by Lydon, John
When you went out, you’d spend all weekend out drinking, drugging, whatever, whoring – except we wouldn’t call it that, more like ‘having mutual-benefit relationships’. Growing up, in other words. Just finding out what your body parts really can do. None of this was a bad thing, and in the back of that there was Mick Ronson’s guitars. And various other sounds too, but music does that – it kicks everything off in your psyche.
And this wasn’t coming from intellectual bands like Emerson Lake & Palmer or Yes; this was from root-core, bog-standard pop. The absurdities of Marc Bolan, the absolute beauty in simplistic stuff, the alleged three-chord wonder – ‘Oh, that’s not music.’ Well, it bloody well is. There’s something in them three chords that hits everybody; that’s why, to this day, the bottom-line function I see in what I do is – I write pop songs. I can go into elaborate versions of pop songs but the basic root of me is pop music. I love ‘Storm In A Teacup’ by the Fortunes as much as I do – well, a lot more than I do – ‘Smoke On The Water’ by Deep Purple.
Bowie was propagating this man-love imagery, but he was doing it in such a brave way that Arsenal’s mob really liked it. Football thugs liked the audacity of it, and the toughness, and suddenly outrageous gay people became warriors, respected by hooligans. It’s a good lesson to learn about the way things really work – what you’d think would be exact opposites could sometimes meet at the same place. If you stand up for whatever it is you really believe in, if you really stand up, and be accounted for, people will rate you highly.
A lot of glam rock sounded great, but none of them had it in the complicated class that Bowie did. Bolan had great records, but, y’know, he was still a little whimsical elf. Bowie was rather loud about it, and in a completely antisocial way according to the powers that be at that time. And therefore you made great room for him. And a Bowie gig was a great place to meet girls, that’s for sure – absolutely full of them, and all rampant!
The sexual curiosity that glam rock kicked up – Bowie standing up for something, saying, ‘Who are you to tell me what to do?’ – it was a great breeding ground for punk to begin. Punk didn’t just begin overnight; it came from all of these things. It was a gradual gravitation towards the bloody bleedin’ obvious.
2
FIRST INDOOR TOILET
Hackney & Stoke Newington College was full of girls! Problem girls – yummy! There were girls at Eden Grove, but in primary school girls were always bullies. They seemed to be more adult than boys. But William of York was all boys, so Hackney & Stoke Newington seemed great to me.
I was an arsehole, and I’d fall in love with anything that walked past me. Very romantic! An absolute penchant for romance, imagining all kinds of situations, and of course all ruined the second I’d open my mouth.
After meningitis, here came another nightmare and a half around the corner – adolescence! A lot of kids go into that with some form of artillery. All my defences were down and beaten to a pulp, so everything became doubly antagonizing to me. An awful lot to consider, and consider it I did, because I’ll tell you, I had such a fixation on girls’ summer dresses. I would turn into such an oogly voyeur. In them days, I don’t think they called it ‘voyeur’, there were far harsher terms. But I wasn’t aware that I was staring so intently. I’d become completely enveloped in the beauty of that visual – schoolgirls in summer dresses. Fantastic.
At the time, though, I didn’t have the words to deal with those scenarios. I was very backward in social groupings of girls, very, very shy about it. I didn’t know what to say or do, and there was no one you could ask really, because your relationships with girls aren’t a subject open for discussion with other fellas. They just aren’t, unless you join those cliques that go, ‘Yeah, I shagged her, then I shagged her,’ and you know they’re fucking liars.
So I became Chinese there for a while. Johnny Wan-King. I didn’t get up to much else. There were girls around the flats, and you’d do things behind the bicycle sheds, that you look back on now, and you go, ‘Oh, I don’t want to remember it.’ I hope they don’t!
In terms of specific crushes, absolutely any girl would do! I was like a complete parasitic leech – I’d hook on and follow them around, and drive them crazy. There were several – their names I can’t remember now. There was a girl who lived above us, she went to a convent school in Highgate, and she just thrilled me. She’d come over in that uniform – just, wow! You look back at it, and she was just a bespectacled, spotty tomboy of a girl with knobbly knees – but good enough for me! But apparently I’m not good enough for her, so there. Rejection is such a terrible thing, isn’t it? But it’s the making of the man. You need to be told to sod off every now and again. It’s useful.
