by Lydon, John
Here we were, the alleged most toughest band in the world, and at the kids matinee show we’d have to play to seven-year-olds! There’s an awful lot you have to leave at the door to do that. To start with, I was thinking, ‘How on earth am I going to sing “Anarchy” here, with any sense of realism?’ Well, kids totally knock you into place with that. They’re going, ‘You’re just one of us, John, a big stoopid kid.’
Then the cake started flying, and it went into absolute insane mental brilliance. Absolute slapstick. It showed our lighter side. It was Carry On Sex Pistols, with Steve as Sid James. Kids can be such a good bounce back to reality. It knocked the stuffing out of Sid too. He was trying to be the hard rocker bloke, but how can you be tough with a Christmas cake in your face? It reminded us that it all had got a little too serious.
As a band, that was probably the closest we’d ever been, but it had come to the point where Malcolm just wanted the band to cease to exist. We just wanted him to go away, but he carried on with that poisonous behind-the-scenes stuff, and it became a total no-hoper. We were right on the brink of falling apart, but not before . . .
Can you imagine what it was like for us Sexy Pissups to have the opportunity to tour America? It wasn’t like nowadays, where any fool can stump up the air fare. Most people could never afford plane tickets back then – ever-never-ever – and certainly not the likes of us. Phwooar, off to see John Wayne Land, yippee-aye-oh! And be paid for the privilege – absolutely astounding! It’s the major benefit of being in a band: you really do get the opportunity to do stuff you could never have dreamed of. Sure opens your mind, I can tell you. Whatever happened, we owed it to ourselves to cash in our chips on this one.
America, to us, was Kojak, Ironside, and dare I mention Starsky and Hutch, a show I only remember for the car. America was all big-arse cars, just like in the films. They’ve actually downscaled in that respect these days, so you would think there would be more room on the freeways – no, there’s just more cars.
American rock, though, was in desperate need of a shot in the arm. It was just West Coast banality. Mellow, drippy blancmange like the Eagles – aaargh!
I love me musics. I like to know the be-all-and-end-all of ALL of it. In fact, sometimes I’m more fond of the things I hate, they’re oddly more rewarding. But the Grateful Dead were so moribund and boring.
The idea of us ‘conquering America’ was fantastically hilarious. Before we could get out there, however, I was having proper serious problems getting a visa, thanks to my speed conviction. The only thing going in my favour was that, one stupid night not long before we were due out there, I went to a club with some of my escort friends – Linda Ashby and her crowd – and I was stretched out on the staircase when someone tried to rob the cash register. They tried to run up the stairs, but they tripped over my foot, fell backwards, knocked themselves out, and suddenly I was accoladed in the press for stopping a robbery.
Suddenly I was the hero of the hour. Ouch! At the time, I was rather spooked by it. It was nothing I wanted mentioned at all, and denied all responsibility of it. I thought, ‘Look, my friends aren’t going to like me for this one.’ But it boded well for getting the visa to America. Eventually, the authoritarian figure who interviewed me at the American Embassy said, ‘Well, you’ve done things for society.’ Wow, is that how you viewed it? But it paid off, it got me my work permit. Although that soon came to be regrettable.
Malcolm, in his wisdom, had decided that we wouldn’t play in the big cities on the coasts, like New York and LA, but instead would play to ‘real people’ in the South. Now Malcolm, there was a man who didn’t understand the working class. So, on a preposterous schedule, we criss-crossed America in early January 1978, amid the ice and the snow, on what was basically a school bus.
Many aspiring stars would’ve been broken by the experience, but not I! The sheer joy and privilege of being able to look out of that coach window and see America whizz by me was utterly enthralling, and in particular because this was the South. It reminded me of the cowboy movies my dad made me watch as a kid. You could relate to the names of the towns, just through the television. Bloody hell, it was great. After all the intrigues, I felt like a kid in those moments. The landscape of America impressed me no end, and I fell in love with the country. Regardless of the piss-poor situation that was unfolding before us, there was still that joy there.
