by Lydon, John
In short, I survived a major illness that had its effect on the way my brain now operates, and that’s part and parcel of the making of me. I don’t know what the mechanics of the recovery are, but when I read modern research on how the brain works, or the scientific approach to human life, I know there’s a bigger thing in there. There is a personality; it’s not just a series of chemical equations – there is a heart and soul, above and beyond the sheer machinery of the soft machine, which is the human being.
I know it was a strange childhood and all of that, but my mum and dad taught me a sense of independence, and an ability to work out what a problem is, and being able to tell a reality from a fantasy. I loved watching this TV programme when I was a kid, called Mystery and Imagination, and it was pure horror. It used to come on late on Sunday night, and they never wanted me to see it, and that of course made me want to see it all the more. I love a good horror story or a ghost story, but I know the reality of these things to be different – and that’s proved extremely useful.
I do laugh at the stuff that comes on TV because they’re missing by a mile what’s really going on, but I don’t laugh at the idea of picking up on psychic things. From time to time I’ll see things. I’m aware of atmosphere, and I don’t know quite what that is but I’ll pick up on a thing and I’ll know if the mood or the tempo in a room or a house is a bit off. I will feel presences and I do know the difference between imagining and the reality in that. I can feel the vibe. It’s an empathy for the tunings of your surroundings. There’s a way of tuning in and out. I can completely ignore it or I can let it happen and then you will see things. Sometimes the visions or situations are forced on you.
Many years later, in this old recording studio, the Manor, I definitely, totally, completely felt what I thought was a cat jump on the bed when I was in it. I knew it and I felt the way it moved. I felt it was telling me it was a cat but I couldn’t see it. But I kind of knew it was there. Whereas before I went into the meningitis coma properly, I would imagine a dragon at the end of the bed but my mind would tell me it wasn’t there. So I do have a good watchdog inside my head and I understand the difference quite clearly. Hard to explain but it’s there.
I’ve seen many things. I knew when my granddad, my mother’s father, died. I ran over and woke my parents up and told them. I’d seen a huge flash in the corridor. There was no reason for a big bright light to be there; it seemed to be looking around and searching. I went out and I followed it into my mum and dad’s room and I told them what I’d just seen. I’d seen things like that before. ‘What is that?’ It’s not Most Haunted. That’s what it’s not. For me that’s total fraudulence, whatever it is those fools get up to in the cellars of allegedly haunted castles. It’s something else: it’s clued into a pulse that’s currently available to those that know where to dial it in, on the radio that’s called your brain. It holds no fear for me; it’s one area where I am extremely brave. It either doesn’t exist at all or it does and I’ve found a way of it not presenting any damage to me.
Now, again, back to hospital, there would be images in my head of characters that would stand around the bed or off in the distance in the hospital ward. I still remember them. One of them is the extremely tall priest, that ominous, odd character who turns up every now and again. He seems taller than the space he’s occupying; it’s not in any dimension I can understand. But I know it’s malevolent and I know how to stop it. I’m usually sound asleep when this is happening and I force myself to wake up and stare at that particular area, where I’m imagining this thing to be. By doing that it’s gone, it’s dissipated. I can do that if I don’t like the dream I’m in – I can find the way out, back into consciousness.
It’s usual that these incidences occur when you’re alone. That’s a great skill, to come through that. It gives you a great sense of empowerment that you’ve conquered the assault on your psyche. It is an assault, a challenge. You have to win through it and it makes you feel stronger somehow. Maybe that’s just my mind going through daily exercises. I don’t do physical exercises but it’s clear I run the mental gamut – or gauntlet.
Finsbury Park: it sounds like such a lovely place, doesn’t it? Well, it ain’t, and there ain’t no horse-riding going on around there, except the police on a Saturday afternoon, chasing the youth. I was eleven when we moved up there from Holloway, just before secondary school. It finally came about because of the overcrowding in the old flat, and through my dad pulling some ‘We’re Irish too, you know’ to the local MP, who was also of Irish roots. It’s about the only time being Irish actually paid off. He was just helping out people of his persuasion, I suppose. It was all very ‘gangster lean’. I imagined there was money under a table, because council flats like our new one were very hard to get.
