Based on guitarist and founding member Steve Jones’ raw, scattershot-style memoir Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol, the six-part Pistol, now streaming exclusively on Disney+, is a boisterous, ebullient, intensely visceral account of the swift rise and inevitable implosion of the band. In three short years the Sex Pistols managed to dismantle the face of pop music and be elevated to legendary status. The band are still as influential today as they were nearly 50 years ago.
With its roots in the social unrest, grinding poverty and yawning boredom of English working class life in the 1970s, the series centres on likely lad Steve (Toby Wallace) trying to avoid his chaotic family and survive the brutality of his environment through drinking and petty thievery. Music, in particular Bowie, is his escape route – the teen imagines Ziggy-style adulation after raiding the famous Odeon venue one night. The tough but sensitive Artful Dodger on the make soon manages to charm his way into the lives of art agitators Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McClaren, as if it were predestined.
Through this mix of authentic grimness and gauzy fantasy, director Danny Boyle and Moulin Rouge writer Craig Pearce encapsulate the listless, hopelessness of these youths trapped in anonymous, concrete estates waiting for something to happen. Boyle’s signature use of big pop culture moments as a lens from which to view society as a whole is employed with tremendous emotional effect throughout the series.
Pistol stitches together documentary footage from sober BBC broadcasts, the sickly, cheap glamour of Top of the Pops, and the oppressive opulence of the queen’s jubilee with the driving narrative of the emerging band. It’s a bricolage of the burning sense of injustice, the chasm between the classes and the generations that birthed the punk movement and the Sex Pistols into existence. This explosive trip through history is accompanied by Boyle’s Trainspotting cohorts Underworld’s eclectic selection of music from the era, which includes everything from Little Eva and Showaddywaddy to Alice Cooper and the Stooges.
The series quickly identifies the outsider working class kids of London, those with nothing to live for, no future and nothing to lose, as the perfect blank canvas for Svengali Malcolm McLaren’s nihilistic pop vision. Thomas Brodie-Sangster positively fizzes with mischief and intellect as the impish McClaren, a British visionary/eccentric who pilfered punk from America after his time managing the New York Dolls and set about repurposing it for the UK. He and the more judicious Westwood (Tallulah Riley) are presented as caustic, hydra-headed media manipulators, ready to exploit their collection of misfit boys to shake up the system.
McClaren was the Pistol’s Frankenstein and they were his monster, his masterful creation something that would in turn disgust and titillate the masses. Ideally the band were supposed to be crude mannequins for McClaren’s revolution, an extension of his “cash from chaos” ideals, spouting his manifesto and wearing his lover Westwood’s recustomised fetish designs and bondage trousers from her SEX clothing shop.
The King’s Road store was the hub of the scene, a demonic, violent twin to Andy Warhol’s Factory. It attracted the hipsters and exhibitionists of the day, including arch provocateur Pamela Rooke aka Jordan, played with razor-sharp precision by Game of Thrones’ Maisie Williams. With her giant beehive and thick streaks of eyeliner, Jordan cycles through suburbia topless in her transparent shirt, refusing to acknowledge the lecherous glances and catcalls. It’s a startling image of a country at odds with itself, the tradition of Page 3 subverted by a self-assured woman in control of her sexuality.
Jordan works alongside aspiring singer-songwriter Chrissie Hynde (Sydney Chandler), American implant who faces the brunt of the scene’s sexism when her repeated requests to join the Pistols is rejected by a dismissive McLaren. Hynde’s struggles are further exacerbated as she becomes involved with the carefree Jones.
There is also the hyper-intelligent, wiry, Irish immigrant John Lydon (Anson Boon), who McLaren pushes into the lead singer role for his musical experiment, gleefully watching the fireworks from the sidelines as Lydon continuously clashes with the less cerebral Jones.
Pistol is a star-making turn for young actors Wallace and Boo, who capture the energy and urgency of these boys who articulate their unhappiness and rage through a clutch of power chords and blunt, brutish lyrics. Boon is electrifying as Lydon, an unblinking, unravelling, uncontrollable, unknowable entity who propelled the Sex Pistols into infamy with his unsparing words. They are the central core of the show, along with Louis Partridge, in an empathetic and often unsettling performance as punk pin-up Sid Vicious, who becomes lost to drugs and his addiction to girlfriend Nancy Spungen (Emma Appleton).
The trio instill the series with a bruising realism, the foolhardiness of youth matched with a refreshing unpretentious attitude, a certain alchemy that can create magic. Their uneasy brotherhood fills the show with a creeping sense of dread, which is fully exposed in the series apex – the Pistol’s American tour, where the ease and speed in which the darkness of the industry can take hold is illustrated in lurid detail.
Pistol follows punk before it became a postcard parody. Lydon’s sneering clarion call to “Destroy” and his proclamation that he was an “Antichrist” and an “Anarchist” gave a unifying voice to disenfranchised teens trying to rip up everything that had gone before. From their famous appearance on The Grundy Show to their ill-fated tour of the north of England, the Sex Pistols struck fear into the hearts of the establishment and parents across the country. The series celebrates the direct, unfiltered power of music.
Punk was a movement as sensational and incendiary as the birth of rock’n’roll, when the curl of a lip or the shaking of the hip could, for one brilliant moment, tip the axis of the world.
Pistol is now streaming exclusively on Disney+. Stream now or discover more at DisneyPlus.com