At the same time, I knew I couldn’t do anything about Sid. It was an impossibility that you couldn’t unravel because Malcolm was using it as a tool to unravel the whole thing anyway. He had to destroy what he couldn’t control in his megalomaniac way, which in the current light of day was very childish of him. But that’s the absolute truth of him, that’s how he was. He was a very jealous man, and if anybody came up with an idea that was something he wished was his own, rather than celebrate it and taking it on board, he’d work against it.
Little did I know that he was secretly taking singing lessons. He looked at Johnny Rotten and he thought, ‘I can do that!’ I just wish he’d have seriously gone into it, because then everyone would’ve seen the lack of talent.
Although everything was falling apart between all of us, and the shows were horrendous, I tried to hook up with Steve. In fact, we spent a great night once. Steve had this shoe-box full of marijuana. ‘Fancy trying this?’ Funnily enough, I did, and it was hilarious, but we had to deal with the problem of Sid who was two doors down hanging out with a black drag queen. It was ugly and foolish and not a Sex Pistols-y thing at all. It was more a sad interpretation of Lou Reed, and wallowing in the problem of ‘Is there any heroin around?’
It was hard on all of us, fighting from our own corners, but never grouping together properly. We realized that Sid wasn’t the problem, we all were. We just couldn’t get on with each other, and that was that. It was pointless trying to continue it at that point, because the outside influences were just continuously poisonous.
The media were crawling all over the tour. Sid did an interview with High Times, who were following us about. Now, High Times was a drug culture magazine, but it was rumoured that it had CIA connections. So really what it was doing was finding out what you do, who you do it with, who’s selling it to you, where it comes from and where it goes. And Sid didn’t have the capacity to understand that you don’t get involved with those outside agendas. Plus, he’d be willingly waffling away his nonsense, his drug delirium, to these folk who were more than happy to print it, and then we’d end up with the reputation as a smackhead band.
I didn’t write these songs for it to be that way, and when Steve first started this band I’m sure that’s not what he had in mind either. From innocent kids on the blag, so to speak, to an arsehole out of his brain on heroin getting conned. And, oh yes, of course he had his money stolen by this black drag queen, who actually beat him up too. So it was like, ‘Ooooh, this is just terrible.’
At the gigs, he’d be trying to out-Rotten Rotten. He’d compete with me onstage, and attempt to stand in front of me, make out that he was really tough and hard. He’d fight with people at the front, and the sad thing is I know why, because I felt the pain in him. He was doing that really as a subterfuge, to cover up for his own feelings of inadequacy. He knew he couldn’t make the grade, it just wasn’t there, he didn’t have it, and so self-destruction became an emblem he could stand behind, because that’s the easy way out, isn’t it?
It was terrible, to watch the demise of a very close friend; it breaks your heart. But at that precise moment in time, I was plain furious that he just wasn’t getting it. ‘Hello, matey, you’re in the most privileged position in the world, people will be dying for this power, shall we say, and to throw it away and make yourself and everyone around you look like an idiot . . .’ He was a controlled robot. You’ve got to learn in life, you’ve got to learn it quick and keep it for the rest of your life: pull your own strings, and have no puppetmaster – and – habits – are – puppetmasters.
What broke my heart was
that some people were watching him and actually thought that was the groovy end of heroin. Sid’s behaviour becomes an act of criminality against humanity, for me. His example is one of self-destruction. How is that appealing? And then you’ve got a media ready to package that, because it takes away from the political content of them songs. Suddenly there’s not a real serious social message, there’s just a drug addict.
I had made somewhat good amends with Steve in the middle of all this. Of course his angle was, ‘That Sid’s got to go.’ ‘No, that’s not gonna resolve it!’ From there on, Steve and Paul started flying between gigs, and booking themselves into different hotels – it became ridiculous. I couldn’t, for days on end, in the middle of a tour, speak to other members of the band, because ‘Malcolm’ was hiding them from me – really childish, silly stuff, that you wouldn’t think five-year-old girls in the playground would get up to.
