by Lydon, John
I couldn’t be wasting my energy being sarcastic to Malcolm. The further I kept out of that, the less likelihood of any audacity along the lines of, ‘I think what you should do, John, is . . .’ Only once in his life did Malcolm approach me that way, and he never came back!
During the heatwave that hit Britain through the summer of 1976, my God, I did everything not to get a suntan, but it was irresistible. I liked my death-white complexion, because I was much more a creature of the night, but the appalling dead heat of all day long trying to sleep in it was a no-no. I kind of reversed my process around that time and became more daylight-driven. You had to, you couldn’t sleep in that. It was unreal hot, regularly in the nineties. So strange, so un-British. I didn’t see any Labour council member trying to complain about it.
The weather will influence all, that’s an act of nature, and you learn to go with the flows of nature. You can’t stand up against them, you will be flattened. It was a gift, and things changed in London from then on. I noticed that the restaurants started to put chairs outside because it was too hot to sit inside, and London became very much like Europe. Once doors like that are opened, society-wise, they don’t close, because they’re enjoyable.
I really enjoyed playing the 100 Club through that summer, as our reputation grew. Yes, it was a sweaty basement, but there was something approaching an air conditioner, even though it sounded like aircraft engines revving. I’ve only got one vague memory of being onstage, and that’s prompted by a photo of me kneeling on the floor in my torn jumper, screaming into the microphone. I remember doing that, and feeling, ‘Oh, look what I can do. I’m really enjoying this, I like this, I like being in a band, I like the songs, I like the power and the energy of it, and by God, look, happy faces. All things are possible!’ We were often portrayed as speed-crazed maniacs onstage, but that was far from the reality. The other three weren’t ‘up there’ at all. Regardless of Steve joining AA years later, he’s never been big on anything, barely a pinch of salt by equivalent. And me, I stopped. I wasn’t going to become too infected with drug pleasures, because I really wanted to conquer the opportunity. Also, you can’t be singing on any kind of upper, forget it, ain’t gonna work, with your heartbeat racing . . . You’ll finish the song before the band have hit the stage. It makes you far too agitated to concentrate on the job in hand – not exactly what you want onstage. Heart attack, panic – you get all of those things naturally. I don’t like being in a condition of angst, so for me drugs were always strictly extra-curricular.
My pre-show tipple of choice in them days was something Nora, my future wife, introduced me to – Liebfraumilch, a German wine, although she said it was awful. Mother’s milk. It was terrible, but gosh, it got me through . . . how many gigs?
Another punk legend is that we were all on the dole. Well, we weren’t. Paul kept his job at the Fullers brewery in Chiswick for quite a long time. He was a trainee electrician there. I tried to make whatever money and bits and pieces I could. I was still doing Kingsway, but as I got more into the Pistols, it was impossible, I couldn’t focus my mind on the two angles. It was like, take a risk, take a leap, dive in, get this together. And I committed fully to the band. Which was infuriating because Paul wasn’t quite doing that, so rehearsals would have to be scheduled around his job.
We were clearly showing anyone who saw us that it was possible – that it was possible to do it without enormous financial backing. In fact, we managed to get this far with no backing at all. We did it pre-record company, pre-everything – we broke so much ground there. We had no one to teach us conceit. Conceit is something you learn, you just don’t naturally waffle into that area.
Once there were people there to see us, it wasn’t just the gig, it was afterwards I liked – talking to people, finding out what their interests were, their assumptions and opinions, and to find that they’re all coming at it from many different angles. The Bromley lot would be very different from, say, what you would run into up north, but all equally interesting, and equally equal.
The so-called Bromley Contingent were really made for the Sex Pistols. They came out of liking Bowie and the Roxy Music scene, which was very much about dressing up. A Roxy Music gig, particularly the big ones, was all about being seen in the foyer. Not so much about the gig any more. And different cliques would have different fashion sense; there’d be a camaraderie but also a sense of competition going on.
