Glen Matlock talks new album, moving on from Sex Pistols and Blondie tour

Legendary musician Glen Matlock is gearing up for a new album, with the former Sex Pistols bassist laying down what he believes is the album that will take him to that contemporary next level, Consequences Coming.

Glen Matlock: Hang on a couple seconds, I was having a cigarette out the back garden, I’m glad you called, it’s too cold. 

Ewan Gleadow: Isn’t it? It’s terrible. 

Glen: Yeah, but it is January, so.

Ewan: Yeah. Well done on the album, by the way. I’ve been listening to it this morning, great stuff. It feels very different to what I was expecting it to be, especially after the last one. 

Glen: Well the last album I did in America, I recorded and asked Slim Jim Phantom to play the drums. He gave it a bit of a flavour. That was kind of my American-ish album. I’ve tried that and now I think I’m going to get a bit more classic, whatever that is in this day and age. 

Ewan: What was it that prompted you to get back into the studio?

Glen: Well, I’m a songwriter, and, you know, you have songs and sometimes pitch songs to people and draw a bit of a blank because the songs are too much like me, and by the time you’ve got 1,000 odd songs knocking around your age, you can’t think straight. You might as well go and record them and clear out the wardrobe in your mind as Vivian Stanshall would say. That’s what happens, and the next thing you’ve got an album and that’s kind of applied to all my albums. I think over the years I’ve gotten a bit better at singing too. You don’t lose that touch and keep at it and you’ve lived a bit more life and more things happen, that spark, your imagination or your annoyance in the case of this album, you know, with Brexit and the Tories and Trump, Boris Johnson and the whole nonsense of that. 

Matlock’s new solo album Consequences Coming will be released April 27. His single, Head on a Stick, is available on all streaming platforms now.

Some of the songs were written a long while ago and I like to think that I was a bit ahead of the curve. The way things work out, you don’t necessarily get things out at the moment that you want them to. There’s a longer gestation period and there’s also me, who’s getting on a bit. I’m not twenty-one anymore and all the record companies are chasing people like that. It’s a bit of a struggle to get things released properly, so yea. It brings us to now, I think the kind of state in this country and the right-wing around the western world, it’s not going away. Hopefully, my songs are still the same, but I loved being played when Trump was being driven out of the White House. The same for Johnson when he got bum-rushed finally, you know?

Ewan: Is it difficult now to get that big release, that big push on the radio and on the charts? 

Glen: Well, I’ll find out, but yeah, basically. You never know whether your record isn’t being played because you’re too old, too out of it and have the wrong haircut or whether your politics are right. You never really know. Yeah. I’ve been getting good feedback on this record. 

I do know people, like my neighbour around my way, who thinks pretty much the same thing. Whether he wants to ram it down people’s throats with his music, I don’t know. But I do know he did a gig in Liverpool, whatever, shouts “fuck the tories” and he said, “oh, well, that’s a catchy tune” or something like that, you know? I’m a little bit annoyed, really, it’s just come up yesterday or the day before. I approached him to do a video for me. I know Steve’s just done something for Sleaford Mods for UK Grim. I hope they haven’t beaten me to it, you know, they’re cool.

Ewan: Yeah they are. You’ve been working in the industry-

Glen: Floating. Floating around. One of the best quotes I ever heard was on the PM program on Radio Four, like the drivetime news show, and the woman is live with Charlie Watts and she says to Charlie “here we are now, you know, today you’re celebrating thirty years of playing Rolling Stones on live radio” and he goes “you’re wrong, it’s more like five years playing and twenty-five years hanging about.” I could totally identify with that, you know? Being in music, getting up on stage and recording, all that, the in-between bits when you’re trying to get hold of the right person to give you a bit of backing because you can’t do it all yourself, that’s, yeah. I’m getting some good backing now. We will see. 

Ewan: Absolutely man, I mean fingers crossed as well, it’s a cracking record. Let me rephrase it then. You’re a very well-travelled musician. You’re on the fringes and working with people like Iggy Pop, The Faces, and everyone in between. Do those collaborations have any impact on this recent record?

Glen: I think when you work with somebody, somehow, by osmosis, something just seeps in and sometimes you don’t realise it’s happening. Musically I tend to stick to my guns a little bit, similar to what I always used to do. Even when I was getting the Sex Pistols together, it was the whole pirate radio thing in the sixties and the whole idea of the three-minute tailored pop song and some kind of consequence for good, I think the thing that changes most is what you’re singing about. It makes it more contemporary. But then you invite musicians to play because A, they’re available, and B, you dig them. You promise them the earth but end up with a sandwich and some coffee. 

