by Lydon, John
When my aunt visited from Canada, she’d be reading press reports about the shortages and offering to send food parcels to us. I’ve never forgotten that. My mum and dad were furious. ‘Never! Never! We won’t accept charity!’
It definitely inspired revolutionary thoughts. I was noting how bad it had got, and that was the fuel for what we were doing – the sense of energy waste. All that capability of an entire young generation, just absolutely ignored. Depressing as that was, and hard as it was to endure, at the same time everybody I knew was in the same boat. We had nothing to do. That was the fuel that fired the engine of what became punk.
With those opening lines, ‘I am an antichrist/I am an anarchist’, I wasn’t trying to set myself up as some kind of bogeyman. I never thought of that at all. No, no, no, somewhere deep inside me, I was thinking I’d be seen as the victim of all of this, and great sympathy and outpourings of love and joy would be bestowed upon me! Honest! I had no concept of being the naughty bugger. It wasn’t about that, and to my mind it certainly wasn’t just about me. It was about us. We’re being given an opportunity here – let’s tell it like it really is, shall we?
Of course, everyone around the band at the time was saying, ‘Why don’t you just write a love song? Why don’t you just write a hit single? It’ll be great then, everyone’ll love you!’ ‘What, don’t they already? Oh.’ To this day that’s all I keep hearing from the business end, and it’s utter nonsense they’re talking.
That line, ‘I wanna destroy the passer-by’ – I’m full of pleasantries, I know – I was talking about all those kinds of people, the complacent ones that don’t contribute, that just sit by and moan and don’t actually do anything to better themselves or the situation for others. The non-participating moral majority. I just thought ‘passer-by’ was a better phrase, gets to the point quicker. Rather than use twenty-two words, just one nailed it rather well.
‘Your future dream is a shopping scheme’? That’s turned out pretty accurate, didn’t it? Seems to be the way of the world now. I seen it coming.
The ‘IRA-UDA’ bit wasn’t so much about the terrorism and political shenanigans going on in Ireland, it was more, ‘Hang on, I thought this was the UK.’ The alleged United Kingdom, not so united after all, huh? With all these political intrigues, divided we fall. I always viewed the United Kingdom as good people getting on with each other, not the Empire. I think, clearly by my stance, I wasn’t promoting British colonialism – the opposite.
But no, I wasn’t an anarchist. I found that the written word could achieve far greater disturbance than planting a bomb in a supermarket. The written word’s a powerful thing and I don’t think that was too well considered, at least not in pop music, until I started to write that way. There’s no personal spite or viciousness in what I’m writing. It’s absolutely about demanding a clarity from politicians. As long as I know what’s what, and what it is you’re expecting of me, and what it is I’m expecting of you, everything’s fine. I will not be anyone’s cannon fodder. If it’s not a worthy cause, I’m with the opposition.
As we progressed and songs like that started to come out of me, I was really into it, one hundred per cent committed, regardless of Steve being in a huff. He’d be in a huff quite a lot, downing his guitar and walking off. Then you’d get Paul going: ‘Don’t worry he’s always like that, he’s a moody bastard.’
I’d catch Steve from the corner of my eye, going, ‘Oh my gawd, he can’t sing, he’s no good’ – without realizing it’s like, ‘Well, Steve, you can’t play! We’re all doing the best we can, mate . . .’ We were together, what, less than six months, and we’d already decided that we were all crap.
In truth, I was inspired by what the others were doing, by the three of them. I was really, really impressed. As for musicality, who gives a damn? It was the bravery of what they were attempting to do, in a sea of only spoilt kids in bands.
I’ve always loved Steve Jones’s approach to guitar. It’s borderline falling apart, which I find thoroughly fascinating. How he just manages to pull it back. The closest I can connect to that with any other musician would be Neil Young on Zuma, where the song is just teetering on the edge of total collapse and that’s a most dynamic point. For me to be able to fit into that, it was great. I could instantly think in stanzas. It gave me that opportunity, and I don’t know if he ever realized it to this day. I don’t think he quite got what a good deal he handed me, and I’m very, very grateful, regardless of his contempt – in fact, that’s just icing on the cake.
