Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  From the off, it’s quite amazing what we had to put up with. All the way, it was resentment: one, for being so different; two, for not being the Pistols; and three, wanting to attack the Pistols thing – all in the wrong place and time, and not really understanding Mr Rotten at all. That’s the way it was turning, punk was turning into that voice of ignorance. The true content and message was stripmined right out of it, more’s the pity.

  Come Christmas Day and Boxing Day at the Rainbow, we filled the place, but there was a real problem on Boxing Day with some West Ham football oiks who came down and tried to disrupt the affair. ‘Hello, this is Finsbury Park, this is solid Arsenal, mate! If you’re looking for it, you’re gonna get it!’

  It was the first night a pre-Rambo John Stevens ever officially ran the security for us, along with my brother Jimmy. You know, you use the local lads. We all kind of knew there’d be some firm coming down to try and wreck it. But more fool them for not appreciating what it is we were getting together here. But at least they had a day out. Even the enemies can’t complain – they were entertained!

  So that went off, and that’s not anything actually to do with the PiL gig, but by the time that reaches the newspaper headline area, it becomes like a PiL riot.

  We went onstage very late. ‘Sorry, it’s Christmas, fuck you!’ We’d brought in – and this is why it took so long to get ready – a set of sub-woofers that actually played bass so deep that you didn’t hear it, you felt it, and if you stood too close to that, the prospect of shitting your pants was highly likely. Subsonic woofers! Fantastic! The stage was humming. You could feel it through every part of your body. It was brilliant, beautiful, where sound became really threatening. And it wasn’t the sound, it was the vibrations.

  It was all illegal, we found out later, because it can make you physically ill. It was creating such a feedback onstage that we were feeling ill before we even started. It went, Bvvvvvvv! It was feeding back and looping off the bass strings leaned up against the amp. Wobble didn’t have the sense to turn the thing off. Or he had the sense to leave the thing on, one of the two. I suppose there was an element of Can running through my skull at that time, when the bass tones from their PA made the stage collapse at the Roundhouse. In a band like PiL, you have to find out what the consequences of extreme music are.

  In the back of the venue, all through the dressing room area, the window panes were rattling, window frames were coming loose. So there it was, we had a health and safety problem before we even began our first number! Oh my God, there’s gonna be death in the house! Great! And on we trot, and it was a very insane gig. Above all, the Pistols fans couldn’t understand a damn thing, because they’d never heard a noise like this before. So it was very much like the early Pistols all over again: ‘What is that?!’

  Wobble was new to playing the bass. The concept of turning it off when you go off to wait for the encore didn’t occur to him. The feedback was ferocious. The rattling was severe. If we’d gone on another hour, the building would’ve fallen down around us. There were complaints, but you’d have to be a sourpuss to do that. What else were you going to do? Watch Ken Dodd’s Christmas Special?

  7

  OPENING PANDORA’S BOX WITH A HAMMER AND CHISEL

  When Sid Vicious got arrested for murdering Nancy Spungen in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, Malcolm was just panic-panic-panic. It was the tail end of 1978, and the whole sordid tale was splurged over the tabloids’ front pages. Of all people, I heard it was actually Mick Jagger who intervened, and put lawyers in to try to help Sid out. That was a huge ‘wow’ for me, because me and Sid, we weren’t the best of mates at this particular point – we had problems, mainly about his drug nonsense.

  One of the last times I heard from Sid, he turned up with Nancy late at night at Gunter Grove. He wanted money so he could buy drugs. When we wouldn’t open up, he thought he could bang the door off its hinges. Well, I’m sorry, but we had the police to do that for us, and they were very good at it. Eventually, Paul Young ran down the stairs and chased Sid and Nancy off with an axe – he wasn’t taking any chances because he knew that Sid always carried a knife. The only reason there was an axe on hand, by the way, was because Paul was a carpenter.

