by Lydon, John
On many occasions at them kind of gigs I did manage to do that. I gave them one particular target to all hate together equally. That would be Johnny Rotten. If needs be, that’s what you do. You come out firing and you quite literally antagonize every single person in the hall. It stopped the brawling. To me that was success. The one thing I really feared when I got onstage was silence from an audience. That’s the hardest weapon to fight against.
It all started from the gig in Caerphilly, I think, when all the Christian people turned up, with their religious ‘When The World Turns To Rottenness’ banners. Suddenly our name came up in the Houses of Parliament. It was Tory GLC Councillor Bernard Brook-Partridge who led the charge. I watched him pontificate on the Six O’Clock News one evening. ‘Erm-er, this has got to be stopped . . . er-erm, it’s the downfall of society . . .’ And/or whatever else he said. What a foolishness. The juvenility of it all.
The hilarity of it is that years and years and years later, I had a friend who joined the Freemasons, and Brook-Partridge was apparently leader of that particular chapter, and had nothing but good things to say about me. It’s like all politicians, they get up on their high horses, but they’re actually talking red herrings. They don’t believe in nothing. We were just an easy target, a bunch of saucy boys from the wrong side of town who were making a racket and were easy to shoot down.
Obviously this was after I’d paid the place a visit for late-night drinking sessions with Jeremy Thorpe. Maybe that’s what spurred this on, but the idea of Brook-Partridge declaring us as public enemies and trying to plot our downfall was preposterous, because, actually, the laws they were discussing us under were so arcane. How can Parliament re-enact a hang-’em-high Traitors and Treason Act in the late twentieth century? They couldn’t. So they backed themselves into a corner and looked pretty damn foolish for it. And quite frankly gave more power to my elbow. Strongbow!
I knew from there on in that these institutions we’re all so frightened of are pretty much headless chickens and there for the taking, if we ever formulated ourselves together accurately enough. But it’s the dissipation and the personal animosities and jealousies that stop movements happening. I’m not talking violent movements here. I’m talking, if you want to change a situation for the better, it is possible, it really is.
In many ways, you become ultimately fearless of it. At times you’d kind of be wary and you’d still be thinking, ‘Oh God, they’re gonna lock me up,’ or whatever, but you know, learning from those experiences you reach the point where you don’t care if they lock you up or not. It doesn’t change anything, in fact it just makes them look sillier – you know, don’t play the victim. And don’t allow yourself to be victimized or dictated to by what, to my mind, are ill-educated, spoilt children.
‘What are you going to say to me? Why aren’t you supplying us with jobs and a decent lifestyle, you fucks? You’re gonna tell me to shut up because I’m finding the economic situation you put the country in a problem? And using that very thing that they just love to espouse in the West, democracy! Ooooh – the right to say what you have to, to stand up and be counted.’ Wow. Didn’t I blow a hole in that bubble. And seriously, a BIG hole in that bubble. I found that to be an absolute non-truth. I wouldn’t tolerate it. And still won through. So there you go, boys and girls of the world, Johnny did his bit for ya. Fucking say thanks, cunts.
I never lectured. Just pointed out the flaws in it all. A song like ‘Problems’ is telling you, ‘Too many problems/Why am I here?’ It’s all just problems, so, one by one, resolve them. And you can’t do that by sitting silent on the sofa, or pontificating nonsense from a soapbox. Your songs have to be reasonable in the way you communicate the message. They’re not lectures. And so my songs don’t lecture, they give you freedom of thought, inside of the agenda I’m pushing.
I think it was understood that Johnny Rotten weren’t no back-down cunt. This boy don’t surrender. And I won through. I did. I took ’em all on – this is my message to these ‘punk’ bands who don’t quite understand it, and they’re so busy inter-fighting and trying to bash each other’s heads in through jealousy: the bigger enemy is out there, go pull that one down, and fight the cause for all of us, not just your selfish little angles. It’s ever so much more fun. Listen, my enemies are not human beings, regardless of people liking me or not, my enemies are institutions.
