Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  In terms of the music I picked up, I got completely drawn into a whole area there called ‘Dread In The Arena’, which was the big thing at the time, and all the offshoot records that were coming out using that theme. It was fantastic, with lots of Johnny Clarke dub versions. When Front Line eventually put out Johnny Clarke records they didn’t have that aspect, and that’s the very aspect I would have wanted them to have focused on – the pure dread of what dub was. It’s all about tripping – mind tripping. Just free up yourself. You don’t have to dance correctly or know any of the right moves, you do what you like. Just as long as you know how to enjoy yourself. Fantastic. That’s what dub was.

  I grew up with reggae music; it was always around me as a kid, so it was fantastic to really feel it as it should be felt, actually in Jamaica. I loved it there. Jamaica became part of me.

  Gunter Grove became my backdrop to get myself properly sorted out, and get a new group off the ground. It was at one of my parties there that I met Gloria Knight, who was actually a writer for the Sunday Mirror, and was married to her editor. We kind of met through someone else in a roundabout social way, and it just seemed deeply hilarious to be hanging around with anyone that had any connection at all with what I viewed as the gossip rags. They’d been making my life a misery for the last year or so! It was like this: Oooh, this shouldn’t work. But it did. Good came out of it, and bad came with it. She suggested that I needed a lawyer.

  There was some weird stuff going on around us while we were in Jamaica. McLaren had got some of his people out there, sneaking around trying to film me for his idiotic movie The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle. Also, Branson had Devo, an electronic band from Ohio who were signed to Virgin, out there, or at least some of them. He may or may not have been trying to get me to be their singer. I certainly don’t think he ever asked me. Sometimes inebriations lead to foolishness. I know we caught one of them spying on us. He’d come down onto our balcony, he was looking through the curtains, and Dennis frightened him off. That was really my only connection with them.

  The idea of joining a band like Devo replacing the lead singer would be an absolute no-no to me. It would make me very angry. That was Malcolm’s idea with the Pistols towards the end, replacing me. You can’t replace the singer. It will always be the band for me – the singer. That’s the direction and the persona and the energy of the thing, particularly with Devo.

  I was constantly aware of people trying to codge off me, like parasites, using me to prop up the tuppence worth of talent or involvement that they’d never really had in the first place.

  Most importantly, Malcolm was trying to claim my name, Johnny Rotten, as his property, and that had to be stopped. How can you try and steal someone’s nickname? Huh? On what grounds? There’s no doubts about it, I’ll see you in court, boy. Which I wouldn’t have bothered with previously. I would’ve just let it go, and moved on. But that kind of spite to try and fuck me out of my own life, my own name, my own career. Very wicked.

  So Gloria put me in touch with Brian Carr, a solicitor who specialized in the entertainment business. Not long after that, she and I seriously fell apart, when her paper went and wrote a story that I was a recovering heroin addict. My God, talk about getting it all upside down. I could have revealed all sorts of her social errors but I’m not one for that kiss-and-tell kind of gossip.

  But Brian Carr, the solicitor, was hilarious. When I first met him, he looked like Abraham Lincoln; he had that same beardy thing, black semi-wavy hair, and sapphire blue eyes. He was a weird-looking man. When he talked there was always spittle rolling out of his bottom lip onto his beard. So I found him to be, ‘Oh God, he’s so unlikeable, this could work!’ And indeed, he was very good there for a few years; he’s the chap who really got the proper barristers to sort out the case against the Pistols’ estate and got everything set up the way I wanted it.

  I didn’t want to walk off with all the loot or anything. I made sure that when it came to a settlement, we surviving members would get equal shares of the spoils. Even though I was harbouring a really serious resentment for the way Steve and Paul had behaved against me, I didn’t want blood money or dirty money, as I would view it. I just wanted what was mine, what Malcolm tried to take away from me.

  Funnily enough, as we settled in at Gunter Grove, we became aware that Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin’s manager, lived across the road – and Brian Eno lived at the top, in a converted church. There was immediately a rumour that Peter Grant offered to manage me – again, one of those fabulous press rumours – although, after Malcolm, what a delicious rumour! I was feeding off it a little – you’re always considering the options.