At Hackney, it became more like actual dating – meet, go to the cinema and things like that. Or sit in a cafe, which was kind of good. It was different and I liked it. But I’ve never been what you’d call Fanny Hunter Number One. I’m just not much good at it. I tend to form deep relationships, me. Flippancy doesn’t really work with me, and it takes a lot for me to open up to anybody, anyway. I have to really trust them.
Everyone at Hackney had a social problem in one way or another – that’s the reason it was there. It wasn’t a violent place. You would think that all manner of bad would come out of that. No, everybody there wanted to achieve, but couldn’t achieve under the duress of the system, or the ‘shitstem’. It was basically just school by any stretch, so I wore my William of York uniform still, because I didn’t want to wear out anything that I liked. But it was a bit of a fashion parade. Sidney certainly used it as a catwalk.
The fella I rechristened Sid Vicious was an amazingly funny character. It would be midwinter, absolutely bitterly freezing – a typical November winter’s day, and you know how to-the-bone ice-cold those winds can be in London – and he’d turn up in a short-sleeved shirt made of cheesecloth, which was the fashion at the time, and no coat, and thin pants – feeling very fashionable but freezing to death, but it didn’t matter because he thought he looked good.
I met him around the college, and just thought he was hilarious. He was always brushing his hair, trying to look like Bowie, and it wasn’t working. What an oddball. Very funny bloke, great company, but dumb as a fucking brush, and absolutely convinced he was gorgeous, and he’d say so. I loved that outwardness. ‘Gurls luv me!’ he always said. When that ended up in the Pistols documentary, The Filth And The Fury, there was a double stroke of joy in it for me because it was something he said right from the very first minute I met him. I know he knew I’d get it. It cracks me up to this day. That’s so typical him, he was so not gorgeous – brilliant, hahaha!
His real name was Simon, but he never liked it, so he was using his other one, John. The story he told me was that his father was a Grenadier Guard. He’d proudly say, ‘Yeah, just like Bob Marley!’ His mother was an Ibiza hippie, and it was an unwanted pregnancy. The father didn’t want to know, so she brought him up. She was a well-educated person, was Sid’s mother, but she didn’t seem to have an occupation. She’d be one for the long flowing hippie dresses, and the black fingernails. But sometimes I’d see her in what I’d call a nurse’s outfit, but in khaki. Very odd. I don’t know what she ever did. She probably bagged nails. Somebody had to put all those nails in boxes.
Ritchie was his father’s surname, Beverley was his mother’s, so how he was registered on his birth certificate I don’t know. He couldn’t get to grips with it, so he was more than pleased when I started calling him Sid, because that was a new name to add to the repertoire. It was after my pet hamster, a stupid thing, but very friendly, hence it was appropriate. At the time Sid was such a downer name, because, with the direct correlation to Sid James, it meant everything awful, a very bad working-class name, so he loved it all the more, he revelled in it. That was Sidney.
He used to live with his mother in Fellows Court, a grim high-rise in Hackney. At first I thought, what a great place to live. NO!! Its elevator never worked, and it
was always up eleven flights of stairs when you went to see him, so I wasn’t too eager about visiting initially.
Sid was very witty, and again that was his survival technique – humour. To pronounce Vogue magazine ‘Vogg-you-ee’ was very funny. I would’ve been none the wiser but for the fact that we had French taught at William of York. In fact I, along with Sid, preferred ‘Vogg-you-ee’. It seemed to sum it up much better. But he used to treat it like it was the Bible. Of course, he never bought a copy. He’d just go to the news-stand and read it. Or view the pictures, actually, no reading involved. He liked his fashions to hilarious degrees, and for Sidney, David Bowie was his fashion icon of all time. If Sidney ever wanted to be anyone, it was Dave.
The Sid speciality was getting his hair to stick up like Bowie’s. He would get two chairs from the living room and put them in front of the oven, open it and lie upside down with his head inside with the gas on, and the heat would make his hair stiff. He once caught fire that way too. Sometimes it would frizzle at the end, but it was a good look. You know, ‘How does Dave Bowie get that happening?’ ‘Well, just like you, Sid!’
