by Lydon, John
To get by, me and Sid had to sell amphetamine sulphate. We had to do a bit of small-time dealing, one way or another. Money was hard, times were tight.
I’m not the druggy sort, but I like to stay awake – the alertness that certain chemicals can give. In them early years, your late teens, you’re well up for it. You don’t want to miss anything that’s happening anywhere at any time. Indeed, you want to be involved with everything all the time. Then when there’s nothing going on, and just indolence all round – grrrr! In those early days, whenever I’d get these attacks of colds and flus and any kind of allergies, and they were coming on me big, the amphetamines that were around at that time would blow them right out of my system. It seems to be very useful that way.
It’s not any self-aggrandizement going on in your skull, not with proper amphetamine. It just makes you more alert. I don’t think there’s a high comes off it at all, it’s just you’re able to activate yourself. I treat it as a key to the box. Or I used to.
My trouble was, you know how they say a salesman should never sample his own wares? Here’s one that did, so I wasn’t very good at selling anything. I’d sit by a big bag and feel very glad of myself until it was gone and not think of moving. Speed doesn’t make me get up and run out around the world, it makes me sit down and think and enjoy whatever it is I’m doing. Even if it’s cutting my fingernails. I’m enjoying it. It get me into the state of not being constantly tired, which again is all back to meningitis.
I suppose they’d call it self-medicating nowadays. My normal existence at the time would be one of inactivity – just zero, run down, lack of iron in my blood. Genuinely, my brain couldn’t handle too much going on, and physically everything was just too much to endure. Except, oddly enough, on the building site. That was a good ten-hour day of solid manual labour, and I never found that a problem. But I always found a problem of repairing a window sill, or fixing a toilet. I’ve learned later that you can turn those things into great adventures. But not then; I used drugs a bit differently. It wasn’t so much recreational as a necessary thing to do, to give myself any get-up-and-go. I was very prone to depressions, after meningitis, right up through my twenties.
Amphetamines had been around on the streets for years. It was a throwback to the mods. It definitely kept you up all night and you could go to many clubs and all of those things. In them early days what I loved about it – I didn’t like the soporific downside of alcohol and the speed would definitely take that away, so you could drink as much as you liked, and somehow not be drunk. I really love the flavour of beer. I’m not a cocktails person – unless you count beer and speed as a cocktail. We bad rock ‘n’ rollers are all at it! But then, joy of joys, so are all the football hooligans, or they were then, so we had common ground.
So that was the backdrop for the Hampstead squat. For a while there, Mad Jane moved in with us. That crazy cow! She was like one of those voluptuous women from a 1940s film noir. Her hair was wavy and long on one side, and she’d wear those dresses from that period. Very strange girl. Movie starlet from the ’40s kind of imagery, lots of that ‘come up and see me sometime’, kind of Julie London-y – a very hard image to pull off in the shittiness of London Town at the time, so I admired her bravery. I don’t suppose we got on very well, but well enough. And from time to time, future PiL guitarist Keith Levene would come round. There may have been a chemical thing going on with him, but no worse than anyone else.
Drugs were everywhere, probably because of the mods. The mods were very into uppers, and that passed on. The skinhead thing was a bit purist, but not by Arsenal way.
I’m not talking heroin here; that was a great unknown to most of us – it was just something the Grateful Dead did, and by God, didn’t they sound it! The dullest band I’ve ever known. What a waste of four and a half hours! I saw them once at Alexandra Palace when I was young. No! No! I couldn’t relate to the crowd that would be digging that kind of stuff. To me, it was life-threatening. Comatose.
These were very difficult times, in 1973 and ’74. Everything was flared. Please: how to avoid flares! We had no relationship to hippies, they just seemed to be spoilt rich kids. That’s probably what drew me into the second-hand demob suits and the Paddy look. We were coming out of the ’60s, and that for me was more in keeping with the skinhead approach to clothing than the hippie lot, so I headed straight into that one.
From an early age, I’d been hanging out on Sundays at the Roundhouse. John Gray lived in Kentish Town, and the Roundhouse is not far away in Chalk Farm, so what I’d do is, get the bus up to Kentish Town, pick him up, we’d walk to Chalk Farm and then we’d spend all day, way into the late hours, watching about twelve or fifteen bands. As I got a bit older, I’d probably been out since Friday night, so what a perfect way to end the Sunday.
