- Music
- 22 Nov 16
Former Sex Pistol Steve Jones has opened up for the first time about being sexually abused by his stepfather in his autobiography.
The 61-year-old star – who performed with the legendary Iggy Pop and is ranked in Rolling Stone’ magazine’s top 100 guitarists of all time – also reveals that he believes being molested as a child is the main reason behind his own sex addiction problems.
In the memoir, entitled Lonely Boy, the British punk star also frankly discusses performing sex acts with both men and women in his youth – revealing that he even performed sex acts on a male for money, only shortly after being sexually abused by his step-dad.
”I never told anyone about it for years and it feels strange putting this in a book even now,” he admits.
However, he feels it’s important to be candid in an effort to try and help others in a similar nightmare situation.
“The confusion I felt makes me want to let anyone who's been in a similar situation know they're not alone,” he explains.
Opening up about the abuse he suffered at the hands of his step-father, Jones told a British tabloid: “It wasn't the end of the world. I wasn't locked in a dungeon or anything like that. But it did enough to send me spinning.”
Jones says the abuse he suffered left him with a permanent emotional scar that he is still grappling with today and that it’s at the core of why he’s been unable to maintain healthy, loving relationships.
“Looking back,” he explains, “that's why I've never been able to settle with anyone and why I've ended up a sex addict.”
Soon after being abused by his stepfather, Jones says another older man seized on his “vulnerability” and offered him cash for sex.
"It's not like I was wearing a badge that said, ‘I have just been molested’,” he says. “But once it's happened for the first time I guess it's more likely to happen again, because from then on there's a little voice in your head that this is what 'normal' is.”
He also talks in the book about paying another boy 50 pence “for his troubles” to perform a sex act on him while travelling on a train.
But despite a number of homosexual encounters, Jones insists that he never perceived himself as being gay.
However, Jones says that at the height of his fame with the Sex Pistols he had sex with everyone and anyone – and even claims that he bedded all his ex-bandmates’ girlfriends, including Nancy Spungen. The American woman was violently killed in 1978 – with her then boyfriend Sid Vicious, the band’s bass player, charged with her murder, but the case never went to court because he died while out on bail from a heroin overdose.
Jones also reveals he had sex with The Pretenders’ lead singer, Chrissie Hynde who had a child with Ray Davies of the Kinks and was once married to Simple Minds lead singer Jim Kerr.
But Jones and The Pretenders singer are obviously still on good terms because Chrissie Hynde – who once made a famous guest appearance on the hit TV show Friends – has written the foreword for Lonely Boy: Tales of a Sex Pistol.
“There was so much shagging going on at this time – at least there was on my part,” he told the Sunday People. “Any chance I got I'd be trying to get my end away, usually in a cupboard or a toilet or an alley round the back of the venue.”
The hardback is out now.
Here’s Jones’ performing the seminal classic ‘God Save The Queen’ with The Sex Pistols.