No one represented the 1977 punk movement more than Johnny Rotten, the sneering, spitting singer, writing lyrics about anarchy, abortion, and boredom that can still shock and disturb today. Unsurprisingly, the chronicle of the punk pioneers’ brief and tumultuous career-they lasted long enough to make one album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols-was beset by turmoil of its own John Lydon, who was known as Johnny Rotten during his tenure as the Pistols’ frontman, was sued by two former bandmates after refusing to license the group’s music for the production.
The result is Pistol, a six-part dramatic series premiering on FX on May 31 (with a simultaneous full-season drop on Hulu). You can see the way the group was built, its architecture, and it allowed for a sense of chaos.” “You come in through a side door…almost like a Trojan horse, and then you're on the inside…. “It’s the most obvious thing,” says Boyle. “The Sex Pistols is an edifice that you can’t really approach because there’s such an electric fence of hostility around them-which they’ve created.”īut eventually, the Oscar winner, who directed Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire, cracked the case, basing his treatment on guitarist Steve Jones’s memoir, Lonely Boy: Tales From a Sex Pistol. “I thought, Well, that won’t work!“ he says. Danny Boyle had an immediate reaction when he was approached with the idea of making a film about the Sex Pistols.