When it looked like Roxy were falling apart there was nothing left to fill the vacuum. Then we popped up, and it was, ‘Ooh, ha, yes please! Now we can all really be ourselves!’ Everyone could admit to liking all manner of music, and create their own imagery; not necessarily having to tie it down to a deliberate copy of some fella onstage. It gave them the new door, that you can break away from the competitive element and the restrictions, because it was all becoming very much like ballroom dancing – the rigidity of overdressing. We allowed a break from that, and bingo, there it was. Many, many doors opened, and sexual orientation didn’t matter one iota. Nobody was judging anyone.
In fact, in the beginning there was lots of little glam-rock type bands opening for us. The more different they were, the more interested we were in having them. But that kind of scene was done with. The world had moved away from high-drama anxiety music, and quite frankly Roxy Music did it best, and why try and be Part Two of that.
So it was great when people started catching on for themselves and forming their own bands. If I can do it, you can do it. It was kids our age, but not only from my own background – from many different backgrounds. Fantastic, that amalgamation of differences. Girls standing up for themselves in some of those wonderful girl bands, like X-Ray Spex, the Slits. There was so much of it, and so much difference between the bands musically, it was an incredibly interesting and exciting period, to watch and listen to these groups. The Roxy was a great club for that. Even though the Pistols never actually played there, we had a place to show off our different approaches to each other. I always thought there was no sense of competition in that environment at all, before punk became available to the masses through the media, and the clichés started to arise, of every song at a hundred miles an hour, screamed.
All that came from the Clash and the Damned, more than us. And that was very much like Joe Strummer’s R&B bands before he joined the Clash. They would be all this kind of breakneck rockabilly hundred-miles-an-hour stuff, which I never liked then. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Joe. At the beginning, he was friendly, friendly, friendly, but that soon changed once he started taking the Clash too seriously.
For me the shining light in that band will always be Mick Jones’s personality – lovely person, really warm. The same with the bassist Paul Simonon – he’s a posh kid, from a good background, shall we say, but he talks like ’e don’t know tuppence from thruppence. I put that down to shyness. Individually I loved them. They’d only been playing a couple of months when they supported us at the Screen on the Green in Islington, and they turned up with so much equipment – oh my God, they had a huge PA, which of course they wouldn’t lend to us. So when the support band left with these enormous bins of sound, like, there was us back onstage with our little boxes.
A band I loved was the Buzzcocks. Great fun lyrics, a totally different approach to music, and unfortunately, with everything being lumped under the banner ‘punk’ at that time, people didn’t really notice they were a little bit off the beaten track.
They played their first gigs with us, up in Manchester. All I really remember is arguing, about anything you care to mention. It was the singer who left not long afterwards, Howard Devoto, and the one who became the singer, Pete Shelley – they took us to a pub called Tommy Ducks, whose big gimmick was underwear stuck on the ceiling, and I misbehaved accordingly. I just found the whole thing rather silly. Because you’re nervous before you do your gig, and you’re not up for, like, these kinds of absurd environments, so I was a little unfair to them, but I think they understand, that’s how we are
. You’ve got to be yourself. Many years later, I got to say sorry.
Malcolm loved to paint himself as the orchestrator of this burgeoning movement, but it was all happening above and beyond his control. His every move was clueless. That September he took us to France for the first time, and we ended up playing to a packed crowd in a Parisian discothèque, for a diehard disco-dancing crowd. You know – ‘Zees eez not ze Bee Gees, eez eet?’ ‘NO!’
What a fantastic time we had, though. I was wearing my Basque beret, the whole thing. Malcolm took us to this great show-off outdoor bar, which was apparently where all the cool célèbres in Paris used to hang out. He introduced us to some multimillionaire friend of his who took us out to this five-star French-nosh restaurant. I loved it – the biggest, fattest, juiciest, rawest, bloodiest steak possible, and I hammered that home with a quail – a whole quail, which looked just like my pet budgie. Tiny little thing, absurd. Where’s the substance to this? I never grasped it, but I grasped the deliciousness.
So that was opening your mind to things, and not letting that change you into an effete culture whore. Quite the opposite. I think that that level of quality should be available to all of us. That’s my way of thinking. Open the doors. And if you get a chance to get a crack in the door, kick it open a little bit further, so someone can follow in behind. Make the world a better place, not a worse place.
