Outside the shit-stem is a real SEX PISTOL.”The Sex Pistols’ former bass player, Glen Matlock, told The Independent on Sunday yesterday it had been a unanimous decision by the band to steer clear. “It’s nothing to do with the bands – it’s all to do with business When I first heard about it I was quite excited… but then I found I was going to have to pay thousands of pounds to take my kids. It’s just a big corporate event, a bunch of Herberts in suits… just a money-making opportunity for multi-million shysters.”Jon Savage, the author of the definitive punk history, England’s Dreaming, was unsurprised that the band had turned down the honour. “They are no friends of the music industry and they have always had an uneasy relationship with it.
I think it’s interesting that finally their influence is being recognised by the mainstream American music industry America didn’t do them any favours They had a terrible time on tour there. At the end of the day the Sex Pistols were punk rockers, so what do people expect?”Several other leading figures from the punk days have already become part of the Hall of Fame.The Clash were inducted three years ago, shortly after the death of co-frontman Joe Strummer, and the Ramones accepted their place in 2002.The forthright Lydon has previously referred to it as the “Rock and Roll Hall of Shame”, and, “a place where old rockers go to die”.Next month marks the 30th anniversary of the band’s first headline appearance, at the 100 Club in Oxford Street, London, after a handful of support shows. Within months of the gig they had caused nationwide uproar when the television presenter Bill Grundy goaded them into swearing during a live interview.A backlash against the band’s language, volatile behaviour, anarchic sentiments and chaotic performances soon followed, which meant they struggled to hold on to record deals, going through three in 1977. Following a shambolic US tour, which saw them banned from several venues, Lydon (then Johnny Rotten) quit during a show in San Francisco, telling the audience: “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” The band had completed just one album, Never Mind the Bollocks, but had a lasting effect on the music industry and on high-flying current US bands such as Green Day.Susan Evans, the executive director of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, said of the band’s decision to shun the accolade: “They’re being the outrageous punksters that they are, and that’s rock’n'roll.”. And it was all going so well… There they were, four albums into a career that, by the strict rules of pop, should have ended several years previously amid escalating acrimony and crippling bankruptcy, and yet Sugababes were, instead, progressing in leaps and bounds. Their fourth album, Taller In More Ways, released last October, was their best yet, reaching audiences far and above their original teenage targets, while the terrific flagship single, “Push the Button”, even managed to hold Robbie Williams’s comeback song, “Tripping”, from the number one spot.
They were huge across Europe, and if their manager was to have his way, America would soon fall under their spell as well. The girls had continually shaken off endless tabloid speculation that a split was imminent with a collective smile more insidious than an MP on an election campaign. In December, Keisha Buchanan (the pretty black one) responded to the rumours thus: “It’s not going to happen yet, everyone. We’re happy and that’s the way it’s going to be for now.”
But just a couple of weeks later, the split did indeed happen: Mutya Buena (the perennially scowling half -Filipino one) quit, the reasons proffered gleefully contradicting one another. She wanted to spend more time with her new baby daughter, born six months previously She wanted to pursue a solo career.
She hated her bandmates, and always had done.
“Not true!” laughs Heidi Range (the bottle-blonde one) over orange juice in a west London hotel one Wednesday afternoon “It wasn’t like that at all, honest. OK, yes, in textbook terms, Mutya leaving when she did – well, it was probably the worst timing it could have been, like, but she never hated us She never actually gave us a reason for quitting. She just went, that’s all.”Range, who is perky to a professional standard and has a habit of gazing at you with her cold blue eyes without ever quite pulling focus, smiles blandly: “And then our manager found us Amelle here [Amelle Berrabah, the new sultry one] and it’s all really good and brilliant now.”No doubt at this juncture, Keisha Buchanan would have pitched in with her own reading of the situation. Buchanan is, after all, preternaturally ingenue-ish and full of skittish opinion But she isn’t here right now Why?”She missed her flight, didn’t she!” This from Range. “We were in Italy last night, Turin I think it was, and me and Amelle wanted to come home early today so we could get our hair weaved in time [for the Brit Awards, at which "Push the Button" would miss out on Best Single to Coldplay's "Speed of Sound"]. Keisha was going to come with us, but she never made the flight.”Eventually, I do catch up with the woman by telephone the following day.
This is the morning after the night before when, despite losing out on a Brit, Sugababes partied with alcopop-flavoured gusto As a result, she has all but lost her voice When she tries to talk, a frog’s croak pops out.”It was a… sh-shame,” she says, clearly struggling, “but Mutya wasn’t happy, was she? I could see that, but then I’ve known her half my… half my life.” She stops here to ask if I mind whether she whispers instead Whispering is softer on her voice, and easier too The words now come out in an excitable rush. “What a lot of people don’t know about Mutya, right, is that she has been singing since she was six years old. Before even I met her [at school], I saw her on TV – Michael Barrymore, My Kind of People – singing Whitney Houston’s ‘The Greatest Love Of All’. Mad, isn’t it? I had a pretty normal childhood, right, but I don’t believe she had the kind of childhood where she went to school, and that. All she has done is sing, and now that she’s 21 and a mother and everything, she probably just wanted a change of scene and I can sort of understand that, can’t you?”Presumably, their decade-long friendship has suffered, though? “Well, we’re trying to build on that now.