It was astounding, the diversity of music. I’d see Roxy Music, Judas Priest, Queen (when they were very young), T. Rex, the Seeds, Mott the Hoople – the variety was fantastic, and there was no snobbery about who was top of the bill or whatever. It was just whoever turned up at that specific time – they’d put their equipment on the stage, and off they’d go. The audience was mostly hippie, lots of floral prints and girls dancing barefoot, and bongo players, the scent of joss sticks – all of that. I kind of paid no attention to that, I only liked what was happening on the stage, and I just soaked it all up.
Punk history later dictated that music was shit all through the mid-’70s. Not true, if you knew where to find it. It was the making of me. I could quite happily spend a whole weekend – alert! – going around to all these late-nighters around town. The Roundhouse scene was full of insane bands. People like the Pink Fairies were full-on, hard, heavy, loud, aggressive – absolutely the opposite of the hippie vibe. There they were with their long hair, but throwing it back at you in such a noisy destructive way. Fantastic!
Likewise, the Edgar Broughton Band had the longest, filthiest beards and hair, and dressed like bikers and sang songs called ‘Gone Blue’, whose classic line was, ‘I’m all undone by the things she said, but I love that little hole in the back of her head.’ Hah! Wow! That topic for that time and that age was like – ‘Oh, they’re going somewhere here.’ That’s not your hippie message at all, is it? And their album cover was sensationally hilarious – racks of dead cows hanging on hooks. I don’t suppose the music would bear up too much today, but that isn’t the be-all-and-end-all.
Black Sabbath were the same – a very different approach to music, and different drugs, more on the up-all-night variety. Ooooh, yeah, you were completely aware what this lot were prepared to do with themselves. When you listened to bands like that and the Deviants, you knew the chains were off. Rules are for fools – that’s what you were gathering from them. At least I was. You know – ‘Oooh, don’t do this, it’s bad for you!’ ‘Bollocks! Go forth, create chaos, and begin in your own head!’ What’s wrong with being off yer nut every now and then, you know? It’s a healthy thing. But these bands, it was a very youthful contingent – it was all about us young bloods who were made to feel unwanted by the sit-down mob. I went to concerts to dance. I shoved as much down me neck and other areas as I could possibly get my hands on, and got up on the good foot.
One of the people I really liked a lot was the Crazy World of Arthur Brown. He’d walk around in the crowd, and I went up and said hello, and it was great. His band was billed to support Alice Cooper at the Finsbury Astoria, before it became the Rainbow, and for some reason Alice Cooper cancelled that concert. I’d bought tickets for John Gray, Dave Crowe and a few others, but I was such a fanatic of both bands, I kept the tickets, I never went back and cashed them in. In fact, I’ve still got them.
I even joined the Alice Cooper fan club and had a box of chicken feathers sent to me, and this silly letter of information. The whole thing just struck me as really funny. There were people that really would take this a bit too seriously.
So I told Arthur, ‘I’ve still got the tickets from that gig tha
t was cancelled,’ and he went, ‘It weren’t me!’ So, that’s how our conversation started. I was just some awkward kid that was giving teachers a bad time, and he was good enough to talk to me as an equal. I won’t hear a bad word said about him, because there’s all too few of those kinds of people on this earth. Anyone who talks to me openly is fine by me. It’s the ones that leer down or flare their nostrils that drive me crazy. But that man was bonkers, seriously out there. Lunatics make good records, oddly enough, and they make good paintings too, and write good novels. They just can’t seem to fit into the shitstem.
Another great band I saw at the Roundhouse was Can. They used this equipment that reached bass tones so low you wouldn’t hear them – you’d feel them. Well, so did the stage, which vibrated and collapsed. All the scaffolding crumbled. Afterwards everyone waited hour after hour for it to be rebuilt, and finally at the end of it all – the most amazing drumming I’ve ever seen! Thank you, Jaki Liebezeit! Just the sound and the audacity of it, and where it was coming from. It was way beyond the trippy-hippie bongo crowd in the audience. This was coming with a far harder message, and it wasn’t the dull stupidity of love and peace.
