by Lydon, John
It may’ve taken a bit of courage to dress differently, because I suppose it’s the way society is. It’s always trying to regiment a thing. Give it a uniform and a label and thereby contain it. Containment doesn’t interest me. I want it all.
At that time I was wearing demob suits. I liked the look on the building sites, the Paddies would come to work, and last month’s Sunday best would now be what they’d be shovelling shit in a ditch in. I liked the look of it. In a world of flappy flares, which I bitterly resented, that was what was instantly available. I liked gas-man suits too, at the time. They came in this electric blue, so I’d wear that a lot. It was a short little jacket, a bit like a Harrington, with matching pants, and it looked great with a pair of red steel-toe-capped boots. Then hair violently cut short, which I decided needed to be taken to the ultimate – from ‘Brussels sprout’ into ‘mad hedgehog’.
Anything that comes from the streets is about ‘short of cash’. There were times when I could afford expensive items and I would, but it would be just the one thing, like an astoundingly amazing pair of shoes, which fitted nothing I had, but I liked them shoes, so Johnny Rotten’s happy-go-lucky mismatch style was developing nicely. I even bought platform boots, but it was the solid wedge ones that had no heels. It was just a huge wooden block. You were seven inches off the ground – very dangerous to be going around London in. But I loved them, because they were in sky blue and electric blue, a mad brogue-y pattern, like the old skinhead shoes, but taken to outer space and back again. Dangerous too, because hard to walk on, definitely a nightmare on the escalator on the tube. Also, if a mob of lads spotted you, these were not runaway material. You’d have to stand and take whatever came, and hope that your wit won the day, which it normally could, but not always.
I don’t know, maybe I was a style pig before my time, but I set to work on those demob suits. I thought, ‘The idea of it’s good, the style is shit. Let’s try and change that.’ To start, you cut off the lapels. ‘Nah, it was better with them on. Maybe I should take the sleeves off an’ all, but – nah, they look better back on there . . . Cue safety pins!’
3
JOHNNY WEARS WHAT HE WANTS
Ever the fashion victim, it was Sid who’d heard about this outrageous clothes store called SEX, and suggested we go and check it out. There were a couple of expeditions walking up and down the King’s Road before we actually found it. Someone could have said, it’s at the farthest end, away from anything useful. Us being young and silly, we didn’t put the dots together. But once we got there . . .
This would’ve been mid-1975, and in those days it was still selling Teddy boy gear. That was the main financial gain – really special Teddy boy outfits, and of course the brothel creepers. Other elements were creeping in there, though, like bits of rubber clothing for the pervs and Cambridge Rapist masks, and quite quickly they phased out the Teddy boy side of it, which I thought they should have kept up.
More than just a shop, it was a social centre for all kinds of strange, fascinating people. I mean, a few months later, I worked there briefly, and selling Reginald Bosanquet a skin-tight rubber top was a genuine thrill. He was a very popular newscaster of the time. You’d get comments like, ‘Do you think it fits?’ and you’d reply, ‘Yes! Perfectly!’ The man was large, like a roly-poly squashed into it, with bubbles coming out at the bottom. It was hilarious, but I liked his bravado, that he had no shame about it. That’s what he wanted, and that’s what he bought.
It was Vivienne Westwood who did all the designs, and Malcolm McLaren was the mouth – he’d come in with the intellectual codswallop to justify it all. Vivienne was basically a born-and-bred shopkeeper, of the Margaret Thatcher kind. The absolute dictator. ‘You can’t buy that, unless that goes with that – I’m not selling it to you unless you buy the whole outfit!’ ‘Er, what?!’ I was well mix-and-match, so I was a big annoyance to her. She never liked me, and I never got on well with her. I kept myself quiet around her, because I knew I could flare into a row with her in three seconds flat – just a ridiculous person but thrillingly creative. All of her obsessions paid off for her. She means what she does; it’s just sometimes it’s too meaningful and she does too much of it. I once said to her: ‘Methinks thou doth project too much!’ Ha – sacked in the morning!
