Danny Boyle Asked the Sex Pistols Twice

Danny Boyle put the Sex Pistols into the London Olympics opening ceremony twice on July 27, 2012. A few bars of “God Save the Queen,” the single the BBC banned in 1977, cut into the filmed intro before the Queen entered the stadium. Later in the show “Pretty Vacant” played to the global broadcast with her in the building. Thirty-five years after the ban, the band was on the official program.

Two months earlier that moment was in trouble. John Lydon, once billed as Johnny Rotten, didn’t want the songs used. Guitarist Steve Jones did, badly enough that a May 30 email from Anita Camarata, manager to Jones and drummer Paul Cook, described him as “flipping out” and wanting to overrule his old singer. The mechanism to do it already existed in a 1998 agreement letting a majority of the band license its music over any one member’s objection. Nobody had ever used it. Camarata, Jones, Cook and Peter Button, trustee of Sid Vicious’s estate, seriously discussed using it for the first time. On June 11 Camarata emailed Lydon instead, laid out what the Olympics could do for the band and urged him to talk to Boyle directly. Lydon talked to Boyle and gave his consent.⊕

The Second Ask

Nine years later Boyle needed Sex Pistols songs again, this time for Pistol, a six-part FX series built on Jones’s 2016 memoir Lonely Boy. The book had been optioned in November 2018 and Boyle was attached to direct by late summer 2020. Jones, Cook and the Vicious estate backed the project from the start, while Glen Matlock, the band’s original bassist, signed on after a conversation with Boyle himself.

Camarata told Lydon’s manager about the series in an email on January 4, 2021, with the director attached and the actor playing Lydon already cast. Lydon was offered scene descriptions and a conversation with Boyle alongside that actor. He declined and Boyle ended up talking to his manager instead.

Lydon refused consent. He objected that Boyle had been hired months before anyone told him and that he’d been treated with disrespect over a story about a band he fronted. Every other rights holder had cleared the music. Consent tied to Lydon’s publishing was, in the judge’s words, “the last piece of the rights jigsaw.”

Jones and Cook sued in March 2021. After a seven-day trial in July, Sir Anthony Mann ruled on August 23 that the majority could bind Lydon. Pistol premiered on May 31, 2022 with the Sex Pistols’ recordings on the soundtrack.

The Contract His Own Lawyer Begged For

The agreement Lydon spent 2021 fighting was one his own side had pushed to get signed. In 1997 he was selling his publishing interests to BMG, which wanted a letter of comfort from the rest of the band before closing. The others worried that once Lydon sold, he’d have less reason to approve licenses that paid them. Their price for the letter was majority rule. Button, the Vicious estate’s trustee, put the principle to Lydon’s English solicitor in a fax on December 11, 1997: “It is not right for any of the individuals if any one can hinder exploitation if requested by the majority.”

Lydon’s side wanted the deal closed just as badly. A day before Button’s fax, Lydon’s US attorney Howard Siegel left Button a voicemail “beseeching,” “begging” and “pleading” with him to finish before the holidays, warning that otherwise “John will have no alternative but to feel that the deal from BMG has been sabotaged.” Lydon had signed by February 20, 1998, after close to two years of negotiation with a US attorney, an English solicitor and his manager in his corner. The judge called his claim that he never understood it a convenient contrivance.⊕

For the next 23 years the band ran on persuasion instead. The judge described Camarata’s method as a “general policy (not obligation) of trying to achieve a consensual approach.” When a member dug in, the others backed off.

Lydon’s defense rested on that history. He argued that years of licensing calls where nobody got overruled had turned courtesy into a binding veto. His team added the 2012 Olympics episode at the start of trial as more proof of the habit. Mann read the episode as evidence against him. The rest of the band had been ready to invoke the agreement nine years before they finally did.

The Casting Vote

The swing vote belonged to the first Pistol out the door. Matlock was gone by February 1977, replaced by Sid Vicious eight months before Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols came out. He co-wrote 10 of its 12 songs and played bass on one.⊕ He was one of the five parties to the 1998 agreement. In Jones v Lydon he was technically a defendant who gave evidence for the other side. Rolling Stone later reported that if Matlock had sided with Lydon, the case could quite possibly have gone the other way. “I did sort of have the casting vote,” Matlock said.

Same Document, Same Director

Nothing on paper changed between the two asks. The 1998 agreement covered both, Boyle wanted the songs both times and Lydon objected both times, hard enough in 2012 that Jones wanted him overruled. That year the request reached Lydon in April, three months before the ceremony, while the answer could still move. Camarata made her case by email and pointed him to Boyle before anyone counted votes.

In 2021 Lydon heard after the option, the writers, the director and the cast, through an email to his manager. Mann didn’t blame Camarata for the timing. Several writers had turned the project down and the pandemic had her worried it wouldn’t happen as late as December 2020. He still wrote that leaving Lydon out of the early stages “could well be part of the source of the difficulty which then arose.”

Twenty-Three Years Without a Vote

Most product teams run the way the Pistols did. On paper a DACI chart (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) names one approver for the call. In the room nothing ships over the objection of the staff engineer, the sales lead or the founder who built v1, because the team has always talked everyone to yes. That habit holds until a decision arrives that someone wants badly enough to stop asking. Lydon got his version of that decision as an email, after the project already had a director, a cast and a majority.

The Sex Pistols close out their North American tour at the Hollywood Palladium on October 18, playing Never Mind the Bollocks front to back with Frank Carter singing and Matlock on bass. It’s their first North American run since 2003.⊕ The lineup heading into the album’s 50th anniversary on October 28, 2027 is the same three members who outvoted Lydon in 2021.