The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 9 October 1996
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HERE
PISTOLS STILL FIRING, BUT ONLY BLANKS TWENTY years after spearheading the youthful rebellion that was punk rock, there's still a lot of anger in the Sex Pistols. Unfortunately, its aged and decrepit protagonists seem to have forgotten exactly why that is. In Sydney yesterday to launch the Australian leg of their reunion tour, the four original members of the Sex Pistols resembled a pack of old rabid bull-terriers that had been sedated and stripped of their fangs. The bark was still there, the same patronising, obscenity-ridden rhetoric upon which the Sex Pistols' mythology was built, but coming from the mouths of wrinkled 40-somethings, it all felt a bit twee. "Either you like what we do or you don't," snarled the band's ashen-faced leader Johnny Rotten. "Quite frankly, I don't give a f..." Trying his best not to let out a solitary grin for the duration of the press conference, Rotten sporting a bizarre crop that looked like a fighting kangaroo flag in need of an iron - spent much of his breath stagging off that traditional foe of the Pistols, the media. "I'm bored talking to the press," he grumbled. "I couldn't care less about any of you." It was a peculiar but predictable sentiment coming from the mouth of pop music's greatest media manipulator. The rest of yesterday's lacklustre "show" was spent hyping up the old Sex Pistols' hype. Full of bravado and self-importance, punctuated by the odd burp and sneer, the Pistols seemed obsessed to remind everyone that they started the whole punk movement. "There's an attitude you've got to understand," explained Rotten. "A lot of people grabbed the Sex Pistols name and turned it into their own little fantasy. And I find that disgusting. "It's about us. It's not about wankers rewriting history for us. We wouldn't have started this if there was anything decent before us. "There wasn't anything out there but dinosaur rock. "Unfortunately, there still are dinosaurs."