  Peter Grant earned a wonderful reputation when Led Zeppelin first went to America as this full-on hard fella. No back-down from him! That’s all well and fine, but I don’t want bullies in my ranks. I don’t want anyone to turn around and go, ‘Do this, or else . . .!’ I’m never gonna have that, because Johnny’s an alpha male. It couldn’t’ve worked, and wouldn’t’ve worked, ever.

  The only way that I knew Peter Grant owned the house opposite was through something Dave Crowe said. We had a pet pussycat, which Dave named Satan. It was a young kitten that was abandoned, and Dave told me that it was ‘abandoned by that bastard, Led Zeppelin’s manager from across the road. He kicked him out and I saved Satan.’

  He saved Satan all right, but Dave went back into his cubby hole, and the cat litter tray was up in my place, right next to the kitchen. So I had to be the one to clean up the cat litter, even though it was his pet. Poor little Satan, it was a tiny little thing, jet black, a mini cat – it must’ve had a growth deficiency. It looked kitten-like, even in adulthood, but it never really bonded with me. It would go down the staircase and meow outside Dave’s hatch. By now, Dave had moved into the downstairs apartment, which was self-contained, and we never converted it fully, we just knocked through a small hole with a hatch, to get up and down from one part to the other. But Dave would never open the hatch, and that poor cat was abandoned.

  Meanwhile, I was trying to put together my new group. Jah Wobble was still one of my best mates, and he’d often been picking up Sid’s bass to have a go – probably more than Sid did. Wobble was very much still a novice with it, but that’s not what matters: I wanted him in.

  In subsequent years, Wobble’s been making out that what we were trying to do was some kind of dub band – and this is from a bass player who was barely learning at the time. He’s looking through seriously warped lenses – maybe he’s trying to hoodwink his way into the current crop of ‘whitey does reggae’ bands.

  That certainly wasn’t our angle at the time. At least, it wasn’t mine. I wanted something completely new and refreshing from what very quickly became the format of the Sex Pistols. We were only together for a brief time but it did become a format – a format of writing which bored the pants off me.

  Being open-minded to all kinds of music was Lesson One in punk, but that didn’t seem to be understood by many of the alleged punk bands that followed on after, who seemed to be waving this idea of a punk manifesto. I’m sorry, but I never did this for the narrow-minded. I was horrified by the cliché that punk was turning itself into.

  I didn’t – and still don’t – have too many punk records in my collection, because I never really liked them. Buzzcocks, Magazine, X-Ray Spex, the Adverts, the Raincoats – those, I liked. They were skirmishing on the outside of it rather than the typical slam-dunk bands that drove me nuts, because they all sounded the same, all chasing the same carthorse. I’m not impressed by macho bullshit bravado. It doesn’t have any content and it’s not actually aimed at anything other than trying to show off your masculinity. Failed!

  You had all these males-only bands trying to out-threaten each other. To me that’s the lowest common denominator. There were so many of them all doing the exact same thing, all of them completely stupid, not understanding Rule Number One: there are no rules. And yet this lot rigidly adhered to rules and r
egulations. They became the new Boo Nazis.

  For my part in it all, I’d opened up an entire new different genre and way of viewing music, and what happened when the door was opened? In walked all the flotsam and jetsam, who were very proud of being stupid.

  I was coming from the standpoint of sharing my life’s experiences, not to go into isolation, as punk was doing to itself. It narrowed its outlook – for me, propagated by poor old Joe Strummer. In his mind, he was leading this political punk thing, with a vision of us all standing there like Solidarność, waving banners, and that’s a load of bollocks. If you’re not doing this for the poor old biddy that lives next door and can’t afford the heating in the winter, then you don’t count at all. Studded leather jackets for everyone is not a creed I can endorse.