It was in Honeyfield, a block on Durham Road on Six Acres Estate. There was a horrible, maudlin song out at the time by Roger Whittaker that went, ‘I’m gonna leave old Durham Town’, which kind of contaminated the good vibes, but otherwise I was thrilled. Just the idea of so many rooms! I loved walking around inside, going up and down the stairs, touching the banister. ‘Oh, I think I’ll look out this window now!’ I couldn’t get enough. Of course my dad would always moan about the rent. That’s what all those extra rooms amounted to – a whacking great rent bill every week. That was the end of my minicab job too, when we moved. It was too far to go in the morning. Let’s say it was thirty yards further than before.
I was really looking forward to secondary school, because it was a fresh start. I was to attend William of York, another Catholic place off Caledonian Road. I loved the first day – everybody was equally shy and open. All of that Dummy Dum-Dum stuff was, I thought, put behind me. What I didn’t know was that the school already had me listed as a bit of a problem. On my first day, which bitterly offended me, they put me in the D stream – D for dunce. Hello! They just assumed I had brain problems, and that was that. But within a week I was out of it. Way ahead of the game.
Soon, of course, the bully system crept in, and then there was the us-and-them nonsenses that young spotty kids can compartmentalize themselves into. Then I hated it. It was all boys, which became monstrously boring as adolescence reared its ugly head. There were no priests, but there was one that came occasionally to give Maths. Again the choir thing was there, and I kept myself well out of that. Really, Catholicism is murderous on potential singers, there ought to be something done about it.
I liked some of the classes a lot, but I hated the physical education nonsense, because they made you feel really poor, because you had to wear certain uniforms for certain things, like a rugby kit or whatever – just unacceptable to me. If you turned up without your kit, it meant you couldn’t do physical education – great! – but you’d get, ‘Bend over!’ and get whacked on the backside with a slipper by the PE teacher. So I volunteered to be beaten every single time. It stung like mad.
The resentment I had for them trying to impose a uniform on me made the pain almost enjoyable, in a self-satisfying, ‘Ha! You’re not gonna beat me’ way. Many other kids did that too, and we ended up the majority, so those classes were very poorly attended, and they just got bored slippering us. We outlasted it. Fine! When it came to that particular class, I just walked straight out the gates of the school and went off to do something more interesting to me.
Around twelve or thirteen, I started to find friends of my own, like John Gray. A fabulously awkward chap was John. He was at William of York, and absolutely didn’t fit in, or go along with anyone’s agenda but his own, and I loved his individuality. He’s a diamond of awkwardness and at the same time has an arrogance based on real knowledge of things. Encyclopaedic, very useful. Anything you didn’t know, you’d go ‘John?’ and there’s the answer.
He reminds me of that movie Desk Set with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. It’s about replacing the knowledgeable staff in a business with a computer. The computer messes up, and they eventually realize that the human brain is fa
r more reliable and emotionally a better response to things. Well, that would be John Gray.
Dave Crowe was another one – a very odd, dark, ominous fella, a bit Frankensteinian in his body frame too, so a huge bulky hooligan kind of a bloke. Quiet, very quiet, but could turn on the deadly seriousness. He was in my class, but we only started hanging out after a year or two. He’s also an absolute mathematics wizard, and Maths was something that puzzled me intensely, after meningitis, you see. I find the mathematical approach to life very confusing. I either understand a rhythm instinctively, or it’s not going to happen.
Dave got bored hanging out with the Arsenal yobs at school because he was a Tottenham supporter. Because he was an odd penny in that world, and I was an odd penny in mine, and both of us never wanted to do PE – and neither did John Gray – that’s how we all came together. A very odd bunch of characters but all totally resolved, who would rather get slippered than have to strip down into some odd outfit – for badminton.