Paul Cook’s timing – astounding, always has been. He doesn’t rattle your cage, Paul, it’s solidly there – he would give me the backup. When I made cock-ups onstage, Paul would always deliver the most painful line and make me bite that reality, whereas a dig from Steve or Glen was like water off a duck’s back. Paul would confidently produce the sentence that was telling me – ‘Curtail that, get that right . . .’
I quickly realized Paul was always malleable to Steve’s will. Steve would ask Paul to ask me. ‘Erm, uhhh, do you not think this would be a better idea?’ All of those things, no matter what avenue of approach was taken, were met with derision, and in many ways created a problem between me and Paul, because he’d think that was a personal fuck-off to him. It wasn’t. I meant it back to the people who were moving him about. Because Paul was all right. I always got on well with Paul. But I never got on well with Paul when Steve or Malcolm were in his ear.
Very strange, the band itself. Paul was a quiet fella. Paul’s not one for the fuss, he’s very much like his father, quiet and compromising. I don’t know what Paul thought. Paul’s someone who doesn’t want to be noticed. But it’s the combination of these characters that creates it and turns it into what it is. I mean, if we were all nutters like me, it would have gone down the toilet quickly. I’ve got to be honest in that. Left to my own devices, a hundred per cent completely – catastrophe! I don’t know how far the push button can go. But: ‘Yes, let’s find out.’
I thought I found my voice very early on, but I only really got to hear myself back the first time we ever had monitors, which was the gig we did with Eddie & the Hot Rods at the Marquee. That was a big shock. I accidentally ‘broke’ the monitors because I couldn’t bear the sound of my own voice. That was the beef on that occasion – they were foolish enough to let me hear myself.
The others would all talk in terms of counting beats to me, and I had no clue what they were saying. Or, ‘Come in on the G!’ What?! Utterly clueless in that regard, yet I had a huge musical knowledge, just not about the actual construction of it.
It was fascinating – it was like coming to grips with a Meccano kit for the first time. Ever get one of them for Christmas? You open the box, you’ve seen all the pictures on the outside of what you could make, but once that box was open, you were left clueless. That’s what joining the Pistols was. I had to quickly put the pieces together and catch up with them.
Steve and Paul and Glen did amazing things for me, I will love them till the day I die. They’re more than welcome to slag me off – that’s their right, and that’s the way I feel about everybody I work with. Good things come from it, or else you find very quickly if things aren’t working, you’re not working with them any more.
The space in Denmark Street should’ve been our HQ. Steve, however, wasn’t welcome at his mum’s and had nowhere to live, so he stayed there. He kind of turned it into his apartment, and created the vibe that we were butting in when we wanted to go there to work. Everything has a dark side. Because the walls were bare, I turned to drawing vile cartoons on them. We spent an awful lot of time playing animosity, different ways of winding each other up.
We all obviously hoped that having the band to focus on would distract Steve from his thieving. As it happened, it was six of one, half a dozen of the other. It was very hard to break through Steve’s mood moments. Only Paul Cook really ever understood him. Steve was particularly good at playing dirty tricks on people, little moments of
spite, and Paul had to endure them as much as everybody else. All of us were at the receiving end of a prank or two, some of them borderline dangerous. This is young men at large.
As for Malcolm, he would have preferred it if I hadn’t had a lip on me, because he still wanted to be accepted by trendy art society. One of the early gigs he arranged was at this guy Andrew Logan’s loft. It was called the Valentine’s Ball. It was very bizarre, a fantastic place to play, but they didn’t like me. Maybe it was something I said.
That sort of nonsense was what he grovelled and hankered for, hanging around with all these fake socialites, who all self-assured each other of their own importance and indulgence. Rubbish artists, poser bloody statue-makers. It was very arty and therefore very fake.
