The Sex Pistols return to the stage in a miniseries by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire), the six episodes of which are available in France from July 6, on Disney+.
Produced by the American television channel FX, already released in the United States and the United Kingdom, Pistol is adapted from the autobiography of guitarist Steve Jones, Lonely Boy. Ma vie de Sex Pistols (ed. EPA, 2017, for the French translation). With Paul Cook and Wally Nightingale, the musician founded in 1972 The Strand, a group which would give birth three years later to the Sex Pistols.
Steve Jones as common thread
The series reconstructs the history of the Sex Pistols, “the craziest and most famous band in the history of music”, according The Sunday Times, from its beginnings until its implosion in 1978 (before some brief reformations), in a United Kingdom ravaged by demonstrations, poverty, inflation and confronted with the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
Tired of the Beatles and the English establishment, setting up David Bowie as a model, the band will, under the supervision of producer Malcolm McLaren, enter the history of British punk rock thanks to its subversive side.
On screen, actor Toby Wallace lends his features to Steve Jones. His autobiography having served as a source for the scriptwriters, he is the main character of the series, who evokes his “unhappy childhood in its most claustrophobic and sordid aspects”, as well as his adolescence as a delinquent, explains The Guardian. Pistol thus gives a version of the history of the Sex Pistols which differs from those, more known, delivered by the second bassist Sid Vicious and the singer John Lydon, alias Johnny Rotten.
The UK of the 1970s, without playback
The concern for authenticity is striking, with the use of“archive footage of a disunited kingdom hit by decline in the mid-1970s”, according The New York Times : from Bowie concerts to the famous interpretation of God Save the Queen from the Sex Pistols on the Thames in 1977, during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, to the shots on rubbish bags in the streets during the garbage collectors’ strikes in the late 1970s.
The series wants to be part of the disillusioned atmosphere of the United Kingdom at this time. For even more realism, the team did not use playback during filming, explains the BBC :
“Every riff and every lyric had to be recorded live on stage, in front of an audience, in an excited and chaotic atmosphere, like the original concerts.”
A series not crappy enough
It does not, however, blow on Pistol l’“anarchist spirit” who wore the Sex Pistols, regrets The Daily Telegraph. The daily laments that the series remains very conventional and that it fails to capture the atmosphere “filthy” in which evolved the punk group.
There is still more sex, drugs and decadence than in the other series broadcast on the Disney + platform, concedes the Financial Times. Only, “the story of these ‘four boys in the shit’, to use their words [référence aux Beatles, les ‘quatre garçons dans le vent’]is way too aesthetically pleasing and flattering for a band whose success has been built more on chaos than music.”
But the focus was on something else: the creators “wanted to recreate a historical moment and not make a simple commemoration in costumes. They had to show the socio-political context that unleashed the incendiary punk anger”. according to New York Times. And therein lay the difficulty. The New York daily wonders:
“Can today’s young people really understand everything that is happening here?”