  I don’t like heroin addicts, but I do like my friends. I wanted to do the best I could for Sid, but Malcolm kept me away from him. I only found out through my lawyer, Brian Carr, that, ‘Yes, Mick Jagger got his lawyers involved in it, and they’re looking to protect him.’ So, I asked, ‘What has Malcolm done?’ ‘Nothing.’ I don’t think Malcolm lifted a finger. He just didn’t know what to do.

  Sid got himself into a terrible situation, revolving around owing money to some serious drug dealers. Now I know this one thing in life: heroin dealers cannot afford to fuck about, and if you fuck them about, they – will – fuck – you – out.

  That’s what Nancy Spungen introduced him into when they went to New York. So Sid’s idea of a cool and trendy lifestyle soon became a depressing problem of ‘Where’s the next fix?’ And that’s how my friend, that silly boy from Hackney, ended up lost and confused in a strange land. You’ve really got to know what you’re doing in this world, at all times, and you’ve really got to know what drug dealers expect from you.

  Listen, peoples, do not ever get yourself in the position of owing money to those kind of dealers, because there’s a lot of reputation on the line for them. Sidney should’ve known that. I know who was out for him, and if you’re talking strictly in terms of moral, principle, right and value, I had no right to stop them, because he’d overstepped the line. That’s an absolute New York fact.

  New York was harder than most towns at that particular time. A lot of it was Mafia-run, no two ways about it. Don’t be telling those guys, ‘Oh, fuck off, I’ve run out of money. Huh huh.’ Then there’s gonna be a big sweep-up, there’s gonna be a settlement.

  The basic truth is, Sid was not ‘street smart’. You have to survive with ‘street smart’, and you cannot survive without street smart. But do not ever get yourself in the position of owing large amounts of money for something so self-indulgent, because you have to be dealt with at that point, because that ridicules the crew supplying the deal, and they’re never gonna accept that.

  When he was first arrested, it was so tragic and sad: Sid’s defence was, ‘I don’t know what happened’ – with a knife stuck in Nancy. Oh, come on. Oh, for Jesus Christ’s sake. Figure it. Seriously. Over your head. Warned you. Sidney wasn’t a smart fella. I warned Sidney time and time again. Don’t get in over your head, not with nothing. Play to your level.

  Nancy was killed, and that poor foolish boy was left holding the knife, not knowing what’s going on. To me there’s no mystery in it at all. You owe money, that’s what you’re gonna get. And there ain’t no police going to hunt it down any different.

  The boy’s life was over, and there he was in Rikers Island jail, in New York, with really not much option. As soon as he got out on bail – bang! – he banged up another number in the vein, and goodbye. He comes out, meets his mum and dies of an OD – he allegedly committed suicide on an overdose of his mother’s own making. Fucking fantastic, huh? What a great lifestyle. Don’t look for no mystery in it. This is what you get because this is what you want. Get the PiL song now?

  Sid’s passing was a pain in my life – a serious one. I wrote songs about him for quite some time after that. They’re all in there somewhere. He just couldn’t see the wood for the trees. Yet again it goes back to education. Education is not necessarily what the schools teach you, it’s about acquiring this way of having an insight, and being able to gather information correctly. And Sidney lacked that potential. I always felt like I was protecting Sid, always. Wherever I’d take him, I knew – aaargh! – he’s gonna cause a problem. But that’s all right!

  Once he stepped out of line, and was left to his own devices, oh my God, it became stupid, stupid, stupid, no value, principle, system or logicality in it. Don’t mess around with drug
dealers, right? They mean it. They have to. Just say no.

  While all this was going on, just the other side of Christmas, there were PiL crises coming to a head at Gunter Grove, between Wobble and Jim Walker. I never understood what the rows were about – well, I do, sort of – but there was some kind of bullying going on. I suppose Wobble was feeling inadequate about his lack of playing ability, and therefore somebody else had to suffer.

  Jim quit. He had very quickly seen enough, and suddenly, after less than a year, we were without a drummer. I thought that Jim would go on to do other great things in music. But no, he went off to Israel to work on a kibbutz, and madnesses like that. He’s not actually Jewish, so it was an even bigger move. I believe he does things in film these days.