The jukebox had stuff like the Flamin’ Groovies on it – abstract garage-y bands from America, a couple of English mod bands, a lot of rock ‘n’ roll, because of the Teddy boy gear they were peddling. They were very into, ‘Yeah, we firmly believe in street movements – which would be made ever so much better if we’ve dressed them!’
The shop was so brazen and anti-establishment, I loved it. I loved working there for the short time I did. It was only a couple of weeks, but it made Sid very jealous that I managed to get in there and he didn’t. He worked there after me. For me it was like, I can really go to town on myself here. I’d turn up in tight lavender T-shirts, but I’d have the tit-holes cut out. Very repulsive, and I’d be wearing winklepicker shoes, drainpipe jeans, and a big gold belt that I bought in the shop, and gold wrist bracelets, and a dog collar. I liked that look, I thought I looked well ’ard.
It was a look that was challenged every weekend by the various soccer hooligan gangs that would be roaming around Chelsea every Saturday. Nottingham Forest come to mind – they tried to raid the shop, but I stood my ground outside and the door closed behind me. When this fiasco of a brawl ended – it was just a slapfest, really – I went inside and Vivienne went, ‘I told you not to attract that kind of people.’ She basically hung me out to dry, left me to deal with them, then blamed me for that kind of people being there in the first place. ‘Okay, Viv!’ But that’s her.
Malcolm was incredibly witty and well read. He understood the dilemmas of the time, but he was an English teacher who didn’t quite know English. He came from that attitude of presumed knowledge, and that position will never work on me, ever. It just automatically makes me think that guy’s suspect, what he’s saying is doubtful – by the by, a bit like Arsenal’s present manager, Arsène Wenger.
Oddly, his favourite books were those kinds of Jane Eyre novels. He would always go on about them. It turned out that his mother used to read them with him when he was younger, so, hello, that was the bigger reason for it. It’s not that he fancied himself as a young emaciated lady, no, I don’t think it was that. I think he was missing some kind of love from childhood. It was preciously rare for him.
All his friends used to tell the same story about going with him to the Grosvenor Square student riots in 1968: they said, as soon as the trouble started, he vanished. He was all for yelling and screaming the big-mouth slogans beforehand, but as soon as they all led the charge, he was mysteriously absent. That’s what I wrote about in the PiL song ‘Albatross’ a few years later: that lack of commitment, him always running away.
Malcolm had been managing the New York Dolls in their dying days. When they came over to London, it was great fun chatting with them because they’d always give us their little insights into what their idea of Malcolm was, and of course none of it was favourable. If ever there was a man that actually really never did much at all, it would be Malcolm. They’d be saying, ‘He just puts up a few silly ideas but nothing that actually ever really stood a chance of being helpful.’
He’d covered them up in red vinyl, but Russian stylee with hammer-and-sickles all over the place. Just stupid. ‘Ah yes, this’ll terrify the world!’ The only people that got terrified by it was the New York Dolls themselves, because they had to pay for all that nonsense. When I saw the photos in the shop, I loudly proclaimed, ‘That reminds me of the Beatles doing “Back In The USSR”, Malcolm!’ A clear, straight dig. But they’d allowed that to happen and got charged for the privilege. They never stood up and said, ‘No, I ain’t wearing that.’ For all their tomfoolery, I suppose they just had an ambition to be popular finally.
Malcolm and Vivienne’s relationship was very weird. I still find it hard to bel
ieve and rather peculiar that they manufactured a kid between them. But it did have ginger hair! There was another child from a previous marriage of Vivienne’s; when the one they’d had together was young, it felt to me like he was being ever so slightly ignored. I felt really sorry for him. There he was, this normal little bunty of a kid, quite plump, running around their house, and there was all this bondage-gear and rubber-wear on model stands, and Vivienne sewing jock straps and things. A strange upbringing, by any stretch, but no stranger than mine.
Their house was an absolute mess; no one had ever thought of washing anything, and that kid always seemed to be hungry. It used to really annoy me. Yet he was so large! To be fair, honestly, I don’t think they ever brought the kids up wrong, there was none of that nastiness in there. It was all in Malcolm and Vivienne’s innocent and naive way, of how they were trying to project sexuality through other people – which wasn’t anything that either of them were particularly doing themselves. Hence the need for both of them to manipulate a pop band around to their way of thinking, and in there lies all the problems with the next band they tried it out on. Because Johnny here wasn’t liable to lay down – not for no one – EVER.
