by Lydon, John
I’d have to ring my parents up and beg them – beg them – not to do interviews, and warn them that they’d be chiselled. ‘Oh, wi feel wi need to stand op fer yi!’ ‘Please, don’t! You’re just gonna make it worse.’ They did one interview with the Islington Gazette which was a particular hatchet job. They gave them all these photos of me when I was young, and none of them were returned. Terrible, and a very spiteful article.
I instinctively wanted to protect my family from the public circus. With the Pistols I was thrown in there, way at the deep end, and I didn’t think my family had the tools to cope with it. It’s very hard to come to grips with the world that you used to view as important and relevant and caring and real – i.e. journalism – when it actually turned out to be a savage vindictive opinionated bag of bile.
Thanks to the press, we were involved in this huge quagmire of misinterpretation and Chinese whispers via the media, which start out as a tiny lie, spread into an enormous one, then explode into an atomic bomb with no reality in it at all. And it’s very hard to hunt it down and correct it.
The media doesn’t exactly chastise itself for getting things wrong. And where do you go? Who do you ring up and go, ‘Oi, you can’t write that about me! It’s a fib, it’s a lie!’ ‘Oh well, you have to prove that.’ ‘With what money?’ There was no money in our pockets at that time. We weren’t earning, couldn’t play shows, couldn’t do anything.
All of this created a wedge between us, because these situations separate you, they don’t bring you together at all. I think it’s a device that the media are not aware of, but it definitely has the end result of destroying you –if you’re weak enough. We were weak, but not too weak, because we kept the ship afloat somehow. But again, Malcolm went into hiding, not talking. You couldn’t find him; there’d be a load of people wrapped around him, all his old college cronies: ‘Malcolm’s got a headache at the moment,’ or, ‘Malcolm can’t come to the phone, he’s busy.’ On and on and on.
I never quite figured out what drove Malcolm. A very fertile mind, but prone to being poisonous from time to time. Self-defeating, actually. He’d create wonderful situations but he’d fold back on them. He’d light a bomb, but he wouldn’t want it to explode, so he ain’t no Guy Fawkes. He’d like the idea of Guy Fawkes more than the reality.
After Grundy, he became emasculated, he had his balls cut off, and he did that to himself. He lived in fear rather than fearlessness. Too much education, so the intellectual process just ends up in self-doubt, because you over-think a situation to the point where you’re killing the joy of it and you’re killing the instinct. We do things in life to put ourselves into a position where our instincts can take over. Not with Malcolm. Instinctively he was correct, but then the intellectual process would negate that. I think first, then I act. Or, in Malcolm’s case, he withdrew.
Malcolm wasn’t an out-and-out crook or a thief, but what he’d see as important to spend money on wouldn’t necessarily be what I’d be agreeing to. Malcolm’s leanings were always artistic and madcap, whereas for me the motivation was, ‘I need somewhere to live, give me the money!’ Malcolm’s argument would be: ‘Well, if I put it in my name, the transaction will go through ever so much quicker!’ A great deal of problems arose for Steve and Paul, because their flat was in Malcolm’s name. I could see that problem coming.
I think there was a shrewdness on his part – like how adults tend to manipulate children. Even after all this advance money, we were still only on fifty quid a week. Everything was now all being saved up to be invested in a Sex Pistols movie. This was a project I bitterly resented, because he was keeping it to himself. It was his project, it was all his ideas. Let’s just say, that’s what somebody that has an Andy Warhol complex can bring to the table. He was always very impressed with Andy Warhol’s ‘everybody has their fifteen minutes of fame’ thing, and he fancied that for himself.
One collaborator he tried out for this masterpiece was ‘tit-sploitation’ director Russ Meyer. When I met him, I didn’t like him at all. An overbearing oaf – pig-ignorant and obviously a perv. There was a very odd thing between him and Malcolm. I knew that these were two people that could never get on. Not ever. There was no common ground. Meyer was very brazen in his approach to sexuality, and I suppose Malcolm was trying to scoop up the droplets from that. Malcolm would emblazon himself with other people’s efforts, so I suppose he fancied himself at that point as a ladies’ man also. Russ would look at Malcolm and go, ‘You look like a lady, man!’
