by Lydon, John
I came in with the concept of lyrics and that punchability, to break the boundaries of dullness. Without me, I suppose they might’ve been a Small Faces imitation band, at best, possibly a pub-rock band, and they might’ve liked it that way. And Malcolm might’ve liked that, because of his love of the New York scene, which at the time was all happening in very small clubs – places like CBGB’s were tiny. It was all so precious – ‘Oh, we’re the creators, we’re special, nobody else counts!’
Well, I’m sorry, I’m a fairground attraction. I like the funfair, I like the chaos, and I like the aspect of being able to break into the larger majority of people, to challenge.
I’m not sorry, actually. I resent that I actually said ‘sorry’ there. I’m not sorry about that at all. What I’m sorry about is that most people actually don’t understand how to change, and readily accept the formats that are given to them. And Malcolm – and the band to a minor extent, because he was their mentor – were fully loaded with that: ‘All we gotta do is wear nice clothes and look ridiculous, and we’ll make some money, right?’ And that’s what it would’ve become. Steve, love him. Paul, love him. Glen, love him. But their attitudes were not one of the bigger picture. Not at all, ever.
QT Jones and his Sex Pistols became, upon my entry, the Sex Pistols. Rehearsals, for me, were: no monitors. There’s them bashing and playing away on their amps, making an enormous noise, and they cannot hear me. They’ve got no idea what I’m like, except that Steve would decide, ‘You can’t sing!’ I’d go, ‘What do you base that on?’ ‘I can’t hear ya!’ ‘Well, I’d like a microphone then.’ We get a microphone from the pub downstairs, then I also realize I can’t sing, but Paul Cook stood up for me. ‘Oh, you know, you’ve got to give the guy a chance . . .’ Paul was very friendly, and helped a great deal in that respect.
You could say, however, and you’d be dead right: ‘What a fucking weak heart! Why don’t you get a proper singer, who walks in with a monitor system all of his own?’ But they didn’t, they stuck with me, and Paul stuck with me – he secretly backed me. Against all of it. That made me more crazy, wilder. I’d start to turn up in the clothes I really wanted to be in. I’m no drag queen, right? I’m full-on, hardcore, a lunatic male, and it’s like nothing that had been happening in pop music at all, since I don’t know when – since maybe the Teddy boys invented themselves? And, by the way, I have a huge affinity with the early Teddy boy movement. Or any street gang movement, or street culture. I understand completely what that is.
At the time of those first rehearsals in Chiswick, I was wearing a ladies rowing jacket. I only found out later that’s what it was – it was white, so I always thought it was a cricket jacket. No. It was a woman’s jacket, and I dyed it pink accidentally by putting it in a cheap washing machine with a pair of pink trousers that I bought at Vivienne’s shop. So, I wrote ‘GOD SAVE OUR GRACIOUS QUEEN’ all over it. That eventually put me in mind of, ‘Hmm, that’d be a good song title . . .’
Any of the gear we wore from the SEX shop we absolutely had to pay for. If not the full whack, then as close to it as possible, and no yelling at Malcolm, ‘That’s absurd, we’re promoting your stuff, you’re using our name.’ The reply was always, ‘Oh, but I’ll try to get you a slight discount.’ Later on, some of the northern bands putting themselves up as punk would bitch about how it was easy for us because we were dressed by Vivienne. No, babies! And while I was paying through the nose for it, I’d tell her what I wanted and didn’t want, regardless of her assumption of good taste. She’s a designer who needs to be told a thing or two from time to time, otherwise, like all of us, you could end up crawling up your own big bottom.
Twenty or thirty quid for a jumper was a lot of money back then – huge money – but everything in there was a one-off. There might be a line on a similar theme, but every print was slightly different, each one was special in its own way – but just don’t ever attempt to have it washed, because then the inks would all run, and the seams would come undone.
The stuff Viv made back then wasn’t exactly built to last. The buttons just popped off – they flew across the room like they were allergic to you. The necks of her T-shirts ended up down between your breasts after one wash, because of the way they were cut, so a nice tight T-shirt ended up like a man-bra.
