"Johnny Rotten came in, turned to Iggy and said, Oo the f***'s that – your manager or something?" David Bowie on his first encounter with the Sex Pistols

Bowie and Lydon — (Image credit: Barry King/WireImage | Ian Dickson/Redferns)

David Bowie's work with Lou Reed (on 1972 Transformer) and Iggy and The Stooges (on 1973's Raw Power) may have helped pave the way for punk rock in England, but that didn't necessarily mean that the Class of '77 held Bowie in high regard. In a 1991 interview with [now defunct] British music magazine Q, Bowie recalled his first encounter with one of the Sex Pistols in 1977, and how it caused him to "nearly melt through the floor" with embarrassment.

At the time, Bowie was playing piano alongside his future Tim Machine colleagues Tony Sales (bass) and Hunt Sales (drums) in Iggy Pop's band, touring Pop's first solo album, The Idiot, which Bowie had produced. In the first week of March 1977, the tour stopped off for two nights at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, north London, which happened to be where Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten lived. So on a night off from working on Never Mind The Bollocks, Rotten decided to pop in to the Rainbow to say 'Hello' to the Godfather of Punk.

"I was in the dressing room – wearing a suit, as it happened – and Johnny Rotten came in, turned to Iggy and said, 'Oo the fuck's that – your fucking manager or something?" Bowie recalled to writer Charles Shaar Murray. "Then he took a second look and said, Oh, it's fucking Bowie in a fucking suit. I nearly melted through the floor! My street credibility's Madison Avenue."

A few years later, Bowie encountered another Sex Pistol - the band's bassist Glen Matlock - in the company of Iggy Pop, and he didn't receive a huge amount of respect on that occasion either.

“We played an extra club gig in New York and David Bowie came,” Matlock revealed on British TV show Never Mind The Buzzcocks last year. “And he’s got the same car and driver [Tony Mascia] as in [Nicolas Roeg's 1976's film] The Man Who Fell To Earth, right? We all bundled in that, going down Madison Avenue, and I’m sitting on David Bowie’s knee because there’s nowhere to sit.”

“And in those big limos, there’s supposed to be two vanity mirrors, right, and he hasn’t got a vanity mirror, he’s got a little painting. I went, Hang on a second, that’s a Picasso, ain't it? And he went, ‘Yeah, it is’. Then I looked [to the other side of the car] and went, Hang on, that’s a Matisse! In his car…

He said, ‘Yeah’. I said, Well you’re a flash cunt!, and he went, ‘Yeah, I guess I am’.”

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A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.