Talk about the right place at the right time. As a 23-year-old film student in London in 1976, Julien Temple became the official documentarist of one of the most extraordinary moments in the history of popular culture, when he began filming the activities of a little-known band called the Sex Pistols.
Now, almost a quarter of a century later, Temple has returned to the scene of the crime, ransacking the vaults for previously unseen footage of the Pistols in action, intercut with new interviews with John Lydon, Paul Cook, Steve Jones and Glen Matlock (Sid Vicious's predecessor on bass and, reputedly, the source of most of the Pistols' best tunes). The result is The Filth and the Fury, an exhilarating, evocative exploration of white pop music's last great seismic shift.
"It wasn't something I was banging on doors to do," says Temple, who directed the first Sex Pistols film, The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, 20 years ago. "It wasn't a subject that I'd ever thought I'd return to, and given what happened when the band broke up, even if you were marginally involved, like me, there were people blown all over the ceiling. It was an ugly, violent, emotional ending."
On one level, The Filth and the Fury is just the latest salvo in a 23-year war waged by John Lydon against the Pistols' manager, Malcolm McLaren, in the media and the courts, asserting his legal rights to his share of the band's profits, and rejecting the claim that the Pistols were completely McLaren's creation, puppets in his brilliant plan to subvert pop culture from the inside. For Temple, though, it's not just about Lydon's story. "I think it's the first time you get to hear what Steve Jones has to say, and he was always a very important energy within the group. Ultimately, it's about what the band feels happened to them, which may not be the whole truth, but it's a very important part of it. It's not denying Malcolm's contribution, but I think his version of these events has been so regularly available and so exaggerated over the years that it's good to have a corrective. I doubt it's on his top ten list of must-see movies, though."
Temple and Lydon had not spoken for years after the break-up, although both were living in Los Angeles at the same time. "I did bump into him one time in an English pub in L.A.," recalls Temple. "I heard his unmistakable tones across the courtyard, and couldn't really avoid him. We ended up having a good session, we got a dialogue going and that, I suppose was what really made this film possible. We all knew that there was more footage there. I had stuff of my own, and there was stuff filmed around the time of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. The other guys in the band were also interested in doing something, knowing that John and myself had spoken. We managed to raise some money in the early 1990s, and put some of the footage onto videotape."
The project then went into abeyance until Paul Webster started running Channel 4's feature film wing, FilmFour. "Paul was an old mate of mine, who was a big fan of the band. He sits in front of a big God Save the Queen poster in his corporate offices. He was sure that there was all this interesting stuff that nobody's seen."
"I saw the world of that time behind them, and that was what really got me interested, rather than doing some sort of rockumentary about the band, which is the kind of thing I hate, it's horrible," says Temple. "But making a film about the difference between that time and now was different; it seems so distant, almost pre-war, and the amount of history that has happened since is phenomenal. The whole story has taken on this kind of Arthurian, lost-in-the-mists-of-time mythic quality."
In 1976, Temple was a student at the National Film School when he saw the Sex Pistols for the first time. "Anyone who was around then, and saw that band play, knew that there was something extraordinary happening," he remembers. "For me, it was like standing on a landmine. Everything changed. Things became possible that didn't seem possible before. We got a key made so that we could get into the college and get the cameras out overnight and then get them back in there again before anyone came in in the morning, so they wouldn't know what was happening. Malcolm would try to stop us filming, but then he realised that he was getting a good deal. In the end he started paying me . . ."
By that stage, the Pistols had gone from underground heroes to the world's most notorious pop group in a matter of months, culminating in the frenzy surrounding God Save the Queen in June, 1977. McLaren's grandiose notion was to plough the band's profits into a Sex Pistols movie, Who Killed Bambi, which he hired Californian cult trash director Russ Meyer to make.
"That was the final straw in the relationship between John and Malcolm," recalls Temple. "I was Russ Meyers's assistant, and I had to take him along to what by that stage had become these horrible, copycat punk clubs like the Vortex, where it had all become so uniform . . . I remember John coming along to this meeting with Russ Meyer . . . he came dressed as a complete hippy in flowery shirts and flared trousers, which totally confused Meyer. John completely sabotaged that project, really.
"And when that fell through, a lot of money had been wasted on it, which was a real problem. So we did have this footage, which I'd shot, and fans had shot, and stuff we'd taped off TV. The idea was to come up with a framework to use that, to avert the financial disaster by doing something very low-budget. So we wrote The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, partly as a joke to puncture that aura of pop stardom surrounding them."
For The Filth and the Fury, Temple went back to The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle outtakes, and his own personal files, and found some previously unseen gems, including remarkable footage of a concert the Pistols played for striking firemen and their children in Huddersfield on Christmas Day, 1977. "Huddersfield was really good. Nobody had looked at that stuff in 20 years. That was a magic moment, really. After all the s**t that had gone down after God Save the Queen, it was all careering out of control. When someone claims they masterminded all this, it's ridiculous . . . Nobody knew what was going on. They were destroying each other. Then there was this moment of calm, when the band were in this surreal context with young kids on Christmas Day, and they played two great concerts. Then, two weeks later, they broke up."
Temple intercuts the archive material with contemporary interviews, with the brilliant twist that we never see the ex-Pistols' faces, which are cast in shadow in the style of criminal testimony in documentaries. "That idea came largely from my aversion to wrinkly, old rock stars," he says. "But it works on several levels - there's that Witness Protection Scheme sort of feel to it, and it also allows you to go back viscerally to that time without constantly referring to some wrinkly old codger."
He confesses to some curiosity as to what the film will mean to a generation which wasn't born at the time of the original events. "We showed it to a bunch of teenagers, and about 20 per cent of them thought it was a fiction film, some kind of Spinal Tap-type excursion to the outer reaches of rock 'n' roll. That kind of ignorance of their own recent history is alarming. To me, the core message of the Sex Pistols is that the most important thing you've got is to be an individual who is able to question the information you're fed. Of course, a lot of the things that they might have hoped would come out of it didn't happen. Control was reasserted. But in any field, whether it's fashion, music, film-making, art, or journalism, it all changed."
The Filth and the Fury is showing from Friday