In a nutshell, Malcolm and his clique were hippie art-wankers, they really were. They changed garb but their mentality was still that same vacuous dead end, all kissing each other’s bottoms, and achieving nothing, offering nothing, doing nothing, self-absorbed, self-fascinated, and closing their doors to the outside world of reality, which is what I was firmly entrenched in.
That cliqueyness of trendy London doesn’t make room for people like me, and I’m so grateful, because you can get caught up in that swirl, or you can think that personal adornment and self-gratification makes you the saviour of the universe. Indeed it doesn’t. They’re all supercilious and superficial and full of praise for each other, and limited and narrow-minded because of that. They have no real understanding of how the real world works; it’s all self-serving. That’s what I found out. Outwardly they’re very impressive: ‘Look at these people, their mad clothes and their apparently mad lifestyles, and they all look like they’re having freaky-deaky sex.’ Really, it’s just a bunch of suburbanites.
Malcolm was an eternal art student. I never saw a single piece of art he ever got up to. He surrounded himself with people like Jamie Reid, who was an artist of sorts, but more in the commercial aspects of art, in presentation, packaging and selling things. Of Malcolm’s crowd, I liked Jamie a lot, and I liked Sophie Richmond, his assistant. She was always morose – ‘Oh, everything’s dismal and I’m bored and I’m depressed.’ I found it entertaining to be around someone so despondent. Nothing that would happen in the world could ever make Sophie smile. I hope she reads this, because that’ll put a big smile on her face.
Malcolm started renting an office off Oxford Street. There were two rooms, and Malcolm would always be locked in the back one. ‘What’s going on, Sophie?’ ‘I don’t know, he’s locked himself in again!’ The biggest expense in that office apart from installing the telephone, the table and the chair, was the double locks Malcolm put on the room to make sure we didn’t break in. He’d be cowering in there because he couldn’t confront you on issues. He didn’t want us to get in the way of his secretive agenda. He’d keep his ideas very close to himself because he knew they’d be shouted down, and I suppose, in his irrational, egotistical way, he couldn’t cope with having to defend the indefensible. Maybe he somehow thought that kind of behaviour, that flightiness, made him artistic. It didn’t; the end result was autistic, it just caused fractures between all of us.
So there were loads of rows. There was one at that pub, the Nashville, in Kensington. We actually played there twice, and the second time was a horrible vibe – Vivienne slapped someone in the crowd. It blew up into a huge row of ‘It’s either me or him’ from Glen, and well, guess what? In the end, it was him!
Over the years, there’s been plenty to be bitter and twisted about between me and Glen, but I don’t want it to be that way, because actually I really like Glen. No, I do! Sometimes. Hahaha! I understand where he’s coming from, but for me that’s two steps back, and that’s uninteresting. I don’t see him as a dark, evil creature. He just wants a happy world, where everybody gets on. Unfortunately for us, that happy world would be according to his rules, and that’s unacceptable.
There were other problems too, like the ‘wanting to be like the Bay City Rollers’ rumour running around, and no one actually declaring it to me. The proposition was put to me slyly through Malcolm, and that wasn’t what I wanted at all. The lyrics got tougher and tougher. Steve – I didn’t know at that time that he couldn’t read or write; I put down his lack of interest in what I had on a piece of paper to plain negligence. It wasn’t; he actually hadn’t got a clue. The only one who really read it was Paul Cook – he’d be fascinated by what I was coming up with. Glen’s approach was, ‘It doesn’t fit the pattern of the music. You’re one beat off.’ In your mind, you’d be thinking, ‘Yeah, and you’re one off a beating too!’ But we never had any violence between us. There was pushing and shoving, but never anything brutal or nasty.
It could have fallen flat on its face, but we stuck at it, and it all worked out. We really did work hard, and that’s a thing that’s not noted. We worked very, very hard, with no money. One of the people who did note it was Chris Spedding, who was Bryan Ferry’s guitarist at the time. He took a lot of time out, to teach us a few things. He took us to a proper recording studio actually and helped us record a demo which was fantastic. It opened our mind to the possibilities.
