by Lydon, John
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This autobiography is by John Lydon in his own words. Sometimes, the organisation of those words does not conform to the traditional rules of grammar. In some cases, the reader will happen upon words not listed in the dictionary, or used in ways one might describe as ‘unorthodox’. The publisher is aware of this – they are not typos and misspellings we have missed; they are part of Mr Lydon’s unique ‘lingo’ and, as such, have been given (mostly) free rein. As John might say, ‘Don’t let tiffles cause fraction’.
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2014
A CBS COMPANY
Copyright © John Lydon, 2014
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
The right of John Lydon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Simon & Schuster UK Ltd
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Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked then publishers will be glad to hear from them.
Endpapers © Kari Kuukka, Rock Summer Festival, Tallinn,
Estonia, 26 August 1988
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-47113-719-8
ISBN: (Trade Paperback): 978-1-47113-720-4
ISBN (Ebook): 978-1-47113-722-8
Typeset in Garamond by M Rules
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
The Lydons. I can’t thank my family for giving me a career, because I did that to myself, but I can thank them for standing by me. Thank you.
Nora. The love of my life. My best friend. The rows are beautiful but the making up is more so. You give me nothing but love and support. Which I hope I’m repaying. Thank you.
I dedicate this book to integrity.
CONTENTS
INTRO: MAY THE ROAD RISE WITH YOU
1 BORN FOR A PURPOSE
Roots and Culture
2 FIRST INDOOR TOILET
3 JOHNNY WEARS WHAT HE WANTS
The Beautiful Shame
4 INTO THE INFERNO
Hugs and Kisses, Baby! #1
5 THIS BOY DON’T SURRENDER
Who Censors the Censor? #1 –
Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged
6 GETTING RID OF THE ALBATROSS
7 OPENING PANDORA’S BOX WITH A
HAMMER AND CHISEL
Who Censors the Censor? #2 –
Swanny Times
8 JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE PARANOID, IT
DOESN’T MEAN THEY’RE NOT OUT TO GET YA
Hugs and Kisses, Baby! #2
9 THERE’S NOWT AS GOOD AS CHANGE
Who Censors the Censor? #3 –
Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood
10 HAPPY NOT DISAPPOINTED
11 JOHNNY CUCKOO
Who Censors the Censor? #4 –
Do You Want My Body?
12 YOU CAN LOOK TO THE FUTURE WHEN
YOU’RE CONFIDENT
Hugs and Kisses, Baby! #3 –
Nora, My ‘Hair-ess’
13 NATURE DISCOVERS ME
14 HISTORY AND GRIEF ... AS A GIFT
Who Censors the Censor? #5 –
Passive Resistance
15 DEEPER WATER
FINAL NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
MAY THE ROAD RISE WITH YOU
Anger is an energy. It really bloody is. It’s possibly the most powerful one-liner I’ve ever come up with. When I was writing the Public Image Ltd song ‘Rise’, I didn’t quite realize the emotional impact that it would have on me, or anyone who’s ever heard it since.
I wrote it in an almost throwaway fashion, off the top of my head, pretty much when I was about to sing the whole song for the first time, at my then new home in Los Angeles. It’s a tough, spontaneous idea.
‘Rise’ was looking at the context of South Africa under apartheid. I’d be watching these horrendous news reports on CNN, and so lines like ‘They put a hotwire to my head, because of the things I did and said’, are a reference to the torture techniques that the apartheid government was using out there. Insufferable.
You’d see these reports on TV and in the papers, and feel that this was a reality that simply couldn’t be changed. So, in the context of ‘Rise’, ‘Anger is an energy’ was an open statement, saying, ‘Don’t view anger negatively, don’t deny it – use it to be creative.’ I combined that with another refrain, ‘May the road rise with you’. When I was growing up, that was a phrase my mum and dad – and half the surrounding neighbourhood, who happened to be Irish also – used to say. ‘May the road rise, and your enemies always be behind you!’
So it’s saying, ‘There’s always hope’, and that you don’t always have to resort to violence to resolve an issue. Anger doesn’t necessarily equate directly to violence. Violence very rarely resolves anything. In South Africa, they eventually found a relatively peaceful way out. Using that supposedly negative energy called anger, it can take just one positive move to change things for the better.
When I came to record the song properly, the producer and I were arguing all the time, as we always tend to do, but sometimes the arguing actually helps; it feeds in. When it was released in early 1986, ‘Rise’ then became a total anthem, in a period when the press were saying that I was finished, and there was nowhere left for me to go. Well, there was, and I went there. Anger is an energy. Unstoppable.
When I sing it onstage nowadays, it’s very emotional for me, because there’s such a connection with the audience. I’ll get these melodramatic responses, that people are bang in empathy with the actual statement, and the point and purpose of the song. They fully understand it and they share it back with me. Now, that takes your breath away. Often, I can forget my place in the song. I’m so impressed listening to the audience singing it, that they take over. For me, that’s complete success: something really generous has been understood by everybody in the building.