The presumption of this squalid little Catholic school off Caledonian Road, presuming that they’d be training future badminton players – impossible in a world of brutality. All around us was gang warfare, football rows and thuggery. And then they were trying it on with sissy nonsense like that. How can you tell young chaps from an area like that to hit the shuttlecock lightly! Unacceptable! Having to wear white dainty outfits with super-short shorts. Never! No! No! Even the gay kids weren’t gonna do that. Just no way.
My brother Jimmy soon followed me to William of York, but the two youngest ones, Bobby and Martin, went to Tollington Park. By that time, my Mum and Dad had started to fall out with the Catholic Church, so William of York was a no-no. There was no way our younger brothers were going to have to endure that priest shite ever again. My dad was very good on that.
The trouble was that the school he picked for Bobby and Martin was probably the worst hooligan school in London. Tollington Park was ground zero for all the serious Arsenal elements in the area. That’s also the same place that my future manager Rambo didn’t go to, if you know what I mean. Attendance didn’t feature very high in that school.
I’m an Arsenal man all my life, so in many ways, me not going there was a sorry gap in my education. William of York was up the Caledonian Road, but that didn’t mean that you were mixing with the Callie mob. You were stuck in this isolated Catholic nonsense that was very narrow and insular, and trying to blinker your vision. Trying to suppress you as to the way the world really worked. A hardcore school like Tollington Park was absolutely about, ‘This is it, mate, no one likes ya, and we don’t care’. ‘Pretty Vacant’ to my mind would be the anthem to Tollington Park. It wasn’t a school at all.
Just as I was starting to find my feet at William of York, something terrible happened. My paternal grandfather, the Owl Fella, died and I had to identify the body. By now, he had fourteen children and was living with a prostitute. Can you imagine that, how my dad felt about representing that to me?
My aunt, who had fourteen kids of her own, came over from Galway, but my dad had to go to work, so I was left to go along with her to the morgue. They’d had to patch up his skull quite a bit, because he’d fallen backwards and split his head open while shagging a prostitute on a doorstep – that’s how he died. When they pulled out the body on the slab, he’d died with a stiffy. And it weren’t the leaning tower of ‘Pissy’!
So I’m there with this auntie – Auntie Lol – and she started screaming and crying, yet that was her father. Her hysterical behaviour really freaked me out – how adults sometimes can put so much pain on you when they should be taking responsibility at that particular point. ‘Argh, urgh, I can’t look at it! It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen!’ That’s what she said. And they went, ‘Yes, but we need someone to recognize the body.’ So, up I had to go. He looked, again, a bit like Frankenstein’s monster, with the stitch marks across the front of the skull, but I recognized him all right.
As young as I was, I realized he must’ve been a dirtier bugger than I ever knew because, for my father’s sister to behave that way, when they pulled the body out nude with a big fucking hard-on . . . Christ, I’m not that well-endowed – it really was big. God almighty, that’s your own father. What on earth’s gone on in this family?
This is County Galway, my father’s family. My mother’s family had different ways of telling me they died – by flashing through the corridor. For some odd reason, my mum and dad loved each other, they truly did, and had us as offspring, but both sides of their family backgrounds are incredibly crazy. It doesn’t make sense. The coldness of my mother’s family, the insane fear of whatever, and endless troops of disaster marching in from the other side.
That night at the flat in Six Acres, Auntie Lol was in the bedroom next door – Mum and Dad gave her a bedroom to herself, so that meant me, Bobby, Martin and Jimmy had to share beds. And we heard her screaming all night long – really terrified screams – and I’d have to go in because that’s what we were told to do by my dad, to calm her down. It was too much to listen to her screaming – ‘He’s comin’ back to haunt me!’
Something had happened, because you can’t be crying about your father in that way. Something evil must’ve gone on. And that’s a terrible truth and reality to know about your own family, just as I was getting over my problems.
My whole world was school and our little slice of London. What else did we know? The furthest I’d travelled was the farm in Carrigrohane, and those periods following Dad’s work in Hastings and Eastbourne. That was the extent of my travels, up until the Sex Pistols. There was a school field trip to Guernsey, and a Geography trip to Guildford. Guildford was an awful long way from London in them days – a murderously boring coach journey down very windy little country lanes, and it would take for ever. It was a week in these awful huts on Box Hill – which I referenced years later in PiL’s ‘Flowers Of Romance’ – and you’d have to deal with the PE teacher threatening to slipper you unless you took a communal shower. ‘Ah, thank you, I love the slipper!’
