Sex Pistols drummer Paul Cook remembered the days of Strand – a pre-Pistols act he was a member of alongside guitarist Steve Jones – confessing the boys used to steal gear from other bands because they couldn’t afford their own.
He told Loudwire(transcribed by UG):
“[It’s] pretty true [that we stole gear]… You’ve got to understand, we weren’t very rich at the time and we wanted to form a band and that was one way of getting equipment.”
Asked if they took “anything that was notable, from any bigger band at the time,” Paul replied:
“Oh, yeah, for sure. There’s a famous story about Steve when David Bowie was doing his final shows of the ‘Ziggy Stardust’ tour.
“Between shows they’d leave all the equipment standing overnight. It was a big mistake, especially with us around. And I wasn’t there actually at the time.
“It was so easy to get in those places and we’d just go around the back. We lived in Hammersmith and so many bands played in Hammersmith Odeon. So we got a full range of equipment before we could even play really. Including the PA.”
Cook also remembered how he wanted to quit the whole rock ‘n’ roll thing back then, saying:
“I got a real secure job at the time and I was in this crazy world of rock ‘n’ roll and I was thinking…
“It was just a bit a a dilemma really, thinking ‘Do I wanna do this? Do I leave the job?’ I had a real good job, I was working as a an apprentice electrician in a brewery. Fantastic. [Laughs] But eventually I thought ‘I’ve gotta give this a go.'”
The drummer also remembered recording staple Pistols track “Anarchy in the UK” and how it didn’t go that well from the start, saying:
“We went in to record ‘Anarchy in the UK’ with Dave Goodman who was our live sound engineer.
“We must have run through the song about 20-30 times. We finally got it but we just knew it wasn’t right, it just didn’t work out right. It just didn’t sound right to us.
“Eventually we went in to do it again with Chris Thomas, the record producer, and we went through it two or three times and that was the final product.
“It just sounded horrible, basically. We should have done better than to get our live sound guy.
“He wasn’t a producer at the time, he was our live sound engineer so we made that mistake. But at least we went back and done it and made a great record eventually.”
Asked on who recorded the bass on “Never Mind the Bollocks,” Paul replied:
“Steve Jones played most of the bass on that, and Sid is buried somewhere in there.”