HUGS AND KISSES, BABY! #1
Punk opened the door on the universe of sex in a really nice, innocent, open way. I didn’t realize until then that sex was readily available. Literally from the very first Pistols gig, it was, ‘Oh, hello?’
Going back a bit further, going to clubs like the Lacy Lady in them early days before the Pistols, it was the way you used to dress that was an attraction of sorts. It was also a problem of sorts, because it could attract massive hooligan attention, and I had many of those agendas to deal with.
Girls found me interesting, and always – which is the way I like it – in a motherly way. I’m a sucker for the soft-bunny touch, even though my imagery, the way my persona came over, was one of ‘cold, hard, spitefully indifferent’, so I’m six of one, half a dozen of the other, really. Girls seem to have a natural understanding that all the signals of someone who’s trying to be an outsider are really the actions of someone that wants attention and love. This whole process reaffirms something in your psyche in a healthy way – that you’re not really as ugly as you envision yourself. There is hope.
Once you were up there onstage with a band, you didn’t have to pursue any longer, and you didn’t have to feel embarrassed because you didn’t have the right chat-up lines. Very, very interesting. Great nights on the early punk scene, lots of fun, and the girls were as tough as the boys in that world.
I once dismissed sex back then as two minutes of squelching noises. I was telling it like it felt. It was an honest statement. Or was it two minutes and fifty seconds? Yes, maybe it went up with inflation. Well, sometimes it did. That was the round-about best-of figure, the average norm. But there wasn’t any depth in it, and therefore, ultimately, no interest. It’s the same thing as: I can’t be a drug addict because the repetition of it would bore me to death. I’d die of boredom before I died of the drugs.
As the so-called King of Punk, I was almost getting too much sexual attention suddenly. Me being me, my reflex was, ‘Is it me you’re looking for? Or is it the pop star side of it?’ At which point I withdraw, because I don’t like the feeling that I’ve been treated as a commodity. I saw the change as the Pistols started to happen. From, ‘Urgh, who’s that ugly thing in the corner?’ to ‘Oh, ’ello, gorgeous!’ in, basically, a heartbeat. But listen, the humour of it wasn’t lost on me.
I first saw Nora at Malcolm’s shop in 1975. She came in with Chris Spedding, who was playing guitar with the likes of John Cale and Bryan Ferry at that time. He was very shy, and Nora wasn’t. He was worried about his flamenco shirts not quite fitting. Nora was fussing around, and somehow the screen in the fitting room fell, and there was Chris Spedding with his belly bursting out of a far-too-tight shirt. That was very typical of Vivienne’s clothing. She would never make them to fit, so you’d always have to order them a couple of inches bigger.
Nora already had a daughter, Ariane, who’d been born and brought up initially in Germany, where Nora originally came from. Nora used to promote gigs in Germany, people like Wishbone Ash, Jimi Hendrix, and Yes. Then she ran away from the confines of German society, which was far too restricting and nosy. Everybody’s in your business.
During punk, Ariane became Ari Up, the singer in the Slits. Her father was Frank Forster, a very popular singer in Deutschland, in a Frank Sinatra way. Germany after the War was very influenced by the American air bases, and that dictated a lot of the music that was popular. Over here, Nora brought up Ari really well, and got her to learn all sorts of musical instruments, which were always lying around. Ari was only about thirteen or fourteen when I first saw her bouncing around.
Nora, I soon discovered, is a guiding light, and a creature of utter chaos. She was a very odd and different soul. Not at all like one of the average old hippie birds, who weren’t quite sure what punk was about. There were loads of them. That, or working-class girls out of the estate, full of ‘fack you’s. None of them seemed like options to me. But Nora – God, she shone in a room. From way across the other side, she shone, she glowed.
Nora loathed me at first sight. At least, that’s what I thought. It was because of what everyone was saying to her. ‘Oh, you don’t want to talk to him, he’s awful’, propagating a myth around me.
She was short, sharp, brutal, and very intelligent with her remarks, and a lot of that was based on what people had told her about me. But Nora being Nora, she was inquisitive. If people are telling her not to talk to anyone, she’ll talk to them, and I’m exactly the same way. I was told she was stuck-up, and so I found her deeply fascinating. Once we started talking, all of that nonsense came to light and we realized we had both been lied to. Everybody told lies, then. Shocking.
