I found myself unexpectedly pleasantly surprised with this documentary.
My initial thought beforehand was "how many times can you see a Sex Pistols story told yet again and have it be anything but the same-old-same-old". But this time coming from Glen Matlock's perspective it does have a bit of a new twist, and has more detail on the band's formative period than you usually get with Pistols documentaries.
If you're a Pistols fan there's plenty of band footage, but probably nothing you won't have seen elsewhere. However that doesn't really matter as the "meat" of the production is in the story told by the interviews. Common to this type of thing you have a selection of talking heads, but they're not the usual suspects wheeled out for Punk retrospectives and suchlikes, which gives it a refreshing edge.
There are new interviews with fellow-Pistols Paul Cook and Steve Jones, and Matlock of course tells the bulk of the story. There's no new Lydon footage, but that kind of works in the film's favour, because I think his inclusion would have been too much of the "same old", which would have left the documentary feel a lot more like every other Pistols documentary.
So I'd say if you're a Pistols fan and have already seen every documentary, this is still well worth checking out. Don't write it off as being the usual re-telling of an over-told story. It is something a little different and will leave you feeling a little more freshly informed than is too often the case with Pistols documentaries.
And, equally importantly, it doesn't outstay it's welcome, which would have been all too easy to do by delving deeply into Matlocks' post-Pistols activity. Instead it focuses almost entirely on his time as a "teenage Sex Pistol". And for a film of an hour and a half in length it felt a LOT shorter, such is the pace and detail. There's nothing here that drags. It's a finely tuned piece of work.
So, a 10 star rating from me.
