY Are you, er...
MATLOCK Or your grandad.
GRUNDY (To Sioux) Are you worried, or are you just enjoying yourself?
SIOUXEnjoying myself.
GRUNDY Are you?
SIOUXYeah.
GRUNDY Ah, that’s what I thought you were doing.
SIOUX I’ve always wanted to meet you.
GRUNDY Did you really?
SIOUXYeah.
GRUNDY We’ll meet afterwards, shall we? (Sioux does a camp pout)
JONES You dirty sod. (As Albert Steptoe) You dirty old man!
GRUNDY Well keep going, chief, keep going. Go on, you’ve got another five seconds. Say something outrageous.
JONESYou dir...you dirty bastard!
GRUNDY Go on, again.
JONES You dirty fucker!
GRUNDY What a clever boy!
JONES What a fucking rotter. (All giggle)
GRUNDY Well, that’s it for tonight. The other rocker Eamonn, and I’m saying nothing else about him, will be back tomorrow. I’ll be seeing you soon, and I hope I won’t be seeing you [the band] again. From me, though, goodnight.
(Credits and ‘Windy’ signature tune. Rotten looks at his watch, Jones gyrates his hips, and Grundy yells an off-mic ‘Oh shit!’ to himself.)
The footage has been quoted many times, often wildly inaccurately. In his book England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols And Punk Rock (Faber & Faber, 1991, pp 258-259), Jon Savage offers a transcript which is so inconsistent in its detail that we can only wonder what his source was. It is not inaccurate enough to be quoted from memory (ers and ums are intact, suggesting he had access to some kind of primary footage), but certain key lines are either misheard, paraphrased, or - in the case of ‘Down the boozer’ and ‘But they’re dead!’ - missed out entirely. Most notably, ‘What a fucking rotter’ is given as ‘You fucking rotter’, which - considering said line’s stature among punk quotations - throws considerable doubt on Savage’s journalistic credibility. With these great fluctuations in accuracy, we can only assume that Savage was perhaps using an official Thames TV transcript, typed up shortly after transmission.
Savage notes the dialogue’s ‘stilted, curiously archaic banality’. Shame he didn’t notice any of the actual words.
Bits of the interview regularly turn up on documentaries and clip shows, but - until recently - the fucks have always been bleeped. TV Hell (30/8/92) was the last to censor it in this way; the following year, Jerry Sadowitz played the unbleeped footage as part of a his Greatest F%£*ing Show On Earth programme about swearing on TV. Subsequent, post-watershed repeats of the event have always been unbleeped.
The other question concerns how much of the interview gets re-broadcast on such occasions. TV Hell played Grundy’s introduction, but inserted their own interview segment after the line ‘Come on kids...’ which obscured his original cue. The interview was then played in three sections: ‘I am told...’ to ‘Good Lord!’, ‘Beethoven, Mozart...’ to ‘Was it really?’ and ‘What about you girls...’ to the close of the show, including the full end credits. The only missing footage was the ‘loseable’ section between ‘Now I want to know one thing...’ and ‘Are you serious?/Mmm’ and, rather regrettably, the ‘Good heavens, you frighten me to death’ and ‘Oh, alright Siegfried’ exchange. The latter was included in Sadowitz’s broadcast, but for some reason this started at ‘What were you saying sir?’, meaning the relevance of the ‘turning people on’ reference was lost. Sadowitz’s broadcast ended on ‘Well, that’s it for tonight’.
It is thus possible to piece together the near-complete interview, with only the loseable Matlock exchange missing.
A neat idea (and one which almost certainly will not happen) is to repeat the half-hour show in full. This would enable people to see this piece of rock history in context, and perhaps preserve the shock effect of the expletives themselves.
[NOTE (1): The most amusing thing about the entire interview is the fact that, as the credits begin to roll, Johnny Rotten looks at his watch. If he was a real punk rocker, he wouldn’t care what the time was.]
[NOTE (2): Permission to use the interview was refused for Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols biopic The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980). Instead, the film reconstructed a scene depicting the urban myth that people kicked their TV sets in upon hearing Steve Jones swearing in their living rooms at tea time. The TV screen bore the legend ‘Censored By Thames TV’ and was accompanied by a jovial audio reconstruction of the interview. Jones apparently played himself; the ‘Grundy’ character prattled on further at the end with ‘Well that’s it for tonight – the show was live, the lads were lively, I invited them to shock me, they did. Some people were upset by what those loutish lads said but it did at least provide front pages like these. Carry on, lads, swearing all the more…’ .]
[NOTE (3): The interview was included on the semi-official album of spoken word material Some Product - Carri On Sex Pistols (August 1979). With the Pistols’ legalities the way they are, the difference between official releases and bootlegs continues to be ambiguous.]
[NOTE (4): A clip from the interview was shown on Channel 4’s Punk Top Ten (6/2/00), but it was on film. Real film too...not FRV, to try and be clever. No idea why...]
[NOTE (5): Because clip shows try and avoid showing original end credits if they can help it (y’know, in case people get confused), one element of the interview has always gone undocumented: with his microphone turned off, Grundy - clearly aware that he’s fucked up big time - says ‘Oh shit!’ to himself as the lights dim.]
[NOTE (6): Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse’ Smashie & Nicey – The End Of An Era TV Special also featured clips, with Enfield’s Dave Nice substituted in place of Grundy. This yielded some mildly amusing exchanges (‘So boys, I hear you like swearwords’/’Yes, they really turn us on’) and overdubbed Siouxsie Sioux dialogue (‘Oy, Nicey, I really fancy you’).
Harry Hill did a pointless parody in his 1999 Christmas show, saved only by a pastiche of ‘Windy’ at the end.
The best parody/allusion to the interview however came from ex-train robber Ronnie Biggs in The Great Rock N Roll Swindle who claimed to have spent all the money from the famous heist ‘down the boozer’. Steve Jones’ detective character also uses the lines ‘You dirty old man’ and ‘What a fucking rotter’ in one scene.]
