Steve Jones - 'Lonely Boy: Tales from a Sex Pistol'

Encouraged by the Disney+ series, entitled 'Pistol' (which tells the story of the band The Sex Pistols), I dug through my pile of books and found guitarist Steve Jones' Lonely Boy, which recounts not only his time as a Sex Pistol and thereby at the heart of the punk movement, but also his childhood and life after the band.

The book is disarmingly honest about everything - including the sexual abuse which Jones faced as a child from his stepfather and, as he terms it, 'the local nonce'. He admits several times that he is a sex addict, and that he will never have a normal and healthy relationship with a woman because of it. These things were sometimes difficult to read because of how approachable and sweet Jones made himself as a child out to be. I wanted to hold him as such terrible things were happening.

But of course, without those things and other less severe ones, we wouldn't have had the band The Sex Pistols.

Jones is open about how manager Malcolm McLaren screwed him and the band over with the 1979 film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, but also says many times that without McLaren and partner Vivianne Westwood, he would not have been the same man that he was at the time of writing the book.

Overall, the autobiography is more like an open conversation between Steve Jones and the reader, and is as transparent a work as I have read in a very long time. I definitely enjoyed Lonely Boy, despite its triggering topics and language.