It was hilarious to bring Sid into Finsbury Park. There were top Gunners left right and centre, going, ‘What the fuck is that?’ I went, ‘That’s a brave fella, you’ve got to admit. It’s mid-winter and he’s wearing a sleeveless shirt because fashion comes first!’ ‘Yeah, fair point!’
One time I took him to the back of the North Bank at Arsenal. As it turned out, he had good mates there – serious mates; I was surprised. There was one chap that years later became a really serious problem – a real battler. He weren’t no weak heart, Sid, and there he was with his Dave Bowie quiff that he’d spent two days with his head backwards in the oven perfecting – because the idea of hairspray or a hairdryer never occurred to him!
He turned up at my family’s house one day, and he’s in a thin T-shirt, but he’s wearing this Afghan coat that he said his mate had nicked off a Manchester City supporter, and there was still M.C. etched on the back. And he went, ‘Have you got any spray paint?’ You know, ‘Come on, Sid, have Man City really come to town wearing that? Hmmm, I don’t know, I think that stands for Maria Cachuba – a girl’s name or something.’ ‘No, no,’ Sid goes, ‘I won it in a battle!’ He didn’t. It turned out it was stolen off a hippie.
But Sid wasn’t a threat to anybody. His thing was: I look better than Bowie, and I’m a virgin. That was his selling point. At that age, that was incredibly brave. Everyone our age, between fourteen and fifteen, was like, ‘Oh no, I’m not a virgin.’ You know when you’ve got your three weeks’ summer holiday, then you come back, and everyone tells you how many women they shagged. I doubt it’s any different to this day, except maybe the age has dropped to thirteen or fourteen. But that was the basic principle, and Sid ran it the other way: No, I’m a complete virgin. I loved that very much about him.
I may’ve taken the piss out of him for the Bowie thing, but then trying to be like anybody else leaves you open for ribbing. At that time, I had really long hair, and I had Hawkwind emblazoned on the back of the jean jacket that I wore over my school uniform – with no sleeves – very biker-y, I suppose. The very thing I was accused of at William of York, I’d adopted as an image.
Sid did a hilarious drawing of me: it was this tiny little head with one string of long hair, and huge wide shoulders, looking very much like a brick with a pea on top, and one thread dangling. That was his image of me, so how on earth we ever got to hang out with each other is anyone’s guess. Other than, I think, humour, and his preference at the time for being called John when it was really Simon. That was, ‘Oh, another John – after me, John Gray, John Stevens, etc. How many of them do I need!’
There was another John at that school; he had extremely long hair, but he had a tendency to be psycho-violent. He was a brilliant artist and a great footballer, but very antisocial and he ended up in some criminal alcove somewhere. He was adopted and not liked by his adoptive parents, so he was having real problems, mentally and socially. I learned a lot from him, and nothing at all from the art teacher. So, another John – after the war everyone ran out of ideas. ‘Call him John, he probably won’t live long.’ And if they did, they could pick their own. ‘It’s up to you now. Call yourself what you want, just get out of the house!’
Friday nights at Hackney & Stoke Newington would be the college dance nights. I ended up running them, and that would be a brilliant juxtaposition of events – lots of Kool & the Gang-type stuff, and then hardcore reggae, and the occasional Hawkwind thrown in, and it absolutely went down a treat. A great mixture of different belief systems in music coming together because it was a chance to sneak in drinks and be naughty, and watch the girls and see how they were when they were ‘off duty’, when the guard is let down. That’s what social events are all about: it’s being able to drop your guard and be rewarded for it, rewarded with friendliness and openness from others. Music’s a great leveller in that.
We started going out clubbing in Hackney, because there were loads of places to go. I’d go down to Sid’s first, and there’d be trouble – ter-wubble! – no matter where we went, just because of the way we were wearing our clobber. Many a time we’d have to run back to Sid’s place because we’d missed the last bus, and I weren’t going to walk through that particular area at night. I’d always stay at his, because there were no buses running, and it was way too long a walk back to Finsbury Park, and very dangerous at night too. You’d go through Hackney, then Stroud Green, and all manner of things could go wrong.