Glen thought along those lines too, but his idea of better comes with rules. You shouldn’t swear because, you know, the children, it’s a bad influence on them. It was a major row then, and it’s one I maintain, that there’s no such thing as a swear word; it’s a matter of interpretation. They’re just sounds that humans make that have effect. All words do, and once you start banning words you’re banning what it is to be a human being. How on earth can we restrain ourselves in that way? These are not acts of violence. They’re opinions, and it’s all the more fun when your opinions are wrong. Wow, don’t you go down in flames! You’re fully welcome to talk shit, but if you talk shit, you’re gonna get shit in return.
Another legendary gig came not from Malcolm’s planning, but by invitation. How odd that Chelmsford Maximum Security prison invited the Sex Pistols to play there – to killers and psychos. Fantastic gig, and fantastic prisoners. The amount of gear them fellas had! They were all long-termers; there ain’t no-one in there for nicking a handbag, at least not in the crowd that came to see us. These were real people contaminated by a shitstem not of their own making and caught up in the problems there accordingly. It’s very easy to become a criminal without understanding the guidelines. I see everybody in jail as a victim one way or another, that’s my sense of empathy. I loved it.
These fellas got the songs, I’ll tell you. Halfway through ‘Anarchy’, I go, ‘Cough, cough, the smell of marijuana’s slowing me down!’ But when they’re locked up like that, all those poor fellas had was drugs. The pain I felt for them locked up with no hope of getting out.
Talking to them after, there was no kind of control, we weren’t separated from them. They meant no harm to us, and quite a few of the fellas were expecting me to become a fellow prisoner. ‘You’re on the road to ruin, you are!’ I’ve since proved differently, but they understand society and how society can turn against you.
When we put a bunch of bands together over two days at the 100 Club Punk Festival, the word ‘festival’ was used totally inappropriately, with a huge sense of fun, and by no means meant to be taken as seriously as it has been ever since. Calling it a festival was a hoax on ourselves, definitely tongue-in-cheek. The reporting at the time – and ever since – saw it as a deadpan, serious, dour affair, rigidly adhering to the cause. No, nonsense! It was a bunch of bands having fun, being entertaining and somehow informative.
A lot of the reporting got taken over by events surrounding the NME journalist, Nick Kent. He’d thought he was a Sex Pistols member at one point – he’d partaken of the odd rehearsal situation long before I joined. He’d subsequently set himself up as the mouthpiece of dissension about the Pistols, and it just felt a bit like ‘Get John’ when he turned up.
That night, he got beaten up by Sid. What can I say? I’m amazed he’d even be mentioning it, because to be beaten up by Sid is pretty near impossible. If you’re gonna be a bad-mouth, sooner or later, someone is going to try and tell you to shut your bad mouth. A lot of people had a lot of issues with Nick Kent. You can’t go around just being that spiteful and inaccurate in what you write, and think that somebody isn’t going to do something about it. Sid wasn’t in the Pistols at that time; he was just angered by what he was reading.
But I enjoyed the 100 Club ‘Festival’. For me, the diversity of the bands was great. You could stand there in the crowd listening to all of them, and then go on and do your bit. That was hugely enjoyable. And of course all of us would be drinking together, so everybody was inebriated. There was no hard-weight pressure on you to be superb. You were just being yourself, and then there you were in the audience mixing it up. That was a very close feeling. Liked it. A sense of camaraderie, and there didn’t seem to be any supercilious inter-band jealousies going on.
By now, the girls that would come to the gigs had their own creative genius just in the way they’d be dressing. There was a whole mob of girls that started wearing bin-liner bags, long before the press caught on. Because of the strikes, the garbage on the streets, it was the natural thing to evolve into. The authorities had run out of black bin-bags, so they started to make bright green and bright pink. Astounding colours, and perfect if you couldn’t afford topnotch alleged punk – you’d wrap one of them on, a few belts on it, and studs, and bingo, ready to go! ‘Right, where’s the boys?’
