by Lydon, John
It was punishing and frustrating with subjects like History, which I loved. I’d have to ring up people like John Gray and ask them, ‘What was the lesson today about?’ They got bored explaining to me, so then I’d go down to the library and research it myself. But slowly, left to your own devices, you lose interest. The perks are gone, the novelty wears off, and it becomes just cumbersome to do that.
I was finally chucked out of William of York mid-year, mid-season. I turned up late – tardiness was their excuse, and not wearing a correct uniform, and my hair was too long. They thought I was a Hell’s Angel, because I used to wear my dad’s leather coat. I couldn’t afford the bus pass, and so I cycled to school, and they just put all the wrong things together.
It was Prentiss, the English teacher, who got me expelled – Piss-Stains Prentiss. These days I go along with the notion of ‘Let the dead rest in peace’, but in them days I hated that fucker. I despised him, yet ironically he was a brilliant teacher; it was absolutely thrilling the way he explained Shakespeare, I was fascinated. So complicated and in-depth, right down to single-word analysis, and the poetic beat of a single sentence, and the structures – absolutely thrilling! The technicalities of the English language. A really masterfully wonderful teacher, but a complete hateful git.
Because I was still under age for leaving school, and I wanted to finish my ‘O’-levels, I had to go to a College of Further Education in Hackney. It was like an approved day school for misfits – when school decided they couldn’t cope with you, that was more or less the local state-run detention centre. We were all supposedly vagabonds and reprehensibles. I’d take the bus, and then it was a ten-minute walk.
Let’s face it, Hackney was never a great place. Let’s just say it was a different class of Arsenal fan.
And that’s where I met Sid.
ROOTS AND CULTURE
Music was always played in the Lydon home; it was a constant thing. Dad was particularly into it – he used to play accordion when he was very young. At twelve and thirteen, back in Ireland, he was in Irish show bands, all the ‘diddly-doodly-doo’ stuff, but he would never teach me any of it – which I thought was really odd of him. Maybe, as with everything else in life, he wanted me to find my own way with it. He still had an accordion, but he buried it at the bottom of a cupboard, and he didn’t want to talk about it or have anything to do with it. It was so strange, this mysterious atmosphere he created around it. He didn’t want to pass on any knowledge about music at all.
But Mum and Dad had an enormous record collection. There was music playing all the time, especially at the weekend. They had very varied tastes, and varied friends. Everyone would bring stuff around to listen to, so endless records would come in the house, which I loved. ‘A Boy Named Sue’ by Johnny Cash was the kind of record my mum and dad would like to hear, to challenge their friends and see what their reaction would be. Mum also liked traditional ballads and folk, but she also loved the Kinks, the Beatles, big singers like Petula Clark and Shirley Bassey, and lots of dance music.
I vividly remember my mum and dad dancing to ‘Welcome To My World’ by Jim Reeves on the Dansette in the front room – her with her bouffant and pink Crimplene outfit, and my dad in his suit and tie. It was a very romantic song, but also kind of political, that the world could be a better place – just hopeful, positive. A wonderful song.
That was where I learned my DJ skills, because I’d see that as my job when I was young, to put the records on. And serve the drinks – in them situations the DJ had to run the bar, and the younger the better, because you’d serve up big measures to make your elders happy. I loved putting on records. Now that was the kind of machinery I understood, because I was getting results – ‘a-ha, pleasant sound at loud volume!’ Great, what a pay-off! And so I got into buying records myself, and went from there on.
Oddly, though, when I was in hospital, which was for nearly a year, I never missed it at all, probably because I didn’t remember it, but there was no music, no radio playing in the hospital ward or anything like that. In fact, I don’t even think there was a television.
I was soon guzzling up all the popular culture that came my way. I remember us always having a telly, a small Rediffusion, maybe. It was something that looked English and was, so it didn’t work too well – grainy, black-and-white, and small. My dad was never too interested in it, nor my mum – for them it was just something to stare at when you’re exhausted at the end of the day.