During a soundcheck in San Antonio, I wanted to try out a new song I’d written, ‘Religion’, and they just wouldn’t cope with it. Didn’t wanna know. Fine. Leave it like that, then. It was all too silly for words, when you look back on it – pulling faces, ignoring me. Sid was up for fumbling around with it, but that wasn’t what I wanted. He didn’t have the chops to get with it. So I kept ‘Religion’ on hold, and used it later when I started my new band, PiL. It was probably for the best that, at that time, no one was talking about making a new album – it never really came up as a thing to do. I’m really glad, because it would’ve been another major stress point – how much can you take?
I don’t know if I really wanted to do it like that, in that same way, and I obviously didn’t, because even to this day, I can’t go back on that sound and try to repeat it. It’s boring, and it would be wrong, and it wouldn’t work. For me, anyway. It’s like this: I know that’s where the money would’ve been, to put out a Part Two that’s just like Part One. But no, money don’t come into it. If I feel that that’s challenging my sense of creativity, my creativity wins, regardless of the financial problems that it can create for me. I will continuously take the risk because I don’t see it as a risk; I see it as the very point and purpose of what it is I’m doing. You only get one opportunity in life and I got it with the Pistols and I intend to use it well. Use it absolutely well, use it to its ultimate extreme. Sink or swim.
Malcolm, apparently, wanted to get the loony cult murderer Charles Manson to produce our second album from prison. I’d be reading things like that but no one would have the front to say it to my face. There were many, many rumours like that. Like, after the American tour, we were buggering off to Brazil to work with Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber. That was the whoremongering of it, and none of that would ever be acceptable to me. It was just looking for cheap headlines and watering down anything serious or good that’s going on in this. Behind all that way of thinking – it’s glaring to me and it should be to anybody reading this – that it was Malcolm’s resentment. He had no control, and so he was trying to take it back into a world of silliness, where he would have a place. A world of cop-out.
So, by that last gig in San Francisco, I’d lost interest really. I’d become incapable of caring about writing another song for this outfit. I felt like, ‘That’s it, there’s the full stop. I’ve achieved as much as I can in this environment.’ So that’s how it ended up with me saying, ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ We were a betrayal of what we started out as.
From my point of view, at that last Winterland gig, who gave a fuck about me? Well, they gave even less of a fuck less about Sid, other than they wanted to use him later – and Sid was eminently usable at that point. Sid hooked up with Malc, basically for drug money, and of course I didn’t want anything to do with that. Malcolm was leading him into, ‘Yes, Sid, we’ll get you what you want,’ and then, when push came to shove a year or so later, abandoned him completely.
It was very clear to me, there was nowhere for me to be in this band, or with any of these people. And so when Steve and Paul snuck off to Brazil without even mentioning it to me, it was perfectly fine – I expected it. It was a relief, actually, but then a puzzlement – ‘Where’s my ticket home? Why no money? What, my hotel bill here hasn’t been paid? WHAT?!’ And then I ring up the record company, and the answer was, ‘Oh, we’ve been told that Johnny Rotten’s gone to England, so we don’t acknowledge you.’ Ridiculous. Insane.
The only person that paid any attention was Joe Stevens, who was a friend of Malcolm’s, and a photographer. I told him what was going on, and he was just puzzled and horrified by it all. Eventually he paid for a plane ticket for me to go and stay with him in New York and clear my head. What a fantastic thing to do. What a fantastic fella Joe Stevens is.
It took about a week to get in touch with Bob Regehr at our American record company, Warner Brothers. He thought it was insane behaviour on Malcolm’s part too. He came and met me in a hotel, to help sort me out, and right there, somebody laid a writ on him for some reason. Bonkers! I’ve no idea what the situation was, but obviously it really bonded the pair of us – which really paid off for me a couple of years later.
I did an interview with the New York Post to give my side of the story. I didn’t want to, but it had to be done. I wasn’t in a right frame of mind to deal with it at that precise point, but as Joe Stevens pointed out, ‘Look what this fuck Malcolm is saying about you,’ and it had to be responded to.
