The Making of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle

Joel McIver
The Making of the Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle (2005)
Here's an oddity, one of a series of books examining classic movies - classic movies such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Scarface and er… The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle.

Me neither.

I guess the general public must have been similarly mystified given that I picked this up cheap from a remaindered section somewhere in the general vicinity of its publication date. It's been sat on my bookshelves ever since, five different bookshelves given the number of times I've moved house since my presumed purchase - presumed because it's a vague impression rather than a definitive memory. I assume it's been there sandwiched between Lydon and Milligan all this time, somehow eluding even those sweeps deliberately intended to select volumes I never got around to reading. Similarly, I've seen The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle and don't remember much about that either. I rate the soundtrack album quite highly, and even Moorcock's bizarre pseudo-novelisation of the film is pretty great, but the movie itself…

McIver's autopsy handily includes a scene by scene synopsis, thus allowing me to remember why I've failed to remember the thing, specifically that it was mostly existing footage cobbled together like a last minute homework assignment which cleverly admits to being crap in the hope we won't notice that it is, in actual fact, crap; plus it was McLaren's vision of the Pistols and therefore pretty much a complete waste of time.

Nevertheless, in discussing a movie which wasn't anywhere near as amazing as I hoped it would be when I was fourteen, McIver pulls together all sorts of fascinating historical details which somehow failed to make it into other Pistols biographies, or were else so underplayed that I didn't notice. Sid, in particular, comes out of it quite well, and actual light is shed upon why he almost certainly wasn't responsible for killing his girlfriend, which is good to know; and crap as the film was, Julian Temple's justification is interesting. Even Russ Meyer comes out of it well enough to suggest his version might have been worth a look, had it been made.

It's surprising that anyone should have found something new to say about punk rock in 2005 - or if not new, at least something obvious which hadn't been said before - but McIver pulled it off. I'm still not too bothered about watching the movie ever again, but I'm glad this thing found its way onto my shelves.