Grundy Interviews the Sex Pistols
The 1st of December 1976 AD
It was an interview that boosted one career – that of the Sex Pistols; and ruined another, interviewer Bill Grundy’s.
On the early evening news and magazine programme Today broadcast to ITV’s London region a very short space was allocated to Johnny Rotten and crew (with Siouxsie Sue and Steve Severin among others behind them) because of their recent £40,000 signing to EMI. Bill Grundy apparently missed the first expletive, from Steve Jones telling him they had ....spent it. He then rather foolishly asked Rotten to repeat a swear-word said sotto voce, which the singer did. And even more stupidly when Jones called him a dirty sod for mock advances to Siouxsie the presenter invited him to come out with more colourful language. Steve Jones duly obliged.
The next day the Daily Mirror ran the headline The Filth and the Fury. Every paper carried the story; out of a couple of minutes on regional TV the Sex Pistols garnered reams of publicity, and the nature of the event, their irreverence and energy, didn’t hurt their record sales one bit. Not so Grundy, suspended for a fortnight, and the very programme ended a few weeks after that.
Grundy, by the way, had another reason for claiming Rock & Roll fame: he was the first to present The Beatles on television in a 1962 Granada TV show.
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