I think that’s what gives it an edge, you know? But it’s a pretty straightforward set of cool changes that can carry a tune. I read a Lou Reed interview quite a while back, it might have been with Lester Bangs, about a new album Reed had released. Bangs said “Hey, you’ve got a new album out. Is it still the same set of three chord changes?” and Lou went “No, two on most of them, but if I could get away with one, I would.” If it’s good enough for him, you know. A simple thing done well to the maximum. Slap it down, tart it up. 

Certain lyrics and the melody, the arrangement you use, it’s not like writing a newspaper article or a letter to somebody. I tend to try and write like I’m speaking and having a word in somebody’s ear, but hopefully the song, the music and the lyric, are a bit more esoteric and evocative than that. Hopefully, the total is more than the sum of its parts, and that’s what we aim for. 

Ewan: You mentioned before about consistency there. You’ve written for a long time and it’s impressive how consistent you’ve been with that. There’s still quality there over that long period. Is it hard to maintain that quality?

Glen: I dunno, I read a lot. There’s quite a good picture book of The Clash on tour by Pennie Smith. Jones is reading a book and the caption is “to have output, you must have input”. You have to be aware of things. I go through phases of being a voracious reader and then I don’t. I haven’t done it for a little while, but I will again. I’ve got hundreds of books on the side and I’ve read most of them, not all of them, some I’ve only got halfway through. But you pick up ideas from loads of different places. Also, a lot of the songs are written while walking down the street, and then you get a little tune in your head and see something and your mind doesn’t necessarily act upon it straight away, but when that idea doesn’t go away, that’s when you’ve got something.

That’s when you pick up the guitar and start working it out and then it becomes a bit of a pain for a week, two weeks, a month, you know, because you can’t find something that rhymes with toast or something stupid like that. It drives you mad until you find some miracle, some way around it. Then you have to make a little demo and send it in the wrong bloody key and then you’ve got to change it all again. But you keep updating it all the time and then you get something. You keep chipping away. 

Ewan: That chipping away must be frustrating to some degree, but I imagine the payoff is quite rewarding.

Glen: Artistically it’s rewarding, but like I said, you do something you’re proud of and you throw it out there. There are a lot of catching people at the right time now, whether I realise that or not. When we reformed The Pistols and then you tour again and you do it again after that, people say “oh, that last time you did it, it was much better than the first time you reformed.” I know we were exactly the same, but you’re catching the mood that people are in at a particular time. That’s not something you can control, you know?

Ewan: I imagine that helps with reappraisal too, the cult circuit. But you’re heading out on tour as part of Blondie later this year, too, excited?

Glen: I toured with them last year, I’m their bass player. It was very last minute though, with them being a bit stuck. I don’t quite know what happened with their bass player. Clem Burke asked if I’d stand in for him and it all went really well. I suppose it went well, I went and re-rehearsed and my first gig was in Glasgow, with 15,000 odd people and not that much rehearsal. That put hairs on my chest, and then we did a big tour of England, America, Mexico and then some dates in the States and I played bass on their new album. I’m not sure when that’s coming out, maybe later this year. I haven’t heard the finished thing yet because I’m just a bass player. 

After the second half of March, we’ve got stuff in Central America and then we’re doing California, then there’s a bit of a break and then we’ve got some stuff over here in the UK at the beginning of summer. I’m trying to slot my release in between all of that, and then as soon as the Blondie stuff is done, hopefully, if my record goes down well I can tour my stuff, which is what I’d really like to do. 

Ewan: A lot on your plate there, then?

Glen: Yeah, but there’s also a lot of hanging around like Charlie Watts said. When you’re hanging around, that’s when you pick up the guitar, and maybe come up with an idea for the next one. So if this goes well, I’ll record. I think there’s been a steady, upward improvement in what I’ve been doing and there’s also been a steady upward in the interest in what I’ve been doing. Those two things feed off of each other. I think what drives me is that I just want to be a contemporary artist, not some bloke who was in The Sex Pistols years ago. You know? I think that’s really important to me, to somehow transcend that, and that’s what drives me. It’s a hard act to supersede, but there’s no point in not giving it a go.

Matlock’s new solo album Consequences Coming will be released April 27. His single, Head on a Stick, is available on all streaming platforms now.

Matlock also plays at Nells in London Friday, February 17.