I always loved the way Nora understands how to dress. She has a completely individual, incredible style, and that style is reflective of her personality. That drew me in. To the point that I never smoked cigarettes until I met Nora. She used to smoke Marlboro, so I started smoking Marlboro, too. So the afterglow ruined me for life. But then Nora gave up smoking completely, and here I am, still to this day!
It was a topsy-turvy situation, for sure. We didn’t waltz straight off into the stars of romanticism. There were all kinds of heated arguments, but in those heated moments we discovered each other as human beings.
I’ve got to be honest, before we met both of us played the field, but we found the field to be full of moos. And those moos turned out to be nothing more than muses, and that’s nothing to base a solid lifestyle on. It’s too vacuous. I don’t personally get the rewards of one-night stands at all. Just don’t get it, never did. I always left those situations feeling empty inside, and rolling over and going, ‘Oh my God, do you really look like that?’, and knowing that’s exactly what they felt too.
I’d gone through the one-nighters period, but there was a point where it became a futile, boring, repetitive procedure. I didn’t know it at the time but what I was really looking for was a proper relationship, and that was slowly forming with Nora. There were girls leading up into that, longer than a week, shall we say, but something really good happened and clicked with Nor’, very seriously. We learned to really know each other, and that’s the best that any human being can ever look for, I think – the right person who truly accepts you for what you are, warts and all, and doesn’t make you feel ashamed of yourself for any reason at all. So self-doubt is gone, and that’s what the right partner teaches you.
At first, Nora had a flat right near Chelsea football ground in West London. It was a basement, and it was cold and damp and dark and very unenjoyable. I never liked that place much, but then she moved into a little house in South London, off Gowrie Road. That’s where things began popping. We were firmly bonding then, and that’s where the likes of young Neneh Cherry came over from the States to stay, and hung out with Ari.
This is what people don’t realize: Nora’s really the ‘Punk Mummy Warrior’ figure. Without Nora, there wouldn’t have been the Slits. She’s the one that funded it and held it together, regardless of what anyone else has to say. And Nora has been like that with many people and many situations. We’re not talking money here, we’re talking benevolent guidance.
You’ve got to bear in mind that none of us were conceiving of the concepts of punk as such a lasting force. Or indeed what a contrivance it has become for the lesser mortals who now dabble in it. We weren’t doing this for titleships – it’s just the way it was. Common sense prevails, and so, a very well-led house.
Ari was only fourteen or fifteen when the Slits started up. It was very much like watching a St Trinian’s film. You know, hooligan schoolgirls – fascinating! Oh, I love the lyrics, because only two of them spoke English with any skill. Palmolive and Ari, by contrast, were a contradiction, language-wise: Palmolive had more Spanish than English in her, and added to Ari’s cross-juxtaposition of badly-learnt English, badly-learnt German, and even-more-appallingly-learnt Rastafarian patois, it made for very bizarre songs. I know that Nora helped out there, too. Deeply, deeply hilarious.
I was always very proud to have Ari as . . . well, she’d call me Granddad! I was always very chuffed by it; it felt we belonged to each other, even though later on we rowed like cats and dogs over sillinesses like religion. Can you imagine religion dividing the punk movement? Anything is possible. So I always got on with Ari; me being with Nora was never really a problem, and Ari rated me because I wasn’t a parasite. I came fully-loaded.
So, Nora had been around, and I’d been around, and good things came of that – a slow progression into something incredible, and that’s the best way. It doesn’t all happen at once always, and particularly when you’re connecting with other human beings, it’s best to spend some time on it, as I’ve learned with various band members . . .
5
THIS BOY DON’T SURRENDER
You couldn’t miss me in a crowd. I was wearing that pink women’s rowing club jacket, the one I’d scrawled ‘GOD SAVE OUR GRACIOUS QUEEN’ all over, a leopardskin waistcoat that I ended up giving to Sid, and a pair of grey pants from Vivienne’s shop, which ended up on Paul Cook. That’s how we were, mix and match. On top, I had a spiky ginger hedgehog going on.
