Julien Temple on ‘Lost’ Pistols Film, Punk Docs & Joe Strummer’s Socks
Johnny Rotten grabs the microphone and lurches forward, his pimply face grinning into the camera. Next to him, Steve Jones is miming (or mocking) guitar-hero moves, while Sid Vicious hunches over his bass, surly as ever. The grainy footage carbon-dates to the tail end of 1977, right before the band was about to embark on their notorious U.S. tour and then implode. It’s Christmas Day in the Northern city of Huddersfield, and will turn out to be the penultimate U.K. performance for the seminal punk band. They launch into a full-frontal-assault version of “God Save the Queen,” sounding as dangerous as ever. And then the camera swings to the side, and captures the crowd — which is made up completely of children, ages six to 12, laughing and dancing along to the noisebomb music.
Ask Julien Temple about that scene, which appears near the end of his documentary Never Mind the Baubles: Christmas With the Sex Pistols, and he’ll tell you that the band’s matinee performance for the children of firefighters on strike was the single most rebellious thing they had ever done. Inquire as to why no one had seen the footage of this incredible performance, which Temple had shot, until the BBC aired it in 2013, and the 61-year-old filmmaker will admit it’s because it had simply been sitting his backyard shed for decades. The same goes for the jawdropping concert snippets in that movie’s companion piece — The Clash: New Year’s Day ’77, in which the other totemic quartet of the era play the Roxy right on the cusp of becoming the Only Band That Matters.
The key chronicler of the early England’s-Dreaming punk scene, Temple would have secured a place in rock history if he’d done nothing else besides the two legendary Pistols documents, 1980’s The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle and 2000’s definitive The Filth and the Fury. (That’s not even taking into account his groundbreaking music-video work during MTV’s infancy-to-adolescence period for David Bowie, Tom Petty, the Rolling Stones and countless others) But he’s spent the last four decades chasing after musical miscreants and mavericks of all sorts, and as “I Was There: The Music Docs of Julien Temple” demonstrates, his use of collage, ironic newsreel footage and point-counterpoint contextualizing has created indelible profiles of everybody from Joe Strummer to guitarist Wilko Johnson.
This 11-film mini-retro, playing as part of Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Sound + Vision fest starting July 30th, collects major projects and odds-and-sods rarities from his back catalog, including portraits of both Ray and Dave Davies, several deep-dive examinations of the Glastonbury festival, a look at proto-punk pub rockers Dr. Feelgood, and those holiday-themed concert movies as one double feature. Calling from an airport lounge, Temple spoke about meeting the Pistols, those “lost” punk films, how his unique style complements the music he covers and why his spirit-of-’77 movies are not about the past.