I already had the safety pins going before the Pistols, but now they really came into play. Actually, you can see in the old pictures, on everything I wore, I’d always have a set of safety pins hanging off the collar. It was about fall-out, having an instant repair kit for when Viv’s goods fell apart.
There was never any sit-down discussion of direction with the band, or Malcolm, or anything like that. We were just shoved into a room, and bang, crash, wallop. No matter what Malcolm may have claimed after the fact, it was just the four of us bashing it out in a room. All the hindsight in the world did him no good at all, because he wasn’t dictating our pace, tone or content in any way – and he was miffed about that.
I was into Captain Beefheart and Can, but that didn’t mean that’s what I wanted the band to sound like. Not at all. At the same time, I’d be the chap telling you that 10cc’s first album was one of the greatest things I’d ever heard – and that was so over-structured! I thought, by containment comes perfection. No, I had it all going on, all of it. I had no expectations other than that’s what Steve’s good at, that sound, that angle, that’s his universe, and that gives me a lot to work with. It gave me a huge kaleidoscope of possibilities. Things I’d not considered; things I’d never heard from my record collection or indeed anywhere else. That’s how I perfected myself, really, through Steve and his apparent faults, which weren’t faults at all.
They would all give Steve a very hard time about his lack of musicality and I’d be telling him, ‘Sod them, there’s no such thing as a bum note. You’ve got the balls to stand there and play the thing, that’s good enough – with time, all the rest will fill in!’ Malcolm was really pushing him in a wrong direction, I thought, it really screwed with his mind. Steve needed encouragement, not smug dissatisfaction. In many ways he’s a bit like me, he can get very distracted very quickly and then lose the centre of a thing. I recognize those things in him; those are traits we share.
He seemed a bit of a handbag snatcher to me – a low-rent thief, crooked. He had a really saucy sense of play. A completely untrustworthy character, a proper Dickensian street urchin, like that Jack character in Oliver! – you know, ‘You’ve got to pick a pocket or two!’
But at least that’s what he was. It was real. Malcolm was on his case all the time about, ‘Urgh, look at your hair, it looks like a perm!’ And indeed I was too, because it did. It really did! He looked like an old woman with that curly hairdo. A curly mullet was a crime. Against nature! You know, ‘We don’t want Robert Plant in the band, thank you!’
Steve had had a hideous upbringing, but we were all damaged goods; we were all soiled kittens. By that time, all of us had been locked up for one thing or another.
On the surface, Steve was a bit of a fly boy – but not too fly, and not too bright either. He wanted to give the impression that he was onto something. But he’s forever trying to get away from being asked a question – very non-committal, slyly judgemental, and difficult to get close to. We’ve had our moments where we’ve been very close and had a great laugh, me and Steve, but he would swing straight back into that alienation thing in a heartbeat.
He can be hilarious, but he doesn’t like another comedian in the room. And, well, if I’m there, it’s gonna happen, innit? And then with people like Sid around – well, that’s just too much for him. If he’d just bothered to open his heart, we could’ve helped each other along there quite brilliantly, but it wasn’t in him and we were young. Oddly enough, we all viewed Steve as the older member. He was a year older than Paul; they weren’t in the same year at school. So he was like the elder influence that, well, really wasn’t an influence you wanted at all.
Glen was, the –
quote – musician of the band, and so his approach was, ‘You can’t do that, that’s not music!’ ‘Pardon?’ Right from the start, there was an argument with him, because he wanted us to be these dandies, these Soho ponces, a throwback to the mods. That was never going to work, pretending to be something which we plainly aren’t, so I laughed that one right out of court. ‘Look, we’re not dandies, why would we want to fake being that?’ For me it had to come from a real hardcore, felt emotion. You can’t just pluck a fantasy out of thin air and think you can cover yourself in that and that’ll be good enough for the rest of the world. That’s contemptuous behaviour, for me.