Sid’s mother, Anne Beverley, never really spoke to me. She never really understood or liked me. I suppose I might have come across as a very silent character. They didn’t know what my potential was, and neither did I at the time. She’d always have a dinner ready for Sid – just Sid, whom she would oddly call Michael, even though we knew him as John, and Sid by nickname. Not even Simon. It was so strange, so dissipated from reality in a weird way. So there I was, the man who’d just saved her son from a kicking, and I wasn’t allowed to eat. I’d have to just sit there and watch Sid scoff it all.
The teachers at Hackney & Stoke Newington were really good, some of them, really inspiring; they’d get my mind to open up to all manner of things. For instance, there was one who made us write an essay on the word ‘encounters’, and what that meant. There was no answer to it, and that was the joy of it. It really annoyed me at the time: ‘I want to know what you mean. What is an encounter? Tell me!’ ‘Nope, find it out for yourself, and put it in an essay.’ Of course, I was nowhere near it. It was an eye-opener, but also infuriating, and I wanted more of that challenge.
From what I remember, I came away with about seven ‘O’-levels. I wanted these things. I’d started those courses when I was young, and I wanted to finish them, as a sense of personal achievement, but also of course out of the foolish belief that by getting all these exams I’d become amazingly clever and everyone would want to employ me. Funnily enough, it didn’t work out that way.
I felt like I’d committed to school, though, and I wanted to better myself. I decided to go on to do ‘A’-levels elsewhere, but I had to pay for my education at that point, so my dad got me jobs on building sites to earn the money to be able to go to Kingsway College. There was no grant for me. I just didn’t qualify. Bad school reports from the previous places didn’t help. No student loan. Nothing. I paid for it with the money I earned working on the building sites, and the money was so good that I could do that, and also live off it rather comfortably while also contributing to Mum and Dad’s rent at Honeyfield. I thought Kingsway was a very good investment for my future. And it paid off, because no matter what I did or didn’t learn there, I learned social skills, how to get on with other people, and how to listen to teachers. When they’re saying interesting things, I’m all ears.
Kingsway was about a ten-minute walk from King’s Cross up Gray’s Inn Road, and when you followed the road right up to the top, you could get into
Soho in the heart of town. But the college itself was bang opposite a council estate – poor people’s housing all round.
The main thing was, I wanted to continue with English Literature, because I loved my reading, and Piss-Stains Prentiss, however much of a bastard, had got me into Shakespeare – so yippee, thanks to him, not all bad. I also wanted to do Technical Drawing, because I love draftsmanship, but it came together with Maths and Physics, so that was a no-no.
Apparently I’d been quite good at Maths before meningitis, but afterwards it was like that capability had been extinguished in my brain. Stuff like Physics is a literal rocket science to me. I find those subjects mind-numbing because I can’t place them in any kind of reality. They all seem to be like complicated suppositions to me. It’s like imagining three-tiered chess, without the chess boards. Where’s the inspiration in logarithms and binary? It was never explained why we’d sit there like dummies, going ‘Zero, zero, one, one’, over and over again. ‘X plus Y equals what?!’ ‘Who cares, if I don’t know what X is!’
So I did three ‘A’-levels: English, Art and History. Initially, I found it extremely difficult to get into the way subjects were debated rather than lectured; previously you were told, ‘This is this, and that’s that, and don’t ask a question.’ But now it would be a lot of preponderance on what your thoughts were, but that was good because it dragged that out of me, and slowly but surely I came out of my shell.
I found that I could actually do what I could do socially now, also in an educational scenario. What a thrill. And to not be shy, to be able to stand up and read out aloud a piece of poetry or a section out of a novel. I learned public speaking, I suppose. That’s not what I went there for, but that’s what I got from it – the emphasis on words, and sentence structures and all of those delicious things. I suppose I was writing things of my own. I’d tease myself with a subject I knew nothing about then I’d go out and find as much information on it as I could and put together a thing on it, a piece, to educate myself, and I liked doing that. At Kingsway I could actually share those ideas with other people because they were doing the same kind of thing, and I’d be able to stand up and proudly present my thesis. It was creative writing, really. I was ready for something, I just didn’t know what.