It was really wicked, really spiteful. He was just trying to make sure I had no chance of an ongoing career, trying to stick nails in my coffin kind of thing, rather than just leave it alone and say, ‘Well, there it is, a parting of the ways . . .’ No, and that really reinforced my attitude about, ‘Right, I’m going to get you back, fucker! Full steam ahead – as soon as I get back to England, straight to a lawyer . . . I want this fixed.’
To my mind they’d wrecked everything that was brilliant and glorious about the Sex Pistols, which was unity, and they tore the arse out of that through selfish shit. And it all ends up in what? Celebrating a train robber? At my cost, my expense?
Then I have to run a lawsuit against them going, ‘Hello, don’t I count? Remember me? I wrote the songs!’ – at least the lyrics, and quite frankly, being real honest with myself and everybody else, I don’t think anybody ever bought a Sex Pistols record because of the lead guitar solo or the drums or the bass – although I couldn’t have done those lyrics without those three things. But I never got the respect and love that I think us as a band truly should have had for each other. So eat shit and die, you cunts. That’s my polite way of saying, we could’ve been good.
WHO CENSORS THE CENSOR? #1
JUDGE NOT LEST YE BE JUDGED
Apparently there has been an old audio interview of me from 1978 doing the rounds lately online, where I’m talking about Jimmy Savile and basically saying, ‘Everyone knows he’s a child molester, but we’re not allowed to say.’ I don’t remember the interview. I’ve been told it was by Vivien Goldman, but I was speaking dangerously out of hand, way before all of this became public knowledge. You have to tell it like it is, and how you really see it, and say what you have to endure behind the scenes.
People were calling me a filthy disgusting Sex Pistol or whatever. But what the fuck is that? Do you not know what is going on with that, that institutionalized, decrepit pervert? He gets his OBE, then later he becomes Sir Jimmy Savile, but I don’t think there was any doubt at all about what he was really getting up to. In fact, I don’t think enough of it’s come out. Everybody knew. It was common knowledge, but unspoken.
From a very early age, looking at him on Top of the Pops, you knew that he was just a wrong ’un. And he was always having a smirk, and ‘letting you know’. You could see it in the eyes what he was doing; you could read the body language.
So that was also how I knew about Savile – his eyes. I could tell he was deceitful, and harbouring something dark and ugly, and he was smirking about it in the knowledge, but not declaring. The full-on auda
city, it used to drive me nuts. That’s what I do, I watch a person’s eyes, and I know what’s going on with them from that. For me, the best actors or actresses, they do all the telling in their eyes. Katharine Hepburn, Peter O’Toole, Charlotte Rampling. You get so much depth in what they’re up to. They can go beyond the words. It’s almost musical.
Radio DJs in Britain in the early to mid-’70s had become god-like. If it wasn’t young children they were abusing, they were definitely abusing something, because their power became overwhelming and dictatorial. And they would propagate themselves there on BBC Radio as the purveyors of good taste, and careers could hinge on their negative impact.
It certainly took an awful long time for the BBC to spin a Sex Pistols record, and I doubt whether they have to any large extent to this day. Ever since, I’ve suffered all manner of rigorous avoidance, all from these purveyors of good taste, who at the same time are up to horribly corrupting things. You had no option but to stand up against it and get banned outright forever, or try to toe the line, which of course I couldn’t do.
6
GETTING RID OF THE ALBATROSS
At the time people in England wanted to live in tiny little boxy rooms that would be easy to heat in the winter. My front room at Gunter Grove, on the other hand, was a wide expanse, practically like a ballroom, with a kitchen out the back, and two tiny bedrooms up top. That’s exactly all I wanted. I think the main room had probably been used as an office space by whoever Steve Winwood had had in there, before I got my hands on it. I had other ideas.
I could plonk a record player on the counter, and a TV with a coat hanger for an aerial between the two windows, which had a semi-balcony outside, and play music as loud as I wanted, and have as many people as I could possibly fit in there, which often seemed about three to five hundred, haha. In the summer we’d drink up on the rooftop – that was always a favourite with the chaps.