Also from Germany, Faust earned my love by selling their album, The Faust Tapes, for 50p – a bargain, even in 1973. I actually saw them at the Rainbow in Finsbury Park, and they just basically made their noise, which was made up of very interesting, hypnotic, trancey electronic-box-produced noises, while they were wrapped around a pile of old TVs in the middle of a huge, empty stage. I must admit, at the time I was really angry because I didn’t have a TV. ‘What are they doing with all those TVs – I could definitely use one of them!’ Then they kicked them to pieces, and rewired them. It was an appropriate backdrop for what they were doing musically, but at the same time – forever the practicalist, me! – I tried so hard to get backstage to nick one.
Everything and anything, I was into it. I went to free festivals too. I even went to one of the first Glastonburys. I think Audience played, maybe Atomic Rooster, and possibly even Melanie. I really don’t know. It was non-stop alcoholic faze, perpetrated by wonderful amphetamines. It was a texture of gloriousness.
I don’t think bands were even introduced. It just seemed to be that one lot would mélange into another. There wasn’t a great turnover of equipment, road crew or DJ activity going on. It just seemed to be who turned up, turned up, and then things swifted over, and before you knew it, it was a completely different band. It was quite wonderful for that.
And in the middle of that kind of affair, I’d also be off to sit cross-legged listening to Nico waffle on about the ‘janitor of lunacy’. Fantastic, completely Queen Vampire! It was John Gray who said, ‘Oh, we must go see her!’ Everybody knew she was a smackhead, like that’d be an enjoyable concert experience, but it was. It was the creepiest thing, her and her harmonium for an hour and a half, groaning away slightly out of tune, which made it even better, because you could feel the angst in her. The tragedy in the voice was just overwhelmingly powerful for me. I’ve learned a lot from them very early years of going to concerts, that it really isn’t about perfect pitch, it’s about the emotion.
I’m not one to sit cross-legged for more than three minutes, and I’m quite happy to dance to ‘Janitor Of Lunacy’, I don’t care who’s looking. I loved dancing. Loved it, loved it, loved it. There I was – me long hair, Hawkwind embroidered on the back of my jacket, and Teddy boy shoes, because I found them the most comfortable to dance in. I wouldn’t wear flares. Any gig, anywhere, any time – get up and dance! But by God, the best guy for that in them days was Jesus.
Jesus was a guy who hung out with the two girls who used to dance for Hawkwind. Sasha and Stacia were their names, I think. He’d strip naked, he had the smallest willy in the world, and he didn’t give a toss who looked. I loved him for that. I thought, ‘He doesn’t care, and look, he’s completely happy. He’s got bongos which he doesn’t know how to play, no sense of rhythm – none! – but a total sense of joy!’ He certainly wasn’t what my mum and dad had in mind as Jesus.
But his message was good and, years later, when punk started and the Pistols were gigging – I think it was at the Marquee, when we were supporting Eddie and the Hot Rods – he was there! He looked completely different, he had a suit on, but he still had the same ludicrous hairdo, which was a very deep fringe and a long mullet at the back, and deathly blond, a natural blond.
It was very hard to bring Wobble into these kinds of situations. He was hateful of the Roundhouse, straight away. ‘I hate these people!’ He’d think everybody at the Roundhouse was a love-’n’-peace fool, but that’s his lack of insight. What he didn’t realize was the building was full of really oddball characters and that he was one of those oddball characters by the fact that he was there – although it was just the once. That’s all it took, I knew not to bring him out any more. Wobble’s angle would’ve been soul clubs – that would be his thing.
Around that time, though, I’d been going out to Ilford in Essex to soul nights at a club called the Lacy Lady. I wouldn’t be alone; there’d be a mob of us – the Johns. Sid would be there, John Gray, a couple of others. Proper mob-handed, in fact.