It was all about us kids looking for ways to get into pubs. That’s what we did. It’s a way of growing up, and you feel like you’ve achieved something – something approaching manhood – once you stretch into those no-go areas.
During William of York, Dad got a job driving cranes on the oil rigs off the coast of Norfolk. It was winter, and we stayed in a holiday camp in Bacton-on-Sea – no one there, just us. That wasn’t for too long, but while I was there, I picked up a bit of an ‘ooh-aaarr’ in my voice. When we came back to Finsbury Park, that didn’t do me no favours at all. ‘You what?!’
I used to run around in a Norwich bobble hat, without the bobble. My only affinity was I liked the colours – yellow and green. I also had another one-colour bobble hat, also without the bobble. What with the way I dressed and looked, which was always a bit different from the norm, it seemed to rub people up the wrong way at the back of the North Bank – the home terrace at Arsenal’s old ground, Highbury.
I was wearing that hat one of the first times I ran into John Stevens. Rambo, as we know him, was a mate of Jimmy’s from around the flats. He changed the face of football violence for ever, with his commitment and organization. You’d never keep up with John! He’d be quicker than a ferret into a ‘row’ – one third the size of whatever was challenging Arsenal, and always coming out of it with a big smile on his face. An eejit like me, I was slightly taller – I’d be the first to be punched in the gob. And always having difficult teeth – oooh, I must’ve broken so many knuckles just on my buck teeth.
I don’t get into the psycho aspect of the violence because I’m not like that. I don’t hold grudges too long and my anger is a temporary thing until an issue is resolved. It’s just plain and simple. Don’t shout up Tottenham or Chelsea or anything at all in the back of the North Bank. Don’t. And then once we chase you out, everything’s happy! I’m not one for pursuing the issue. But I am one for going to their grounds and yelling Arsenal
as loud as you like. That’s a kind of hypocrisy, but that’s the wonderful arena that football creates.
The sense of unity was astounding. Every ground had that depth, and you knew it. You knew that this was from the bottom to the top of the terracing. It was not there for the taking, it was there for the full-on argument. Glorious, really. I loved History in school – the Roman invasion of Britain was my favourite subject when I was younger, and the Saxons, the Vikings – I always wanted to imagine myself in one of those scenarios. Well, a football terrace was exactly that. And it was done in that exact same way. Flanking mattered a lot. I also had this book from the library about the Battle of Agincourt – the tactics were all-important, and Rambo’s very tactical, even as such a young kid. Our part of Arsenal’s mob was so young, up against these enormous fucks in their thirties and forties, but we wouldn’t run.
Anyway, that night, Tottenham had a home match. There was a rumour that their mob may be coming down. Forty of us met in the courtyard of the Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park. I was there in my one-colour bobble hat. Rambo had set an ambush for them, and any of their mob returning from the match. He just took one look and went to my brother Jimmy, ‘Oh no, he’s no good, send him home!’ Jimmy went, ‘No, that’s my older brother, he’s harder than me!’ I was working on the building site at the time, so looks could be deceiving. This is, what, fifteen, sixteen. I was utterly fucking fearless. Gone were the days of when I was younger and couldn’t really handle a fight at all. But for somebody like John to come up, and he’d back you up – that’s like, wow, you don’t be turning that one down. Not at all, not ever, as I only fully realized many years later.
At school, I suppose I started to become a bit of a handful in class. Not habitually, but instinctively. If I’m puzzled, I want to know the answer. And if they resent explaining to you what it is they’re babbling on about, then fuck ’em, and then of course you will agitate them. You can’t expect people like me just to sit there and be nullified. I knew in my own heart and soul that I was there to learn, that’s what school was supposed to give me – an education. When that’s being denied by rubbish teachers, I’m furious. Not violent, but I always had the right words.