  So my mindset was, ‘I can’t take no more of that.’ I was envisaging a consortium of like-minded loonies prepared to jump into the next universe without any tools, and find our way that way, and be an exciting possibility. And indeed it was, because we were not playing to any set standard of musical clichés. In that way, the band can’t be revisioned in hindsight into any one person’s schemes. We were schemeless. It was a free-form adventure and things like musical inadequacies didn’t matter at all. Not to me. I had a stomping ground I could have stuck very safely to and just done Johnny Rottenisms, and that no doubt would have worked, but I wasn’t interested in it. Sorry, but I’m a big risk-taker, me.

  I’m the one that rang them up. I’m the one that asked them in. No one came to me with any ideas in that way. They were all skirting around unemployed, and so – bingo!

  With no minor difficulty, I tracked down Keith Levene, who I’d known from hanging around with Sid at the Hampstead squat, back when amphetamine was the new buzz of the day. He’d since been in the Clash, at the very beginning. I knew he’d worked hard inside that band, but I also knew he didn’t fit in with them. Their manifesto was too limiting. He’d come backstage to a Pistols gig one time, and told me how deeply unhappy he was working with them. His attitude was, ‘Look, I do all the work, I write all the songs, I get no respect. That awful rubbish, listen to them. Aaargh!’

  So I kept that in mind. Whenever you ran into Keith, he never had a good word to say about anybody. That thrilled me no end – I’d never known such a professional misery. When you’re young, you can find that entertaining about someone. But once you get into your twenties, it’s not so entertaining, because he hasn’t learned from it. I look at myself in all of this too. I used to love the word ‘dismal’. ‘What do you think of that?’ ‘It’s dismal! I’m bored!’ I don’t think I ever meant any of that, I was merely perfecting the art of dissatisfied youth.

  After the Clash, Keith had been in a band I’d put together called the Flowers Of Romance. It was a good collection of people, just mates floating in and out, having fun, and so I gave them the name. I liked Marco Pirroni from Adam & The Ants anyway, I knew him from hanging around, and Chrissie Hynde, and it was a good idea for them to be forming a collective, and see if that went anywhere. Keith and Sid and Viv Albertine all passed through, and how it ended up is utterly beyond me. There was another name, the Moors Murderers, which may or may not have been a different band. It was a vague, unimportant thing, but showed good faith in breaking the tethers of punk cliché. And that was definitely where Keith was coming from.

  Keith is acerbic. Basically, he’s a bottle of vinegar, so you chuck that into the crisp bag and you’re gonna get all kinds of flavours. Keith’s musical background is interesting. He has flirtations of Wishbone Ash lurking in his previous history; he learned to play from that kind of music. He told us that he’d had guitar lessons from Steve Howe of Yes. I would hate to find out that was all a fabulous lie. It kind of made sense: Keith had a different insight there, to what was currently going around. He was outside of punk clichés.

  Once we got together, Keith’s playing astounded me. The idea was around back then that after Jimi Hendrix no one could ever play the guitar again. There was no point, the instrument was finished. But to my mind Mr Levene’s playing absolutely proved that to be not true. I thought it was very creative and very different, kind of discordant but at the same time always resolved itself musically. Very trance-like. It wouldn’t skip a beat, but it would soar off in many different directions without ever losing its focus. I found that intensely riveting and very, very inspiring. A sense of, he played like a rhythm guitarist, but he took the rhythms to such extremes.

  So the landscape was a lot broader than some people’s little nail varnish appliers would lead you to believe. There was room for expansion, in an incredible way. All we needed was a drummer. We auditioned a bunch of them, but Jim Walker was the best by a mile. He’d come over from Canada, just to get himself into a punk band – well, my God, he picked the best one in the world, didn’t he? Coming from abroad, he was an unknown quantity, but he absolutely stunned us all. I thought, ‘Wow, the inflections are really grabbing me and exciting me. Cor, they’ve got my corpuscles bouncing!’ Disco, African, a bit of everything really – almost a Ginger Baker kind of approach.