The other clientele out there was very interesting. There was the semi-gangster-ish local toughies. They’d look at you threateningly, there’d be no two ways about that. But we were a pretty mad bunch ourselves. That’s where pogoing really came from. That’s how we used to dance, jumping up and down. We didn’t know the moves, so we invented our own, and good times were had by all. As a result, you weren’t then perceived as a threat, because you were up to your own universe and enjoying yourself in your own way and not there to nick the birds – although, girls love ‘different’. Did they want to mother us? No, but that’s good too! I was young for the age I was, there was never a chance of ‘Come back to my place.’ I tried hard, though. Anyway, you couldn’t do anything; you couldn’t go off on your own, because you had the responsibility of the collective.
What they’d play there was a good root course in where soul music in America was going. It was beginning to split into different angles, after Tamla Motown. There were more interesting and exciting varieties coming out, it wasn’t all so orchestrated out of Detroit. They played kind of West Coast funk which was really interesting, a lot of Philly and Chicago stuff that later turned into all kinds of different things.
It was early disco, really, and I loved all that – ‘Hi-jack your love, hi-jack your love!’ etc. The DJs out there were great. Some of them were BBC DJs, but they played the stuff they liked, outside of their regular broadcasting playlist, like the hardcore stuff. Loved it. And in them days you could go up and ask, ‘What’s that record?’ and they’d tell you. That’s a lesson modern DJs could well learn from. I’d be ferreting out future purchases, that’s what Ilford was all about – ooh, must get that, and then I would.
Disco sucks? You never heard that from me. Whoever wrote the punk manifesto wasn’t listening to the actual punks – them what started all this. No one was paying any attention, it was all negative two-steps-backwards Dumbsville. A great pity. I still have a deep love of The Fatback Band. They had a great way of catchy little dance-y singles about them. Love ’em. Kool & the Gang, Love ’em. What more can I say?
The only drawback about going there was, there was no way home after, and the only person we knew out that way was called Tony Colletti and he wouldn’t let us stay at his house. Three or four times of that, freezing to death until four in the morning when the next train came, and the fun was gone from it. We were all under car-driving age, and probably under the influence anyway, and we definitely didn’t have money for a minicab back. So we had to go elsewhere for our fix of that kind of music.
If you ever went into Soho in the middle of London Town, the gay clubs were the only ones that would welcome your different imagery, and, again, you wouldn’t be pestered by the boot boys and the yobs. You didn’t have to deal with that whole angle of life, of, ‘Who
are you? Arsenal or West Ham?’ Again, there were lots of girls dressed really well, with different clued-up ideas of fashion. So, it was thrilling to watch and be in amongst, and frankly, there was a better class of drugs.
The music was usually dance-orientated. There was always exciting things coming from odd little bands from up north, and I don’t mean Wigan Casino, because that didn’t entirely sum up the northern scene at all. There’d be many different angles on things, remixes of Bowie tracks, whatever. Just great fun. Not too much orientated towards sensationally eye-opening music, it was more like a social gathering where you’d have a bloody good laugh, and if you got out of your nut you wouldn’t be beaten to a pulp for it. People were genuinely helpful. Very open and friendly, no judgement going on.
The macho stance that progressive rock had adopted for itself was repulsive to me. I loved Status Quo, I always will, but the audience were just the same bunch of long-haired, waving-it-in-the-breeze dullards. They were just identikit, from the front row all the way up to the back. I had no time for that. I didn’t want to join an army, and I felt that none of these fools were really listening to what was going on at all. Whatever they were masquerading as, was fuck all to do with the band.
It was just hairy students in RAF coats, that was the look – kind of a Led Zeppelin cast-off thing. Those Great Coats – very big thick blanket-y things with silver buttons – were everywhere, thanks to Army Surplus stores. Now, I don’t mind dressing up, I go for a bit of this one day, and a bit of that the next. But as a lifestyle thing? No, never.
It was just really exciting to find like minds who dressed differently. For instance, John Gray and I used to go out to Canvey Island to see Dr Feelgood. Again, Wilko Johnson – what a guitarist! Man alive, that bloke thrilled me to death. Like, how on earth are you doing this? So fantastic. And the lead singer, Lee Brilleaux – oh my God, the seediest, tackiest, harmonica-playing sleazeball, stains all over the white dinner jacket. He looked like a vagrant trying to look classy, a great image. The whole thing about them, they were outside of the agenda, and they were really kind of grubby.