Unwittingly, Glen was very helpful. You do need negativity thrown at you, it’s a great driving force, and it makes you work harder. When this flummox of a situation started to weld its way into tunes, it was fantastic. Our attempts at other people’s songs, particularly the Who, were great. I really started to feel like I was in a band, and I loved that feeling.
We could have, and should have, hung out more together socially, but that never happened. If Malcolm came to rehearsals it would only be to pick up Steve and Paul, and possibly Glen, who usually had something better to do. He’d take them off to these very nice eating clubs that he was so prone to going to himself, and I always understood and knew that I wasn’t even considered as part of that. So I never really bothered to ask after the first one or two rejections. Listening to the fumbly-arsed lies about, ‘Oh, uh, no, there’s not room for one more,’ or whatever, you get the message and you move on.
I don’t think Malcolm ever liked music at all. To him, it was just the noise that accompanied his exotic-clothes future for the human race. He didn’t quite comprehend its importance or its social significance at all. And indeed, why should he, because really there wasn’t much of that at all up until we arrived. What would songs of social significance up to the Sex Pistols mean? It’d be some dreary-arsed folk singer prattling away on an acoustic guitar. Oh God –urgh!
There was one meeting in a pub at the top of Tottenham Court Road. We were having an argument, and Malcolm introduced us to Bloody Marys. ‘Wow, they called a cocktail that? And it tastes great, you don’t have to suffer the vodka tinge, but you get all the effects.’ Brilliant evening! But in the background was John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’, and I knew the song well. I said,
‘There! That’s social significance, proper, my style.’ And then he started to grasp it, what I was coming from. I don’t know if that left a good impression on him. From there on in, we never really spoke – very odd. He really didn’t want to move mountains at all, he wanted to rearrange piles of glitter.
I, meanwhile, homed in on the lyric-writing almost immediately. That’s what Steve gave to me, that burst of energy. He was like a diamond to me. Stunning, gorgeous, brilliant, beautiful opportunities. I was quite the dynamite once the doors had been opened to give me the chance to sing. I really went at it. I went straight into the writing and just wrote all the time. The words just flowed out of me, all this pent-up stuff that I’d had no place to aim at before, that I had no ambition with, suddenly found its mark. Fantastic! Magnificent!
There were many, many things I was toying with. I don’t remember this, but apparently one of the first things I tried out was about the Archangel Gabriel, slagging off the Catholic Church. I might have done something like that, but what was released is where the energy and effort was. Everything else I view as the scrag end, best left on the cutting room floor. Anything that hasn’t been finished is that way for a very good reason.
The first one we actually rehearsed, I think, was ‘Mandy’. I’d been at this girl Mandy’s house for a party, and she made a punch-bowl using Southern Comfort, Martini, and some kind of fruit juice which also had alcohol in it, a liqueur, and ice. I drank so much of it that it took me two days to wake up – John Gray, Dave Crowe and Sid dragged me back to my family’s house. I can from time to time be a creature of excessive stupidity. I’m well aware of the warning signs and yet I’ll dive in and just go with it, but overdo it. I tend to lack subtlety. Maybe in later years I’ll catch onto that one, the idea of being subtle. But anyway, that was the subject of my first song – best left unrecorded, eh?
In rehearsals, someone would play something, and I’d go, ‘Oh, I’ve got some words for that’ – an absolutely open-minded, spontaneous approach, which, I’m well aware, can also hideously not work. But for us lot, it did, and I’ve kept that methodology ever since. It used to be like that in the Pistols, you know, for a good two weeks. There’d always be somebody in a corner playing something from their heart and soul, and I’ve got the ears for that moment. And I’ll zoom straight into that and go, ‘Empathy with that!’ I write with a melody in my head, and I’ll just try and stand there and sing it, right off the bat. Sometimes it’s impossible to sing what I write, and I’ll scratch for any idea that comes into my head.
Of the early songs, ‘No Feelings’ was a character analysis, satirizing the way rock ‘n’ rollers were trying to present themselves, as being hard and above it all, and yet being a bunch of wimps in reality. There were these nitty-gritty bands flirting around, all trying to make themselves out to be harder than they were. I wasn’t presenting myself as a hard man, just a full-on honest one, and dealing with people telling you things that they’re not. Liars. Liars will always be a good subject matter.