After World War Two, class was redefined completely in the UK. The landed gentry really were an all-but-dead dinosaur, so things had to be readjusted. So you had the BBC – Tory, upper/middle class; and ITV – Labour, working class. The lines were drawn that clearly. We’d never watch anything on the BBC at all apart from the football, because it was considered posh people doing rubbish. I loved the plays, I grew up with them, but the posh accents drove me nuts.
I hated Sundays bitterly because the TV was always so bad. The religious programmes in the early morning. We loved The Big Match in the afternoon, but after that you knew it was more hymns and Stars on Sunday and all them horrible Sunday Night at the Palladium things, which were just grim to watch. I hated them, hated everybody on them – even the comedians; you got the idea that they were watered down. Even at a very early age you knew the humour was just babyish. You’d end up watching Upstairs Downstairs – I used to love the mother in the strangled neck clothing – simply because there was fuck all else on.
It’s worth reminding people: how many channels did we have? Three, at that point. And what would there be on for kids? Rubbish like Thunderbirds and Supercar – urgh! – and Fireball XL5. That’s my youth. I hated all of them. It was just daft puppetry. You could see the strings! You could maybe laugh at that, but really I had no attention span for it at all. There was Doctor Who, which involved humans, but only because of the Daleks would I have any interest. Most of it was those stupid ant people, and you could see the big fat legs and you knew it was a man in a suit. It was a bloke in high waders with an ant job on top. Daft!
What I loved was the comedies – particularly Steptoe and Son, because there they were, they were dealing with garbage and trash, but the writing was a jewel, and the characters were so real to working-class people. The portrayal of the characters was not cartoonish, and the dialogue was overwhelmingly educational. The understanding and the comprehensive balance and delicacies of being British were all in there.
Poor old ’Arold trying to be sophisticated was a scream. I could immediately empathize with the pain he was going through, getting it wrong, but I couldn’t empathize with the fact that he never seemed to learn – his presumptuousness in wanting to go ‘poash’ and every single time completely misunderstanding posh people. Whatever environment he was trying to sleaze his way into with his sycophantic ‘oh yaah!’, those alleged posh people came over as decent folk who couldn’t tolerate him and thought he was the snob. He was always being reprimanded for his social climbing because he was the most judgemental one of the lot. This is all what I gleaned from it as a very young kid.
I loved Norman Wisdom films too – a heart of gold, and always misunderstood – but music very quickly became my thing. For me, exploring it alone was the best way. I’d obviously take hints from Mum and Dad, but their taste wasn’t always mine. At all. I could never understand the Beatles for some reason, and they loved them. It was all that ‘she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah’ stuff. Urgh! I hated their hairdo, hated everything about them.
So, when I’d got a bit of money together from different odd jobs, I’d go off to different record stores and deal with the challenge of finding out what’s what. My first purchases were all bad choices based on the colours of the covers, but one thing led to another. I loved the shape of records, I loved the feel of them, I loved the power of what came out of the speakers from them. It was astoundingly rewarding to me, to do that. All kinds of noises thrilled me.
When I was ten or eleven, it was 1966 or ’67, and
albums were becoming more important, but they were outside my price zone. So I’d always have a single off it. Some of them stores would actually let you hear the album, and that was always fascinating. You had to find very select stores with people who really did love music and would share it with you, and could see that you were an up-and-coming musaholic.
For all the ‘Swinging ’60s’ nonsense, Britain was still stuck in the Max Bygraves era. We were still being force-fed all that showbiz syrup. Like always, what they play on popular radio isn’t necessarily popular – it’s what you’re told is popular. It’s what you’re denied access to that’s really the most intriguing stuff.
Until punk started, there really wasn’t anywhere to listen to new and different types of music. It’s been belaboured that John Peel or the pirate radio stations were doing that, but they weren’t really. It was still music that was above and beyond the average working-class listener. No one around my area gave tuppence about Sergeant Pepper’s. That was when the Beatles were rich kids having fun. It was still highly orchestrated and highly organized, and a lot of money went into promoting it.