I believe it was Malcolm’s mate Bernie Rhodes who spotted me amongst their clientele and said, ‘That’s the one!’ Not Sid, the fashion victim, because that’d be too much of the same old thing. ‘You want the one with a bit of gusto.’ We were an odd bunch of fellas that had started hanging out there. John Gray was very effete, shall we say; Sid was like an oafish model, and me – I don’t know how I came across – probably a bitter, twisted fuck. Quiet but fuming. An ‘angry yooong man’, as Morrissey would say.
At that point, there was no concept in me at all of being in a band. It took Bernie to say, ‘What about ’im in the “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt and green hair? He looks like a singer.’ This must’ve been about August 1975. Bernie was one of the intellectual ideology people that hovered around Malcolm – they knew each other from college.
Bernie’s a troublemaker, there’s no two ways about it, but he was also one of these fellas that could get bitter and twisted. He took it all a stage too far, did Bernie. Politically, he was extreme left-wing, almost communist in his approach. Of course, the way he later steered the Clash was about raking in huge amounts of money, in spite of his communist leanings. So, a curious juxtaposition of events, is Bernie Rhodes.
The element of talent-spotting always gave us the reputation of being a boy band, but Steve Jones and Paul Cook already had a group, going back as far as 1971/72. They hung around the shop, and Glen Matlock worked there, so he fitted in because he was learning bass. And they needed a singer, and through Bernie to Malcolm came I!
Bernie was very aware of how to manipulate a public, which you could see in the early T-shirts he designed for them. There was one – and to this day, I still have it – which had a triangle on each side, and a line in between. The upside triangle contained all the good things, and the downward triangle all the negative things. That already tells you a lot about Bernie’s black-and-white kind of thinking. On the good side – somewhere near the bottom, haha! – is QT Jones and his Sex Pistols. That was their modus operandi before I came along, until they discovered that Steve couldn’t really sing, and didn’t have that kind of personality to project, in that way.
Our first meeting that day was so bad it really shouldn’t have worked at all, should it? No one ever believes me, but I was playing the diplomat there. I wanted to be revolting and disgusting, but I also wanted the job. I was working at cross purposes. Now that they’d asked and told me to come back after the shop had shut, I really wanted to be in a band with them.
For me nowadays, I know exactly what I’m doing it for, I have a need to explain how I view the world, and I enjoy doing that. Whereas meeting the band for the first time, I had to come to grips with all that inside myself, pretty much on the spot. There was no more reserve – it wasn’t acceptable. If I was going to get on with these people, I had to be completely open.
When we went back to the shop and I sang to Alice Cooper’s ‘Eighteen’ and various other records off the jukebox, I really wanted it. I was up for it. I instantly had the mannerisms, the characterizations of the words. That I could do, I just couldn’t sing. A minor thing . . . Fair play to Malcolm, he said, ‘We can fix that.’ Which was a big wow, because that was the hard one to get over – but he was right: if you’ve got all the other things going, that’ll come. That’s a matter of disciplining yourself. For the record, I did do singing lessons, but they didn’t help, because the approach was different to how I wanted to be. ‘Do-re-mi-fa’ was far beyond me – I couldn’t relate it to how I wanted to write. But it was useful to see that’s how singers normally go about it, so I found my own way even in that. That’s how I ended up with that very sweet dulcet tone that the world has fallen in love with.
Afterwards we went to a pub up the road, the Roebuck, and we really didn’t get on. I turned up at the interview – shall we call it that? – with John Gray, a gay guy who hadn’t yet come out at the time. I thought that would be very audacity-minded to them, and it was, it really perturbed them. They weren’t expecting that from what they perceived as, I don’t know, a weak-link art student, possibly. He really off-put them. This effeminate fella just drove them nuts. But John would talk pure sense, and has an absolute wizard knowledge of all things music – very much a librarian, in that respect, and so between the pair of us, we had the answers to every situation possible. That kind of astounded them. Glen couldn’t pull out any rare Kinks records that would surprise me, because I’d be fully endowed. I love the Kinks – love ’em!