‘Lazy Sod’, which later got more tastefully retitled ‘Seventeen’, came from a Steve Jones idea. The lyrics killed me! Sorry Steve, but to this day, I didn’t mean to humiliate you, but you should have felt humiliated, those were bad words. Fabulously dumb lines, like, ‘I’m all alone, give a dog a bone’! I suppose he was writing about a self-pity kind of thing and not being able to find a proper attachment to another human being. A good idea, but I wasn’t ready for that kind of wimp-out, so by the time I got to it, well, look what I did.
‘I don’t work, I just speed’ – that was all I needed in life! It was very much an anti-hippie thing, drawing up the battle lines with them. ‘Let’s all live in the forest together!’ ‘Fuck off!’ Listen, I’m well into passive resistance, I understand that’s a vital way of bringing down empires, but the hippie thing of peace and love was vacuous. It didn’t actually mean anything, and it was never conjured into anything solid.
When I went to the festivals, I’d watch them squabbling over where to park their Volkswagens and pitching their designer tents and arguing about peg-holes. Come on, where’s your peace and love now? But in all of that there were generous souls, and they tended to be the people that weren’t wearing the uniform. The ‘velvet loon pants’ lot would never help you.
On ‘New York’, I used the New York Dolls as a reference point and played around a bit. Personally speaking, I’ve got no problems with the New York Dolls at all, I thought they were great, but we’d already had men dressed up as tarts quite a lot in British rock. And then, my God, when they came over – what a mess! There was a band that fell apart. The other New York bands – Television, the Ramones – we couldn’t believe how old they all were, and how much more loaded. They could afford the things that we desperately wanted, but had no taste, so they’d come over from New York and they’d look terrible. They’d be trying to dress down – black and leather – just depressing, trying to look dirty. And yet at the same time I never knew an American that came over that didn’t have a walletful. I thought we were better than that.
Chrissie Hynde tried to help me on the music side. She used to hang around the shop a year before I did, maybe even a couple of years before. She and Vivienne used to be close but they fell apart. One of the most delicious lines she said to Chrissie one day was: ‘The thing I don’t like about you, Chrissie, is you go with the flow – well, the flow goes that-a-way,’ pointing to the door. Chrissie would be in fits of laughter. The delivery was so funny, that she had to go, ‘Fine’. Vivienne can definitely deliver a good one-liner – no doubts about that mouth.
I can’t remember what th
e brawl/row/scene/whatever was. But – ooff! – when women decide to not like each other, wow, us guys have got lots to be proud of, because we could never take it to that level. Well, actually I know a few guys who could. We’ll talk about them later.
But Chrissie – what a lovely nutter! We never had a physical relationship but mentally we were very attuned to each other. I respect many, many things about Chrissie – a very smart girl, who went through all manner of trauma as a child, and was wayward in her youth, shall we say. She’ll always be an awkward person to get on with, she’s very difficult, but I think she deserves your space and your time, because in that difficulty she’s looking for answers. And she does find answers from time to time, and that makes her to my mind a very important person in the world.
She was great fun to hang out with. She’d take me to Clapham Common, and we used to walk for miles talking about music, and our understanding of things. She tried to teach me how to play guitar. I’d moan about being left-handed, but of course her line was: ‘Jimi Hendrix was left-handed, that’s no excuse.’ ‘How about this excuse, Chrissie – look, I had a bottle jammed into my wrist!’ Which was true, I had two fingers that had to be sewn up, and I’d lost a lot of control in my left hand.
I was hanging out with Paul Cook one night, and he took me to see some of his friends out in Chiswick, and a couple of them took offence to Paul because he was in a band. And a fight ensued, and it was all chaos and very hard to remember, considering the amount of booze we had plied into ourselves. We had to walk from Chiswick and eventually ended up at the Hammersmith Hospital, where I had to have my hand stitched up, because the fingertips of my two pointy, fuck-you fingers were ripped to the bone and bleeding profusely.