What I shouldn’t have done is gone out for a walk in all that clobber with a packet of gear. It was just into the New Year – 1977 – and we were still all over the newspapers as a result of Bill Grundy, ‘Anarchy’, and being bumped off EMI. We were rehearsing in Denmark Street, when I nipped out with Nils Stevenson, who worked for Malcolm. I had a mental lapse. I thought, ‘Well, if I leave the speed behind somewhere, even if I hide it pretty well, Steve Jones’ll find it.’ He was very good at ‘finding things’, that boy. Steve always wanted to know everything about anyone. He was a continual rooter. We should’ve nicknamed him Drano, or Domestos, in that respect.
The bust was a very odd one, because the emblem on their police helmets wasn’t one I recognized. They had pythons on them – like, what the hell is this lot? They were mercenaries, a little bit more hardcore than the usual bobby. This lot were a notch up. I later found out they were some kind of special patrol group.
They sat me in the back of the van and drove around until they’d arrested enough people. I was sitting there, thinking, ‘I’m screwed, I’ve also got a knife, what on earth am I gonna go down for now?’ I was looking, in my mind, at a long, long term inside. And then, bearing in mind the record I’d put out recently, I knew that weren’t gonna bode well in court with any bloke in a wig and a long dark cloak.
I didn’t consider myself particularly criminally minded, but the police were heavy-duty in those days, and the slightest infraction would get you round the neck. I was given a choice: ‘What are you going to go down for – the drugs, or the knife?’ I thought, ‘Easy, the drugs!’ A very stupid move, in the long run.
The main officer put the gear in a plastic bag, stuck it in his back pocket, and then sat on it. They then drove around Soho for a while, going, ‘Look at that one, whurr-urr, let’s grab him!’ So, what would the amphetamine sulphate do, next to the heat of his sweaty flesh? Given my detailed knowledge of speed, I was fairly sure it would evaporate. Therefore, as the minutes went by, I knew my charges were diminishing.
At the station I was strip-searched in front of a woman officer, which apparently they’re not supposed to do. But what are you going to say at that time: ‘Stop that, it’s rude’? That won’t work. When you’re in custody, you tighten down the hatches and get wise with your words. You try to diminish yourself in stature, and lessen yourself as a target.
When it came to bail, I didn’t know anyone that didn’t have a conviction of one kind or another, t
o get me out. It dawns on you just how under the cosh working-class people are. Everybody’s guilty of something, according to the institutions. So that was a bugger. Malcolm could’ve got me out, but he didn’t show up.
I don’t know how my dad did it in the end, just to get me out on bail. And then there was an error on when I was supposed to turn up in court – they got the dates wrong. The form I had didn’t tally with the actual court date, so they raided my dad’s house and caught me trying to jump out the upstairs window, so I was done for evading arrest. But because the report card was filed wrong, I got off. You can’t evade arrest when you’re actually not even supposed to be getting arrested.
For the hearing, Malcolm was given a specific time, and of course he turned up late. He couldn’t actually raise forty quid to pay the fine, so they set another pay deadline a few hours later, and he turned up with it with minutes to spare. Otherwise I would have gone off and done time.
I don’t think I got specifically targeted as a direct result of all the fuss with the band. I just should’ve been more careful.
By now, I’d finally turned that ‘GOD SAVE OUR GRACIOUS QUEEN’ jacket into a song. I was waiting to go to rehearsals one day, and it was a long wait. In them days, I’d get up about midday, and I sat at the kitchen table, made myself some baked beans, just took a piece of paper and wrote down the lyrics – a very rough guide to it, but the absolute crux of it was there.
What I liked most about it was, there was no verse-chorus in it. I was impressed with myself when I read it back. The hook lines were really not about chorus effects at all. They were to emphasize and set up the next set of lyrics. I think ‘God Save The Queen’ is a powerhouse example of how pop can be turned upside down, on its head, and still be pop. It breaks all the rules of the pop song format.