  Jim had a very open mind and he didn’t come at you like a muso. He was excited by the craziness of it, and indeed as it came to pass, he was way bonkers himself. Way out there! He didn’t have anywhere to stay, so I gave him a room in the basement at Gunter Grove, and gave him money to get furniture, and he spent it all on a moose head. When I saw his room when I finally went into it, there was nothing in it but newspaper on the floor, and the moose head on the wall. He had no interest in comforts of any kind. I don’t know how he slept in it or what he did in there.

  The PiL house – which is what Gunter Grove had become, because Keith moved in an’ all – was very much centred around what’s on TV and what’s on the record player. Jim said he didn’t need to be upstairs with us – his room was in the downstairs part – because he could hear the bass rumbling through the floorboards. So he’d be down there in the dark. Very odd. As I keep saying, I’m attracted to oddities in life. Him buggering off to London on his own from Canada reminds me of coming out of hospital and having to blend back in at school. I appreciated his sense of adventure.

  We had no real concept in advance of how we wanted to sound, other than, ‘We’re going to do something different here’, because none of us wanted to imitate our pasts, and would’ve been uncomfortable doing that. The sound really formulated itself from the first rehearsals.

  Very early on, we wrote the song ‘Public Image’, which was the freest moment, like escaping the trap of the Pistols at a stroke. The writing and envisioning happened down by London Bridge, in a rehearsal room south of the river. Wobble was getting the lilt of the bassline, Walker was just exceptional, cracking away at the groove, and Keith was really bang on it and really enjoying what we were doing. We were formulating a different approach and doing it quite naturally and things just fitted so well together, and the words just flowed.

  I was so proud of each member’s contribution, and they gave me a great space in there to shapeshift my voice, to try something different and go with the sentiment of what it was we were all trying to put together here. I wanted to declare where we stood in the world, and, ‘Don’t be judging me by the publicity machine and all that nonsense that I had to put up with in the Pistols.’ I was about taking a completely different step aside from that, and I knew there would be consequences. I knew there would be resentment from the alleged punk world because I wasn’t staying inside the confinements of the box. But that’s their fault, not mine. Punk to me doesn’t accept them kind of authoritarian approaches.

  This bit was important: ‘I’m not the same as when I began/And I will not be treated as property.’ It’s just saying, ‘Who are you telling me what is and what isn’t? You can either pay attention or you can get stuck in that hole in the ground that you’ve all buried yourselves into. Well, pull the soil over the top. Goodbye.’

  It was a great, great song and, just in case any member wasn�
��t aware of it, ‘Public Image’ belongs to me.

  Only joking! I wasn’t referring directly to the band. It’s about: Johnny Rotten, that’s me, don’t try and take him away from me, and don’t rewrite his history.

  It was very cheeky of me to begin with ‘Public Image’, the name of the band. I’d taken it from a beautiful book called The Public Image by Muriel Spark – her wot wrote The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. A very small book, but it’s a great storyline, about how the publicity machine turns an average actress into a monstrous diva and she wrecks everyone around her. I didn’t want that happening with me or my imagery.

  In Public Image Ltd (aka PiL) I wanted to keep the Johnny Rotten side of things well out of it. I’d moved fully and very comfortably into the persona of John Lydon, who didn’t need scandal to flog a record. It wasn’t so much that we would earn our rights wherever we were in terms of sales, but by the quality and the content.

  The ‘Limited’ part of the name was about limiting our public image, to not allow the scandal rags access to us. To keep our private lives private, thank you. Keep a definite distance away from a scandal-mongering publicity machine. Which would’ve been what Malcolm was treasuring and I found to be detrimental. It’s bad for your health that angle, it really is.

  The double entendre was very deliberate, though, about setting up as a limited company, which I did with Brian Carr’s help. We wanted to be completely free of all attachments and dictations, running ourselves. The idea was to try and break into all areas where you could possibly earn money, but to offer quality goods. And to break away from fear of the corporate, to have our own version of what we wanted the idea of ‘corporate’ to be. A co-operative, meaning all working in it, all together, all doing different things but all for the ultimate good of everyone – a kingdom without a king, a republic without a president, based logically on a premise that common sense would prevail.