I’d had a couple of pints beforehand to steady my nerves, so the whole day was a huge alcoholic infusion, and it only ended because we had to catch the night bus home. I really didn’t think I’d got the gig. I just thought it was a great night out, and we laughed all the way home in a complete drunken state on the night bus, which, again, could be very dangerous in them days. The gangs would tend to hop on, and muggings and beatings were the order of the day. But we managed to get home completely unaccosted, so it all looked rosy to me.
I didn’t think they’d ever ring, but then the phone call came in a couple of days later. It was Boogie, aka John Tiberi, one of Malcolm’s people, telling me there’d be a rehearsal in Rotherhithe. So down I went, got there, and no one was there. It’d been cancelled, I still don’t know the reason why, but nobody even bothered to tell me. And that’s a tough thing for a Johnny Rotten at that age, to go to Bermondsey Wharf and wander around them docks alone. No one there to say, ‘Sorry, John.’ I was fucking furious.
So I rang and told them where to go, and then there was a whole series of phone calls, and I thought, ‘Oh, bloody hell, this is worse now, because they’re really telling me they want me – not the band, this is all the underlings of Malcolm – really, really pushing for me.’ But I thought, ‘I ain’t got the tools to handle what I’ve talked myself into.’
Another rehearsal was arranged at a pub in Chiswick. I didn’t learn, did I? I went to the next one an’ all. Why did I go? I’d bitten the bullet, hadn’t I? I wasn’t gonna let go at this point. I wanted to push it a couple of stages further and, fair play to the lads, not one note of any kind was in tune. They were just running through what would now be termed mod, the classics of the 1960s, by the Who, the Small Faces and what have you – the usual verse-chorus pop hit kind of stuff.
I was only used to choir practice, where I’d perfected the art of un-singing just to get chucked out. So I had to break out of that very quickly and find my own voice, and not sound like I was imitating, or trying to be this, that or the other. That was my approach. It was pure hell and torture for me.
That night ended in a row – a good row, a healthy row, because it was about the messing about, and really trying to get into doing this properly. I think I got my point across: that no matter what you think of me, give me a chance, and don’t be rude lik
e that. You don’t just not tell someone and think that’s funny, because it bloody well ain’t. In them days if you made an enemy of me, you could live to regret it.
They showed an incredible cowardice, to my mind, from that point onwards. I was very resolute that I was gonna make this work regardless. But I was so impressed . . . There was a piano in the corner, completely out of tune, a typical pub upright piano, and Steve and Paul played ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ on it. Steve had the rhythm, and Paul played the ding-ding-ding afterwards, and listening to the two together, no one else but me would’ve worked that out to be – I wanna be in this band, I like the way they’re destroying yet creating.
They were trying to do early rock ‘n’ roll, but it weren’t right. The notes were wrong, but the patterns were right! The emphasis, the energy on it, was excellent. I loved listening to it, nothing to do with discordancy, or accuracy of notes, and obviously the wrong placement of fingers – it was, the energy was right, and Paul Cook always had brilliant timing. And timing is EV-ER-Y-THING. If your drummer is out of time, nothing makes sense; it’s the root core to music. From that point on, I listened attentively to Paul Cook, and I had my anchor.
That night I went up to the Sir George Robey in Finsbury Park and tried to repeat what they’d done. I’d watched where they put their fingers, and I remembered the hand positions – really simplistic stuff now, but for me that was thrilling. It was like, ‘Wow! I’m beginning to understand the chemical formula!’
The first time I met Malcolm in the shop, I didn’t know if he liked me or disliked me. He was never a friend, he never in any way related to me, and possibly only introduced me to Steve and Paul as an act of spite. I never got to grips with any of that, but somehow or other he must’ve assumed that I was a character above and beyond the band’s very dull activity up to that point. He almost certainly saw something in me that he didn’t have in himself. But how far that thing could go, to Malcolm’s vision, wasn’t too clear. But he did, he backed me in that agenda: I was an ideas fella, and I always will be.