I actually put forward Graham Chapman from Monty Python for the job, because I’d seen his antics in a pub in Archway. He did a little trick with this small dog, where he’d lie flat on the floor and pour a bit of cider on his genitals, and the dog of course would lick them. If Malcolm was talking about making a film about us, then I thought that’s the sort of person who should be directing it. But he was not going to be tolerating Malcolm’s phoniness. Malcolm eventually would have to run away and hide from people like that, because you have to put your wares on the table at some point. Anyone can talk up a storm, but you have to declare how big your guns are, and Malcolm’s weren’t sizeable.
Finally, I got Malcolm to get me a place of my own at Gunter Grove, near the World’s End in Chelsea. I was fed up with all this moving about, and I knew damn well it weren’t going to last forever with a manager like Malcolm. At any point they could pull the rug from underneath me. I wanted something for myself to be fully grounded with. I didn’t care where, but Gunter Grove was cheap. I think it was Stevie Winwood who actually owned it, and Island Records were selling it off for him. I got in there, and the best parties I ever had were there.
At the same time, the authorities were desperate to pin something on me, so that’s when the police raids started, and one way or another they never really stopped.
I genuinely felt I was bearing the brunt of this ferocity. There was no back-up from my band, and definitely none from the management, so who the hell was backing me up? Some bored kid in a bedsit, who I had no way of communicating with?
In fact, I actually took to responding to fan letters around that time. I used to do that quite a lot because that was my only real outlet. I never went on to meet any of my correspondents, as far as I know or remember, but I do know that a lot of the letters were ‘thank you – thank you for making me able to think for myself’, along those lines, which is bloody heart-warming stuff, and then two hours later your front door’s kicked open by the police! I’ve always had time for people that wanted to communicate with me in that way. Always.
Me having my own flat annoyed Steve and Paul very much. They’d be like, ‘Who do you think you are, hurr hurr?’ I’d reply, ‘Well, I’m writing the songs, aren’t I? And who the fuck’s that cunt, Malcolm? That’s your mate, your King’s Road luvvie-duvvie. He ain’t mine, he don’t like me, he don’t like anything I do, yet you’re all profiteering off it. Quite frankly, if “Anarchy In The UK” or “God Save The Queen” were with any other set of lyrics, they would not have been what they were. They wouldn’t have had any direction, they would have been pointless, dull, rubbish. Just another trash pop band.’
Their ‘you can’t sing’ attitude stemmed from the fact that ‘boy band’ was ultimately what they all wanted. But to be brutally honest about it, if I can’t sing then what were Paul and Steve – and Glen – doing? They wanted celebrity, I suppose. I was naturally attracted to the exact opposite of that, and by default got them to where they wanted to be.
But because it wasn’t something they quite understood, the rebellious spirit etc., it was a problem and it would always be a problem and it never got any better. And it was never resolved, it was never openly discussed. The basic attitude given to me was one of disgust for everything I did. And out of that environment, of course, I quite naturally chose Sid. Have some of this punishing number, baby! It was the better route. Poor old Sid, my mate, it destroyed him, and it breaks my heart to say it because he was pushed in at the deep end,
but at the same time he made the band better. It was never about nicely played melodies, and why the hell should it be? Nothing in rebellion is about gentle melodies. It just isn’t.
Still, there was that yobby image that was being cast out there about me, and I’m not like that. I’m a quiet, contemplative kind of soul, the deep thinker, and oddly enough very rational. That wasn’t what was being put out there into the publicity machine, and that was a pity. I tried to do my bit to correct that when I did radio shows and played music I liked. There was one on Capital Radio in London, with Tommy Vance, which got a lot of attention. I played Can, Beefheart, Culture, Neil Young, Peter Hammill, Dr Alimantado – and all I got from Malcolm was, ‘How dare you? You’re ruining punk!’ ‘What? Excuse me?’