  We tried out a number of replacements, but none of them seemed to stick. One was pure disco, another pure reggae, and neither could adjust to anything outside of that particular format. Another was just not getting the vibe that was there between us.

  For a while there, myself and Rambo were jokingly telling people he was going to be our new drummer. Rambo went along with it and it might’ve worked, but he’d have to have learned how to play within a month. That was way too much pressure for any human being. I’m glad, and I think he is too, that it didn’t happen, because we found a way to work together that was much more beneficial to both of us, further down the line.

  So, it was just a case of whoever responded to the advert. Exchange & Mart was our favourite read of the time. If you tried through the music papers, it would always be the wrong kind of arses. They’d turn up with some silly imagery, rather than content from them as human beings.

  We messed around with Richard Dudanski for a bit. He’d been in Joe Strummer’s 101’ers, but he wasn’t really up to it. He was too soft and gentle to really to cope with our lack of fear. Poor old Dudanski was a bit of a hippie, but then he wasn’t, because he was balding. Hair loss removed his hippiedom.

  Most of them felt ill at ease. They’d be noting the tensions going on between Wobble and Keith, me and Keith, Wobble and me, between all three of us at once – a very hard thing suddenly to be in the middle of. I do understand their position: Sid must have felt much the same when he joined the Pistols. You’re walking into the lions’ den, and the lions all know each other. Ouch! Heavy, heavy judgemental scenes!

  Oddly enough, even though it was down to just the three of us, without a steady drummer, it became more settled and more confident, now that we’d got the first album out. We’d got into a pattern of recording in bits and pieces, all over the shop. We were never in any one place long enough. We’d be a week here, a day there.

  There’d be a lot of night-time sessions at the Town House in Goldhawk Road, Shepherd’s Bush, and those were always very last-minute. The Jam were using it a lot at the time. When they’d finish in the evening, we’d get the tip-off and could go over and use the facilities, so long as we didn’t touch the mixing board. The Jam themselves were certainly never in on it. It was a cut-price universe.

  So, everything we did was what they call ‘monitor mixes’, rather than going through a big desk. Once you get into the bigger technology there’s all manner of mollycoddling of sound going on, where the brittle edge is stripped and impossible to replace. That’s what gave those early PiL records their thrilling sound – they’ve got that raw energy of a band playing live in the room.

  The big treat for us was when Virgin would pack us off to the Manor, their residential studio in Oxfordshire. This place was a different universe again, and proper palatial by our standards. They’d book you in for a few days, and you’d be the only band in there. The whole joy of it was that it was, ‘Do what you want.’ There were twelve bedrooms, so there’d be an entourage included – bring yer mates! There’d be a pile of people speeding in the living room, and it was endless food and endless drink. They changed that later, but in them early days, everything was on an open cheque book – they hadn’t got around to tightening the purse-strings.

  There were fireplaces everywhere, so the best time to book it was always in the colder months for that good old roaring-fire vibe. The dinners were enormous roast things, traditional English. It wasn’t exactly a boar on a spit, but it was that kind of presentation. Roast potatoes and a proper roast beef done traditional – semi-raw in the middle – was thrilling to me. I gained so much weight.

  They had satellite TV, which nobody had at that stage in Britain. All of us would be thinking, ‘Great, we can sit in that room and just snuggle up round the fireplace and watch endless TV!’ But – grrr! – it seemed to be the same channels repeated ad infinitum in Italian and Spanish! And channels with nothing but adverts, and that was it.

  But I loved the Manor. It was an absurd, ridiculous ‘harking back to previous centuries’ kind of place. I always felt like, ‘Hey, here’s my chance to be lord of something’, and I’m damn well sure that was in everyone else’s mind at all times.