Anger is the root core of why I write songs. Sometimes I barely think I’m in control of myself when I’m writing. If there’s such things as guardian angels out there – well, mine’s a real bleedin’ piece of work. There’s a great deal of forethought and experience that goes into these things, you see, in the preamble, in my life in general. Once I’m on, then the words just flow. And when I’m on, I’m ON.
Whatever that thing in me is, it keeps me going and being like this, and being relentless, and understanding things in my way – it’s not so far-fetched, after all, from the rest of humanity. It really isn’t. We all go through this, but I’m just the one who gets up and says it.
I come from the dustbin. I was born and raised in a piss-poor neighbourhood in North London, which was pretty much what you’d imagine Russia to be today. It was very, very controlled. Everything. And the presumption of control, too. And people were being born into this ‘shitstem’, as the Jamaicans call it, of just believing that others had the right to dictate to them in that way. Like I said to the Royal Family, ‘You can ask for my allegiance, but you certainly can’t demand it. I’m not anybody’s cannon fodder.’
I don’t think that w
ay of thinking had really come into the British psyche for many years. It had done in previous centuries but it had been nullified, shall we say, through the Victoriana approach. The British have a really delicious history of civil disorder, but by the time the Second World War was over it had all been mollycoddled under the carpet, and was not mentioned in history lessons – but for some of us out there who love to read, well, look what we found.
I could read and write at the age of four or five. My mum taught me, but after I got meningitis aged seven, I lost everything – all my memory, including who my mum and dad were. It took a long time to come back. I’d go to the library after school and just sit there and read until the place closed. Mum and Dad were very good, they trusted me that I’d find my way home, even though many a time I couldn’t – I’d literally forgotten where I lived.
I loved getting back into reading, though – history, geology, or anything about wildlife, and then later I progressed into Dostoyevsky. By eleven, I was finding Crime and Punishment very insightful – very miserable but sometimes when you wallow in other people’s misery and dourness, it’s fulfilling and rewarding. Like, ‘Well, sod his luck, I’m a lot higher up the ladder of tragedy than him!’ So books were incredibly important – my life preservers.
There have been conversations here in the United States about why every ex-President opens a library when politicians do not read the books. Hello, America! Kind of explains your politics. For me, reading saved me, it brought me back. And I found myself in there, so when the memories and bits came back, they kind of made sense to me and I realized I was the same person that I was before I lost everything – it’s just I was ever so much better at it and able to look at myself and go outside of myself and ask, ‘Look, what do you think you’re doing? Try getting it right instead of just bumping into situations without any forethought.’
Maybe I was being hard on myself there – what am I expecting from myself, up to the age of seven? But I’m very, very demanding of me, and that’s always gonna be the case. Nobody can write anything really that bad about me that I haven’t already thought of, and half the time when they’re really being hateful, I go, ‘Phew, they let me off lightly.’ As you will see in the pages ahead, I am my own hardest taskmaster, and this book is all part and parcel of me researching myself – a lifelong and ongoing process.
Back in my late teens, I was definitely ready for something. I was fully loaded, and it happened in a most amazing way, because it wasn’t anything I was looking for. But as soon as ‘Would you want to sing in our band?’ came in, it was ‘Wow, yeah! Cor, now all the pieces fit!’ and I wasn’t gonna give it up too damn easy. I was very resilient even with the others not turning up at the first rehearsals and all of the other negatives that befell the early Sex Pistols.
I didn’t arrive with notebooks full of lyrics, they just came straight out. I use my brain as a library. I like to keep notes but usually I’m very dismissive once I’ve written things down. I can think quicker than I can write, so therefore I’ve got good storage space between the ears.
It felt bloody fantastic to be able to shout these things out. In all honesty, it was not in my imagination to foresee quite the huge numbers of people that ended up listening. I’d just seen the Pistols as a nightclub act, really. I didn’t see much hope in it. Because, like everything else, the music business was well and truly sewn up by then. All of the free-loving bands from the ’60s, they’d grabbed all the top-notch seats and they weren’t making room on the bus for no one.
Within a year or two, however, a couple of the first things I wrote – ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and ‘God Save The Queen’ – really hit their target. I’d like to thank the British public library system: that was my training ground, that’s where I learned to throw those verbal grenades. I wasn’t just throwing bricks through shop windows as a voice of rebellion, I was throwing words where they really mattered. Words count.
I was discussed openly by councillors and parliamentarians, who angrily cited the Traitors and Treason Act. That was a deadly thing to be brought up against. It was a very old law, and actually from what my lawyer was telling me, it still carried the death penalty. Ouch! What? For using words? To dictate from a government point of view what you think your population should or should not be doing is absurd. We’re the ones that vote them in – not for them to tell us in return what we’re doing wrong. They should be emphasizing what we’re doing right. Civil rights for us all, I say. Judge not, lest ye be judged.