The Beatles – yeah, a couple of good records there, but my mum and dad had driven me crazy with their early stuff, so by the time they’d turned into Gungadin and his Bongos, there wasn’t much there for me. The people surrounding them were pretentious, with flowers painted on their faces and rose-tinted oversized sunglasses. The whole thing was too silly for words. I remember watching them on Top of the Pops doing ‘All You Need Is Love’, all that ‘la la la la-laaaa’ – oh, fuck off! No, I need a hell of a lot of other things as well. Don’t make me feel selfish for acknowledging a truth at a very early age.
My impression of them always was: cold as ice, not made for sharing. I preferred listening to Slade, which was a bonkers stoopid-looking band. Noddy Holder with that perm – come on, that’s ridiculous, and what a great guitarist!
From about thirteen, circa 1969, I started getting really heavily into record-buying, and that was my albums period. I was listening to everything and anything, not just pop and rock. I loved Rachmaninov, anything that had a Rimsky-Korsakov banging-of-the-piano was way up my street. That heavy, heavy stuff. I think it was called Romeo & Juliet, but there was a part in it that just sounded like tanks coming over a hill to me – loved it!
As an aside, the school orchestra always thrilled me, because it was just dreadful, but glorious. I’d always listen at the side, banging a triangle, while forty of us made this insane row. I’d listen inside of the ringing, and pick out tunes, all absolutely discordant. There’d be the haters in there bashing away, and the arseholes who were trying to do it properly – the Matlocks. And then there’d be the merrymakers, such as I.
It drove our music teacher mad. I can’t remember his name. He was so effeminate and ridiculous, and he loved the Bee Gees. He had these silly plastic xylophone things, with just one metal clip and a tiny hammer, and asked us to be twottering away to Bee Gees records. It was great to hear the Bee Gees in school, but they were hardly to my mind the voice of rebellion. At the same time, that music teacher, he had to endure the hate and the wrath of the Catholic hierarchy at William of York, because they viewed the Bee Gees as a negative influence on the youth. There were no youth running around trying to look like the Bee Gees, I can tell you that.
At the same time, we had everything around us in Finsbury Park, which is what ‘Lollipop Opera’ on the This Is PiL album is all about. Reggae was always around – you couldn’t miss it because of the Caribbean community living there. Oooooh, the dirtiness of some of them early ska records. One I remember in particular was ‘Dr Kitch’ – ‘I cannot stand the sight of your injection/I put it in!/She pull it out! I push it in . . .’
From a very early age I’d go to my favourite store, the one under the bridge in Finsbury Park, run by a little old lady. People from outside the area used to come just for that store. I don’t know how, but she had the best reggae in the world, all imported directly from Jamaica. The shop was full of Jamaicans, and heavy metal heads. There was a lot of Jimi Hendrix in the racks, a lot of hardcore heavy metal, which it wasn’t called that at the time. It was called progressive. So there would be the brilliant combination of those two elements that felt right at home with each other to me.
All of these records used to intermingle; I never made any cultural decisions about them, they all just seemed to fit together well, and blend well. So I’d like bits and pieces of anything, and I’d quite happily mix reggae or classical up with Alice Cooper and Hawkwind. I realized that it all exists inside the head, it’s another universe entirely. It’s as real as anything else; it’s the gift that we humans have for each other, that extra special form of communication that goes beyond words and sounds. It’s a dreamscape, I suppose, and out of dreams great things do come.
I loved Status Quo, for instance. I loved the way that they found something inside a simple format, to say so much. Their methodology is simplicity, and perfection inside that simplicity. I’m so empathic with what they do, it just sounds like jolly good push-and-shove. Very, very skillful to me – superb, and beat perfect. Fantastic rock. Wonderful, brilliant, beautiful stuff.