That was the beginning of the end, where we were virtually no longer speaking – that issue – because for me it was an opportunity to play all the music I loved and adored, and explain the reasons why and what it is I’m doing right now and where I am in the scheme of things in the world. And he was just furious, because Malcolm’s presumption was that punk was the New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, the Ramones – but the Ramones didn’t exist for me at that point, because I had Status Quo! And the Flaming Groovies were never top of my chart parade.
It was just him trying to tailor us like we were some new silly T-shirt he’d come up with. Control freakism. Did you think I’m some kind of packaged hamster you just purchased and put a sequinned neck-choker on?! You daft cunt, telling me what I do and do not like. Fuck off! I was really angry – really angry. We’ve got to learn to stop thinking in terms of categories as a species. This is that and that’s that. No, there’s cross-pollination all the time. And I don’t believe in six degrees of separation, I believe in a continuum.
That’s where a split began and quite a serious one – a land-mass separation of what is punk and what isn’t punk. I’m sorry, I’m on the correct side of this, fighting this backwards thinking of trying to justify yourself by trashy aversions to things. And that’s no shame to Iggy or the New York Dolls, who I love and adore – they fit very nicely in with my Todd Rundgren. It’s people who experiment in life that interest me. Not just, ‘Wham bam, thank you, here’s a pile of trash, and look how junked-up I am.’
I didn’t want the junkie image thing to creep in, and of course Sid bought well into that and wanted to live the New York lifestyle – so there was Malcolm’s hook on that one. Malcolm was very enamoured with New York.
We finally persuaded him to book us some gigs in England for August. We ended up having to advertise ourselves under assumed names like the Tax Exiles, Acne Rabble, and S.P.O.T.S., which stood for Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly.
Having to go out incognito was at the same time ridiculous and challengingly refreshing. It turned into the world’s worst-kept secret. But it kept the authorities off our backs. Whether or not we were banned outright is a moot point – maybe it was all part of Malcolm’s alleged masterplan. I don’t know what it was that some of these local councils thought we’d be getting up to, all the riots that would ensue, but it never really happened in that way. The only negatives that we ever really faced was from apparent ‘music lovers’, hahaha.
On that tour – which was only half a dozen gigs, so it never really felt like touring – it became a close thing with local audiences. Very warming, but it seemed that every time anything was working in a really good comfortable way here, for us and the audience, Malcolm would find a way of sabotaging it, like he was scared of it actually being successful.
He got very scared of the long arm of the law who were eyeing us with malevolence, and he backed away into the fiasco of his movie – called Who Killed Bambi?, at that point – as a light-hearted escape from the reality of what it was we were actually all about. He was also very fearful of dealing with me in any verbal confrontation because he knew damn well that I had the artillery.
In many ways it became a power play. A very odd situation was unfolding: I was being blamed by Steve and Paul for bringing ‘that arsehole Sid’ into the band. Malcolm stirred all that up and got them two very angry – and by such a scene isolating me – and then tried to create a friction between me and Sid. Because Sid and Malcolm oddly enough were communicating. So he was playing both sides, Malcolm, with me losing out in all of these scenarios. And those situations then developed into the nonsense that they became.
From the beginning, Malcolm didn’t make a good job of the whole interpersonal thing within the band. He really should’ve been ashamed of himself. It was now all spiralling out of control, but he would throw in spiteful digs and rumours that would cause all manner of trouble. No two of us were ever told the same thing. It wasn’t great fun to be yelling at each other, and when we unravelled what he’d said to each of us, we’d realize the divisions all traced back to him. Then all of us would go, ‘Right, let’s get him to ’fess up’ or whatever, and that’s when, of course, he’d be behind locked doors.
I remember Steve once smiling and happily saying to his face what a cunt he was, which of course Malcolm would smile at and take as some kind of achievement. So that’s how their relationship was working. You weren’t going to be able to move these unbudgeable nonsenses.