We did other demos with the road crew, which was a couple of hippies that had a few stacks of PA, but that wasn’t quite the same as somebody who actually has made records showing you how it was done. It was fantastic; that only strengthened our commitment.
At Malcolm’s end, there was no strategy involved. It was all happen-chance, ‘fly by the seat of your pants’. Picking up the phone and making a call – which he didn’t even do himself, that’s what Sophie would be doing – I hardly think that that was strategy. Malcolm would have a way of annoying anybody he ever approached. There were many agents who chased him out of offices, some actually even physically abusing him. They didn’t like his arrogance and his tone and his superficiality. You can be prim, but be proper. These are blokes that don’t want to waste their money on what they see as a bloke goofing off on his own ego.
He got us a load of gigs up north, but booking the Sex Pistols into a Teddy boy reunion in Barnsley wasn’t clever, was it, Malcolm! That could have been a very deadly evening. If you’re in the wrong place playing to the wrong type of people it can be an absolute warzone. We still had our fifteen-minute set at that point, which we had to play twice. These were some very angry middle-aged Teddy boys. They were trying to remember their youth, and we – the new youth – weren’t having it.
Scarborough, the next night, was unbelievable. The hatred! It was very much out of season, and there was no one around but locals. Outside it was blisteringly rainswept, freezing-cold, stormy-sea conditions. You could see the ocean from onstage, because there was a wall of windows at the back of the club.
In front of the stage stood this solid firm of 300 full-on beer-monster yobs, who were obviously thinking, ‘You softies from down south, you rate yourselves?’ I’m trying to sing while battering people with the wedge end of the microphone stand – the iron bit at the end that holds it solid to the ground. And you get into it, you don’t skip a beat, you continue the song, and that becomes overwhelmingly interesting to the people that have set themselves up as your enemy, and they start to pay attention then, because you’re not there for them and their silly little fiasco brawl, you’re there for a bigger issue. You end up making mates with these kinds of people, just because you’ve got the bottle to stand there and deliver. It is respected.
Every gig was like a battle, but we came through. The music press started to give coverage to what they called ‘violence’ at our gigs, but you have to say they’d have to have been really going out of their way to find those incidences. Go to a Justin Bieber gig and there could be fights in the audience. It’s par for the course. You put a lot of human beings into one building all at the same time, then there’s going to be an affray.
Never, never, ever, ever have I preached violence. I’ve got a very intense working-class background where violence was the order of the day and
I, possibly through childhood illness, had to find another way out of that.
I may have said things up there, but – oh, that’s banter! Don’t ever mistake that in any way as opposition, unless of course they’re trying to kill me, then I’ll have something more serious to say. I like the give and take. I like when people shout things out. I respond. It’s a connection. These are human beings, they’re trying to say hello. They’re not trying to be offensive, although some of the remarks could be swung that way.
Shit happens sometimes, and every now and again in an audience there’s one particular person that absolutely hates the ground you’re standing on, and there’s nowhere to go with that other than deal with it directly. The very last thing you should do is leave the stage, because there are 99.98 per cent of the crowd who are absolutely there for the right reasons. But you have to meet the challenge.
Because of all this nonsense, it had got to the point in London where no one would consider letting us play their club apart from Ron Watts at the 100 Club. I liked Ron a lot. His background was jazz. It was a jazz club, but he’s a very fair, open-minded fella and would give anybody a go. As he said at the time, ‘It’s either George Melly or the Sex Pistols, what’s the difference?’
I don’t think he liked Malcolm very much, but then again, not many people did. He’d come in with his ‘I’m the Royal Highness’ approach, and manage to offend the staff and the owners with sheer pomposity. Always trying to over-labour his position, which of course opened him up to no end of ridicule, not only from outsiders, but Steve Jones – he’d be on that, phwooarf, like butter on toast. Those two had a very odd relationship. Steve didn’t want to do anything without Malcolm’s say-so, but then would spend all day and night ribbing him. Deeply wicked ways, but Malcolm seemed to like that. Go figure.