Vivienne’s bondage suit, on the other hand, was the most restricting, disgusting, annoying thing to be in. I felt really hateful in it. I loved it! Now, the zip on the pants ran from the arse to the front. The trouble with that was, it was too tight, and she cut them always with a feminine design, and that made male genitalia inside feel incredibly uncomfortable. It was like a ‘u’ cut, rather than a u-bend and then up. There was nowhere for your meatbox to gather. Oh man, so you’d have to swing it either to the left or the right. You know the old tailor’s quote – does sir dress to the left or the right? But even then, there wasn’t enough material . . . So uncomfortable!
She never ever understood the human shape, and, I think, bitterly resented it. She certainly never had any concept of where men’s goods are supposed to go. That’s what happens when you live with Malcolm as a lover: she performed expensive castration on her adoring fashion-worshippers!
The strap between the legs, that’s one thing, right? For me, having a football culture background because of where I came from, the idea of ‘I can’t run in these so I have to stand and fight’ was a very good one, but that’s not what she was doing this for, because when it came to the zip, listen, my testicles were unfeasibly bothered. Her answer would be, well, then, leave the zip open! Now: I tried that at one gig, I think it was Leeds. No, Middlesbrough. I wore a pair of bondage pants, and what happened was, because I left the zip open, the chafing at the zipper each side of my genitalia was like a pair of saws cutting in from either side, and led to a really major infection. Within two days, you’re doing an interview with an incredibly important music magazine, and they’re asking you, what’s it like to be a rock star? Hahaha! Come on, John, all the girls must love ya! You’re thinking, There’s no way I can show two half-sawn-off nuts to a woman. Me meat and veg were jeopardized.
Ah God, and if you were unlucky enough with that zip, that ran from the arse to the front, that was very painful, and you had to watch the way you sat down. They were completely cut for women. But the way Vivienne would explain it was, ‘That’s all part of the bondage experience.’ I quote directly. The woman was hilarious!
But soon everybody was tripping over their leg straps. All over the world! It’s an aside but it’s a great story: a really good friend of mine, Paul Young – not the pop sing
er – bought a pair, and his mum ironed them! Creases down the front! She meant well, someone was caring, but my God, is that painful on a teenager? Don’t worry – an hour in a pair of bondage pants, and the sweat would have ironed that crease right out of them.
I’ve got to say, however, her T-shirts were amazing. I liked the idea of two squares sewn together, that was a Vivienne idea, and then the dialogue written on the front or whatever, but the concept of breaking up a T-shirt into two squares sewn together from the neck to the arm, and from under the armpit to the bottom, is excellent. What do you need it shaped for? I liked that, except onstage, when you’re giving your biggest, hardest running-around bit, and then there’s a photo of what looks like a beer-belly, when you’re only twenty. You know, too short.
The consistent problem I had with Vivienne’s designs was that the aesthetics counted more to her than the actual physicality of a human being. And also the unravelling, because seams would never be finished. Then again, she didn’t really have the money to pay for proper seamstresses, and proper finishing, so it was all happenstance. I mean, she really did survive a universe of adversity there. I’ve met her since, and she’s said very bad things about me over the years, and I’ve said very bad things about her. I still respect her. Who else is, like, walking that edge? Who else? That’s the joy of what we do, that when we talk about each other, we’re teasing each other into the next element. But it gets mistranslated in the press as a bitchfest.
Vivienne was always a very difficult character, though. Very unforgiving and judgemental, and very hard to get on with. At the same time she’d be standing there, yelling abuse, looking for all the world like a turkey! One particular outfit – she was yelling abuse at me before some gig, and she was wearing a full-body, one-piece, zip-up-the-back rubber suit, and it was flesh-coloured, and where the nipples were there were red rings, and it went all the way up to the neck, and she had her hair stuck up, and she did look like a turkey – an emaciated, plucked turkey. Her wrinkly old neck was trying to hover out of the top of this thing. It was before Sid joined the band. I didn’t know what she was going on about. Who cared? I was just looking at this absurd thing in front of me, and Sid went, ‘Oh, shut up, turkey neck!’
