label, which was under political pressure, released the band from their contract. In one journalist's later description, the Pistols had "stoked a moral panic...precipitating the cancellation of gigs, the band’s expulsion from their EMI record deal and lurid tabloid tales of punk’s 'shock cult'". As McLaren fielded offers from other labels, the band went into the studio for a round of recordings with Goodman, their last with either him or Matlock. Sid Vicious joins the band In February 1977, word leaked out that Matlock was leaving the Sex Pistols. On 28 February, McLaren sent a telegram to the NME confirming the split. He claimed that Matlock had been "thrown out...because he went on too long about Paul McCartney....the Beatles was too much." In an interview a few months afterwards, Steve Jones echoed the charge that Matlock had been sacked because he "liked the Beatles". The claim was fictional. Steve Huey of AllMusic has counterclaimed that Matlock "was even more enamored of The Faces and the mod groups prominently featured on London pirate radio in the late '60s, as were Steve Jones and Paul Cook". Years later, Jones expanded on the matter of the band's issues with Matlock: "He was a good writer but he didn't look like a Sex Pistol and he was always washing his feet. His mum didn't like the songs." Matlock told the NME that he had voluntarily left the band by "mutual agreement". Later, in his autobiography, he described the primary impetus as his increasingly acrimonious relationship with Rotten, exacerbated—in Matlock's account—by the rampant inflation of Rotten's ego "once he'd had his name in the papers". Lydon later claimed that "God Save the Queen", the belligerently sardonic song planned as the band's second single, had been the final straw: "[Matlock] couldn't handle those kinds of lyrics. He said it declared us fascists." Though the singer could hardly see how anti-royalism equated with fascism, he claimed, "Just to get rid of him, I didn't deny it." Jon Savage suggests that Rotten pushed Matlock out in an effort to demonstrate his power and autonomy from McLaren. Steve Jones remembers it differently: "Tension had been mounting between Glen and John for a while, and when they had a really big row right around the time Glen started asking Malcolm awkward questions about where all the money was going, Matlock's days were probably numbered. Julien Temple says that getting rid