Lonely Boy - Steve Jones

LONELY BOY – STEVE JONES

There's a telling sentence at the start of Steve Jones' autobiography, where he writes 'It was my shit upbringing that got the ball rolling.' The ball he's referring to, of course, is the Sex Pistols and what Jones says gets to the gist of the matter immediately, even though it's not quite the whole story. Jones did indeed have a shit upbringing, there's no denying that, but in him describing it there's no wallowing in self pity or anything of the like, it's just him telling us how it was.

What all the Sex Pistols' members had in common and what typically applies to a lot of working class youngsters was the idea that they were essentially worthless, or as Jones puts it: 'The message I'd got from my upbringing and education was that I was a piece of shit who was never going to amount to anything, and that kind of negative view of yourself can very easily become a self-fulfilling prophecy.'

The point Jones makes is an important one and it tells us exactly where the Pistols were coming from: The Sex Pistols could only ever have been working class. If they had been anything else, they would not have had the impact they did. To borrow Mark E Smith's term, the Sex Pistols were the original prole art threat.

It's not, however, quite the whole story because other influences also came into play to make the Pistols such a 'success', not least the effect of Johnny Rotten's personality and Malcolm McLaren's art school background and contacts. Saying that, it was still Steve Jones' willingness to look beyond his shit upbringing that started it all. 'That's not me showing off,' he writes 'It's just a fact.'

It was the lure of music and fashion that cast Jones a lifeline and caused him to look further than his allotted place in the world. Born into a single-parent family, abused by his step-father and essentially 'brainwashed into apologising for it', Jones ended up as a career criminal, stealing anything and everything which took his fancy, including musical instruments – lots and lots of musical instruments.

Being broadminded and without prejudice, simply by hanging out at his shop Jones became a friend of Malcolm McLaren and from there the story of the Sex Pistols began, as has been documented enough times already for the need to go over again here.

As well as being a thief and in the words of McLaren in The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle film, 'a brilliant cat burglar', Jones also had – to put it mildly – an eye for the ladies. Come the Bill Grundy interview and his past experience of sexual predators (and even being a bit of one himself, as detailed in his book) Jones recognised what Grundy was up to immediately in the way he was talking to Siouxsie Sioux. “You dirty sod. You dirty old man.” Jones says. “Well, keep going, chief, keep going,” Grundy replies “Go on, you've got another five seconds. Say something outrageous.” So Jones tells Grundy what he thinks of him: “You dirty bastard. You dirty fucker. What a fucking rotter.”

And the rest is history.

The Pistols never put themselves up on a pedestal – they were pushed there – but once they were on a pedestal, what exactly did people want from them? If the truth be told, a lot of people probably wanted them to be martyrs. To be useful idiots, even? Well, they certainly got both with Sid Vicious. Johnny, on the other hand, was a little too smart to be anyone's fool, least of all Malcolm McLaren's.

In hindsight, the Sex Pistols reforming in 1996 and their Finsbury Park concert was the best thing they could have done in terms of kicking the pedestal out from under them. It certainly destroyed the myth that had built up about them. The fact that a lot of people didn't want them to reform and viewed it even as a betrayal is evidence enough. And was it such a crime to be only 'doing it for the money'? “Is it cos we're working class and that means somehow we don't have access to cash?” Johnny roared at the gathered media at the press launch for the Finsbury Park concert “Should we just stay in our horrible little council estates? Bollocks!”

Come the day of the concert, Johnny was in his element: “Let's start a war!” he called to the heaving mass of the audience. And so too in his own special way was Jones in his element: “Who wants a shag?” he called out.

Steve Jones' autobiography, Lonely Boy, certainly lays a few ghosts to rest particularly from his childhood as well as, of course, from his Sex Pistols experience. On reading it, you just can't help but to love the old rogue even if by today's terms he's a veritable rock dinosaur, especially when it comes to women.

Does he really need to let us know he had Chrissie Hynde over a bath at a party once? Do we need to know he 'took one for the team' when shagging Nancy Spungeon whilst she was going out with Sid? Do we need to know John Lydon's wife, Nora, used to be Jones' sugarmummy? Do we need to know he shagged Pauline, the girl from Birmingham as sung about in Bodies, down an alley off Wardour Street? I guess we do?

Nowadays, Jones is a resident of Los Angeles where he has his own radio show, Jonesy's Jukebox, which is actually really very good. On the not so plus side, he admits to hanging out over there with Russell Brand doing transcendental meditation. It's a reminder of what Rotten once said when asked about Neil Young's paean to him in the track Hey, Hey, My, My from Young's Rust Never Sleeps album: “I've got better things to do than sit on a beach in California taking acid,” said Johnny.

In his remark, he was highlighting the remoteness of Neil Young's world in comparison to our own and in a similar way, Jones' life in America these days highlights the gap between where he is now and where we all are back in Britain where government imposed austerity continues to crush its people and eat its children.

We shouldn't bemoan or criticise Steve Jones' life nowadays, though. After all, who are we and what gives us the right? In fact, we should instead be pleased for him because he's been through the mill and he deserves the peace he seems now to have acquired. In fact, if anything we should be thanking him for giving us one of the greatest rock'n'roll bands ever and for a lot of us, at least, for actually helping to change our lives for the better.

In buying his book, you'll be making Steve Jones a happy man. Send him nudes and you'll probably be making him even happier.

John Serpico