I just got on with being myself, until at some point after trying to share an apartment with Sid, I started thinking, ‘Well, do I really need to be in this band?’ The stuff I was writing and thinking seemed to be beyond this now. I had bigger ambitions than just being involved in this domestic drama which offered no reprieve.
Never Mind The Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols, the album, when it finally came out that October, was a nice end result, I have to concede. It showed to me that Steve had great capabilities; he could be taking that guitar to all kinds of different, new, exciting and original places. It was like a guitar army, rather than just a messy noise, going, ‘That’ll do.’ He had a good learning curve on him, Steve. That’s how I viewed it at the time. Recording had gone on for ever, and it’d almost turned into a guitar roadshow, but my God, I was liking it. The blending together of all those different takes had made a delicious end product – although, it left the band with something of a problem if you wanted to reproduce that live.
Richard Branson did a great thing to promote Never Mind The Bollocks. He filled the Virgin record stores with these Never Mind The Bollocks posters, the yellow posters with the blackmail lettering – particularly in Oxford Street in London, because he had two shops there, one at one end and one at the other – so we just blurted from the whole window all the way round. Fantastic.
The same posters went up in stores up north, but the north had a different attitude to it – in particular, Nottingham, where they decided to take a local store to court for their supposedly offensive window display. They were to be tried for the ‘Indecent Advertising Act of 1889’. So we had to go to court. Well, we didn’t have to go to court, but I volunteered. And I wanted Malcolm to go too. We were gonna go and stand up for our right to use the word ‘bollocks’, which to my mind, reading the Oxford dictionary, is a perfectly feasible Anglo-Saxon word for ‘testicles’. Malcolm backed out, of course, and so I was driven up there by some Virgin representatives, because they understood the importance of it. We hired QC John Mortimer, writer of TV’s Rumpole of the Bailey, to prove ‘bollocks’ was actually derived from a nickname for clergymen.
I’m against the banning of any word, so I was more than happy to sit in the front row in the court room to hear what this judge had to say, telling me what word I could and couldn’t use. I was absolutely dying to get on a stand and give a speech. I had prepared one, I’d really, really worked on this, I hadn’t drunk for days, I kept myself really sober – but they didn’t give me the chance, because the judge went, ‘We must reluctantly find you not guilty.’ So then we whizzed straight off to see some friends of the record store people, who ran the local radio station, and had great conversations. I got another great chance to play my favourite records to back up the court-case vi
ctory. And of course I immediately went into, ‘Where’s Malcolm? What a wanker, so I’d like to dedicate Cliff Richard’s “Devil Woman” to him.’ I was enjoying this ‘ruining punk’ lark.
We drove home later in one of Branson’s buddies’ Aston Martin at high speed. Fantastic day. Virgin were backing me, they were supporting this. For me it was a personal tragedy that not one of the band wanted to be there, or the management, and I really seriously felt from that moment on this was never ever going to be a unified group. Because they were lacking the courage of commitment. By not turning up they were completely devaluing the Sex Pistols.
In early December we were all set to play our biggest ever gig in and around London, at Brunel University. Unfortunately, it turned into an ill-conceived nonsense, thanks to guess who. We had no equipment that anybody could be hearing us on, just appalling, and Sid’s drug nonsense made the whole thing vile and difficult and painful to go through. The cheapskatedness of it.
There were hundreds of people in Brunel that night, and hundreds outside, they came from everywhere – so we should’ve at least had a good sound system. I’m not blaming everything on that, but it’s one thing for the band not to be able to hear each other, quite another to have to strain your ears out in the audience. An unforgivable lack of consideration. But Malcolm wanted to create a scene of chaos. Bullshit, he just didn’t want to spend the money. He wouldn’t learn: you’ve got to give a lot to get a little.
The only respite was when we played two benefit gigs on Christmas Day for striking firemen and their kids in Huddersfield – a matinee show for the kids and an evening show for the adults, which turned out to be the last gigs we ever did in England. It was great to do it for them because they were all broke and nobody gave a damn about them. These people weren’t going to have a proper Christmas, so we laid it all on, flooded the place with cake and presents for the kids.