I also latched onto Captain Beefheart in a big way. I had no idea what he was about, but I knew I liked it. Captain Beefheart was a comedy act, slightly. He never took pause when he was going into deep comedy or parody. He was a bit like a Tommy Cooper of music at that time. It was wonderful what he did – taking deep Delta blues and all those Southern things, and turning it upside down, and making really, really good tunes, out of tuneless cacophony.
He wasn’t liked by many serious blues musicians at all, precisely because of his chaotic handle on it. They would take themselves rather too serious, and were too wrapped up in themselves as historians, shall we say. Which is missing the point and purpose of music, which is to entertain, enthral and educate. But not dictate. Authenticity? Oh, stop it! That’s the devil in music. The people who were preaching authenticity in blues were the likes of Eric Clapton – now, hang on! Apart from coming from the wrong country – there’s a few other things wrong there! He’s imitating something, then preaching the rights and wrongs of it. He misunderstands that music is written by people, for people. I understand that purity is a very fine thing, but some of us sometimes – we like impure also. Y’know, I like to mix my drinks!
‘Progressive rock’ was an unfortunate title for all the music that came at the turn of the ’70s, because most of the bands under that banner really weren’t very progressive at all; they all seemed to be following each other, and there was too much Beatles influence in so many things. I was never one for Yes. I loved the covers and the artwork, but that ridiculous dribble that they released – there’s not much in there for me. But I took the Roger Dean trail so seriously. I bought albums by bands like Paladin – anything that he had artwork on. In many ways, that opened my mind to records that I wouldn’t normally have listened to. There are many ways to get to the music, and artwork is one of them for me.
I used to love the Vertigo label, when it had the spinning spiral, that was just great, and it was always on the B-side, so I’d always play the B-side just to watch that revolve on the turntable. It was great, it was quite trippy, on their 45s, on the singles. I’ve been prone to epileptic fits, after meningitis, so any kind of movement like that gets a bit trippy in my head. Watching that symbol circulate, that ever-ever-ever-ongoing tunnel, and trying to get the fucking stylus on the groove – wowzers!
By the time I was fifteen, sixteen, glam rock had taken over. T. Rex’s Electric Warrior was a stunning album. Again, I loved the cover – the gold, and the power amp – phwoar, it was the dog’s bollocks! And there he was wisping away over those beautiful underplayed guitar parts – more than a nod and a wink to Bo Diddley, but God, look what he’d done with it!
The productions at that time really, really thrilled me. Pop music in general sounded just great, so slick and groovy, even down to Alvin
fucking Stardust, who I adored, and David Essex’s ‘Rock On’, and Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock And Roll (Part 1 & 2)’. Not much music in them, in a way, but there was something else going on, the atmosphere it would create. It was modernizing rock ‘n’ roll, taking it to a new level, and it wasn’t always gonna be about Yes and bands like that, who were torturing you with their fine-note productions. This lot were, ‘Oh, bollocks to that.’
In making his transition from hippie-dippie folk, Bolan was rather disliked by the cross-legged brigade, but he was instantly adored and loved by girls and young boys at the local disco. They were records that formulated a great deal of sexual activity, which cannot be undermined. Tamla Motown did the same. So we had it from all sources. You must let the youth bond with each other.
Then there was David Bowie singing about ‘man love’ in ‘Moonage Daydream’. That’d be Sid’s song – he loved that, but he wouldn’t explain it. For me, it was all about Mick Ronson’s bloody guitar, which to this day is still lurking around inside my head as the most wonderful sound I ever heard. It was smooth, delicious, tonal . . . Ooooh, such a wonderful fucking thing to get to grips with. It would empower you.
Before him, if you were looking for guitar heroes, of course there was Jimi Hendrix, but nobody could quite work out what it was Jimi Hendrix was doing because – wonderfully so – it was beyond music. But because he came from an American culture, there was still a mystery as to what that Americanism was, so it was very hard to relate to on a street level. Mick Ronson just seemed like a lad, with a bit of glitter and satin pants, but he was playing tones that felt very, very soulful to my culture and my background.
