The Great Rock and Roll Swindle - DVD

I first saw this movie the one time that it played in Los Angeles (that I know of) in 1980 or so, and sometime or another in the VHS days of the 80's, but hadn't seen it since. For some reason I was thinking about the Pistols recently and Amazon had this cheap, so I got it.

I didn't remember too much about it, other than it had manager Malcolm McClaren giving hindsight justifications for the mess that was the Pistols career (which, of course, was his fabrications for events that he had little or no control over), it had very little in the way of actual Pistols footage and it had too many post-Pistols filler songs.

And that's pretty much the way it is. There's almost an excuse for a plot, with Steve Jones as a detective on the search for McClaren, interspliced with Malcolm's ramblings and a bit of actual, historical footage. Certainly nothing remotely like a Pistols documentary or a completely fictional film. It was meant to be a swindle, after all.

There are some fun moments, a bit of good live & lip-sync footage and a couple early demos, but not much to write home about and the Sid, Jones, Cook and Ronnie Briggs outings are all fair, but nothing that you would want to listen to regularly. OK for cheap, but nothing too exciting.