The whole fiasco aroused that naggy little git in me, the idea that words are actually weapons, and are perceived as such by the powers-that-be. What a thrill that became. Absolutely – wow! It was justification for me. It was hardcore and serious, it wasn’t done for a laugh. I utterly resent all forms of government. This one was telling me I wasn’t allowed to say certain things – in other words, I wasn’t allowed an opinion. And so I discovered that I really am toxic for the powers-that-be.
Not many ‘pop singers’ push it that far. I mean, you’ve got Pussy Farts in Russia now, and I’m so much on their side. I do love bravery. But before them mine was the most extreme predicament I’ve heard of any pop star ever being in. It was the most political, and the most dangerous, and I laughed all the way through it. Our so-called manager, Malcolm McLaren, shit himself, as did the rest of the group. That’s basically why we started falling apart: they were terrified of being dragged into what they viewed as scandals. For me, these were the questions that needed to be asked. It was absolute public research. What can you say, and what can you not say? Why on earth is ‘bollocks’ a word you can’t touch? Who’s to tell me that? That’s what set me off on the road I now follow. Tell it like it is. And never back down.
I saw a live video of Iggy Pop once, just one song, and he was doing, ‘Down In The Street’ and I was just so impressed with the bravery of the racket – in no way at all being weak, just FULL ON. There he was with his long, blond, luxurious hair, and mascara – Iggy! And it worked for me, because the man wasn’t shying away from what his message was. I’m here, get used to it. The sheer relentless bravery of it.
You can’t always expect to be accepted and sometimes it’s equally beneficial that you’re not, but either way, once you’ve had the bravado to stand on that stage, it’s yours. Do not run from it. And I do not run from it.
I never allowed myself a big pat on the back for what I’d achieved, even though I’d come from nothing, because the next problem was already plonked on my lap, and then the one after that. This is not a trophy hunt for me. These were just things that I felt needed to be stated.
I’d said my bit. The political restraints and presumptions of being British – I thought I’d dealt with them in the Sexy Piss-ups, so then what you do is you move on to the next thing which was internal politics – sort myself out, and find out what’s wrong with me. Before you make your career of pointing fingers at others, you’ve really got to sort out what might be going wrong inside your own self. So that’s how I used my next band, Public Image Limited – PiL, for short – to stop being a big head, with the complete faith that we would all go into this as equals.
That way, we managed to get some great work done. Really important stuff and thrilling to this day. I love my Pubic Hairs Limited. We totally challenged what everybody considered music to be at that time. It fundamentally changed the concept of music forever. In fact, I changed music twice.
It’s difficult to remember the details, but somewhere back in the ’80s or ’90s, it was communicated to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be a nice idea if you got an MBE?’ I suppose they thought I was becoming tame, but you see, they weren’t really listening to the content of Metal Box and Album. The vocals were presumed to be not as insightful, but they really were. The subject matter was internal rather than external, therefore it was presumed that somehow I could be cosseted into the shitstem and Johnny don’t go that way. I am very wary of those self-aggrandizing titles; I don’t find them necessary. I am actually rat
her fond of pomp and ceremony – I just don’t want a place in it.
And yet, I recently had dealings with the American government while applying for US citizenship, and they told me the British still keep an open file on me, to this day. Go figure!
All I want in life is clarity, transparency, so I know who is doing what, and to whom, at all times. My only real enemies in life are liars, and they’ll do everything to stop me because they want the contamination to continue, because it’s comfortable for them, or completely ignorant mindless fools who believe every word they read in a daily rag.
I know damn well that the people who will draw most entertainment from this book will be the haters, and practically every second line is going to be justification for their contempt. Well, that’s fine. That is somewhat also part of the point. As long as they are thinking, even negatively, at least it’s thought! Anger is an energy, remember?
So, here’s My Life Uncensored. There should be a caveat to that – Even Though They Try. Censorship is something I’ve always been against. It’s the kind of ordinance that comes down from people that don’t like to think very hard and aren’t prepared to analyze themselves, just judge others, and are scared of the future. The future’s unknown, let’s leap in, see where it takes us. There’s an old quote but it’s absolutely true: ‘There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.’
This book is basically the life of a serious risk-taker. Risk-taking’s in me. It’s what gets the best out of me. In early 2014, I pitched myself forwards for one of my biggest risks ever – three months on the road in America playing King Herod in Jesus Christ Superstar. Yes, I know. I was well aware of the shock value in it, and the condemnation I would garner – I love it . . . love it! – but that don’t matter tuppence compared to what I would get out of it as a human being. It was forcing myself to take orders, and follow a script. The final challenge! Then a week before the show was due to open, it got cancelled without any real explanation.
But listen, I’ll try to be as accurate as possible without causing too much personal damage, because everybody deserves a chance to get back and repair themselves no matter how many times they fall down. I’ve led a hard life here, and I don’t want it to be dragged down as an unnecessary act of spite against lesser players in the bigger picture. I’ll leave the spite to those dogs and rats.
