Triggers: A Life in Music by Glen Matlock, review: Cheerily grumpy account of surviving the Sex Pistols

“There are two Glen Matlocks,” notes one of them at the end of this self-knowing memoir. “There’s the ex-Sex Pistol, who every day answers a thousand questions about the same three-year period, and there’s the second Glen who wants to be seen as living in the present. The second Glen is the one I’m rooting for. He’s the reason I get up in the morning.”

As he’s all too aware, whatever he does, Matlock will always be primarily an ex-Pistol, but now teetotal after an alcohol problem and comfortable in his own skin, he’s a survivor, unlike two fellow Pistols. Guitarist Wally Nightingale, ejected before the rise began, fatally overdosed aged 40, the day before, Matlock suggests, a long-overdue, life-changing songwriting cheque landed on his mat. Meanwhile, Matlock’s replacement and drinking buddy Sid Vicious was dead of an overdose aged just 21 while awaiting trial for murder.

Lucky escapes aside, Matlock walked out of the band almost half a century ago, after writing the music to their best-loved hits – but remains forever damned by manager Malcolm McLaren’s press release claim that the bassist was sacked after he “went on too long about Paul McCartney”. “Absolute bollocks,” snarls Matlock.

Triggers is less an attempt to re-write history than more one to come to terms with it. Matlock looks back with less anger than in his often self-pitying first memoir, 1996’s I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol – the absence of victimhood here, allied to the wisdom of the 67-year-old’s cheerily grumpy old age, results in a vastly superior book. Matlock treats the Pistols as part – albeit a major part – of his life arc, reflecting that “there were half a dozen kids in my school year who went on to Oxbridge, but I was the only one who went on to be a Sex Pistol”.

Aside from scandalising the nation by swearing on television’s Today programme (they were late substitutes for Queen, after Freddie Mercury’s toothache played up), being a Sex Pistol seems a drudge. Beyond the succession of cancelled concerts, there was the one at Plymouth nobody attended, and the one at an unidentified northern Conservative club which was halted because the regulars couldn’t hear the bingo numbers.

And Matlock was there for the lucrative but soul-sapping, squabble-infested reunions, where his old animosity with singer John Lydon re-surfaced; where Lydon refused to record new material that might have given them new life and where, mercifully, Matlock’s idea of a Vicious musical called Sidney was rejected. “We missed a trick there,” he chuckles.

After the Pistols, Matlock really did miss a trick with his band Rich Kids – whose feisty, beautifully crafted pop punk deserved more than a fleeting flirtation with the charts – his last shot at glory before embarking upon a solo career that would rarely threaten the mainstream. He’s a sideman too, for Iggy Pop in the early-80s and as part of a 2010 Faces reunion. Now, as he approaches his 70th birthday, the boy once given a peck on the cheek by Debbie Harry is in Blondie, and played with them at Glastonbury this year. A survivor indeed.

As the sub-title promises, Matlock is circumspect regarding his non-musical life, but the west London boy still lives there and he’s seemingly at one with his musician sons, Sam and Louis. Anyway, if he’s dissatisfied with his lot, he’s not going to be admitting it here, in a memoir that manages to be both frank and revealing, yet a homage to contentment. It’s a dignified read.

With unlikely cameos from Billy Connolly, Frankie Vaughan, Kevin Rowland and David Bowie (“always a regular bloke”), plus a late diversion into the wrongs of Brexit (“a huge backwards step for all of us”), as with the rest of his life, Triggers makes the most of what Glen Matlock has been given.