Then someone complained to the police and arrests were made, Richmond and Reid included. "Again, I was really surprised at the strength of the reaction to it," she says "But Malcolm was great in such circumstances. He could always quickly come up with a response; something that made sense of it." MacLaren understood how to manipulate situations to his advantage. What refused to be manipulated was the band itself."It all came to an end during the 1978 American tour," says Richmond.

"I joined them at Baton Rouge, a really lovely gig, supported by a Cajun band." Hang on. This is the first time I've heard a Pistols' gig described as "lovely", and - mon dieu - a Cajun band? "Dallas on the other hand was horrible The audience were hard. Sid was completely out of it." That's more like it."From there we flew to San Francisco. I remember sitting in a bar, people coming up to us wanting tickets for the Winterland gig, which was the last ever." Lydon left the band that evening.

"Once John had gone, it was a great effort to get things done," says Richmond "Malcolm wasn't a conventional manager. At this point he was only interested in working on his movie."By the end of the decade the Pistols had broken up, McLaren's movie The Great Rock and Roll Swindle was released and Glitterbest went into receivership. In the Eighties Richmond moved into publishing and now edits anthropology books."You know, at the end I actually got terribly fond of the receivers," says Richmond. "We used to go and watch the movie together, over and over, them saying to me 'can we make any money out of this?'" They wouldn't have been the first, or the last, to turn chaos into cash.'The Filth and The Fury' is out on Friday. It's odd to learn that, of all people, it was Kirk Douglas's film portrayal of the white and ultra-classical-sounding Bix Beidebecke that first inspired the South African trumpet star Hugh Masekela to pick up the instrument. Later, after music lessons from the ANC activist Trevor Huddlestone and the gift of a new trumpet from Louis Armstrong, Masekela watched America's postwar black jazz musicians on film and listened to them on record, aspiring to a perceived level of glamour and equality that was probably more fiction than fact.