  Mostly, we’d work the night shift. I’m sorry, I can’t be thinking of running into a studio at 10 a.m. My brain starts to kick into its agenda at around 8 p.m. By 10 p.m., I’d be fully focused, and everyone else probably wanted to go to bed. Still, whenever we got these opportunities, the eagerness to get in and record, and the enjoyment and the thrill of operating machinery and pressing buttons and screaming and playing things, was absolutely the driving force of it. That wasn’t lost, regardless of all the surrounding ugliness. That was the thrill, the joy, the point and purpose of being in a band, and you can’t take that away.

  We knew the stuff we started coming out with would annoy the record company, but my belief was, I’ve only got one opportunity in life to do and say what it is I truly feel, and I’m not prepared to back off from that, and I’m prepared to suffer the financial and business consequences, because I think in the long run the work will prevail. It would’ve been semi-useless to be going out there to write a plausibly huge commercial success, which is what the label would’ve wanted and enjoyed. I’m Johnny fucking Rotten, you know, that’s still me, whatever Malcolm thinks, and I do what I want.

  For me the success was to do something completely unexpected, and yet a natural progression. The album that became Metal Box was not contrived. Contrived would’ve been to have written an instant hit. Somehow, with all the conflicting lifestyles and personal situations developing, and the pressure from Virgin, we managed to make a really cohesive album. It sounds like it might as well have been recorded all at once, from start to finish. It’s a stunning beautiful tapestry of high anxiety.

  The idea of it was, it would numb you, absolutely flatten your resistance, just wear you out with its omnipresence. I think we got there.

  I was fiddling about a great amount of the time on a Yamaha keyboard, which I just loved. It was a cheap nasty thing, but it was one of them earlier ones that had swirly and swishy orchestra sounds, if you twiddled with some of the knobs. I just loved that. In fact I used to play that thing to the point where my wrists would develop these cysts, these lumps, which were very worrying at the time – I didn’t know what it was. You know when you keep doing a thing over and over again relentlessly – day in, day out – how the lactic acid builds up in your hands? It may have been Jeannette Lee, who was lurking around with Keith, who said, ‘Oh yeah, I heard if you hit the cyst with a heavy book, it will burst and go away.’ The only heavy book I could think of was the Bible. And one good whack – oh yeah, it went away, but the pain! Ouch!

  So I realized keyboard-playing wasn’t going to be my future. But it gave me a great deal of fun and intrigue – how to suss out a song in a completely different way, so I could weave in and out, snake-like almost, with the vocals. I loved that.

  We had no real rehearsals for Metal Box, we just didn’t have the money, so I’d be writing in my head, and thinking of different formats for myself. A looser agenda, less of a hold on the reins vocally, and pushing myself into really challenging ways of singing and presenting it. And of course when we ca
me to recording, it was about compromising the vocal presence, because I wanted the music to be so powerful, to declare us on a way interesting level playing field, where you don’t really need the vocals to be so upfront, which was the pop way at that time.

  You have to strain a bit to hear the vocal on some of the Metal Box tracks, but that’s the point. It will creep into your psyche slowly but surely, where you’re almost unaware, or you’re lulled into a false sense of security – or a false sense of insecurity. Either way, it’s getting into your mindset and it’s affecting your perceptions of the world around you. At least that was my ambition: making you think bigger things.

  We were largely responsible for our own productions. It was the art of balance to get the kind of heavy bass we wanted. This didn’t just involve reggae: a lot of ’60s mod music was very heavy-bass-y – the Yardbirds, the Animals, they had that deep sound in there – and funk and disco. But to get the kind of bass we wanted, something had to be sacrificed and so smart-arse me sacrificed the vocals. We dropped the vocal a notch to push the bass up, because it was about the aural tapestry of the whole thing, a tour de force on all levels. You didn’t need the vocals to be way out front and all the music to be pulled backwards. We wanted the complete impression to be overwhelmingly exciting.

  Often, there were obstacles to achieving that, such as whenever Virgin sent down any big-name producer to ‘help us’. There was one who’d worked with the Rolling Stones, and that was a serious problem. We’d gone up to the Manor to do one or two songs, and he was just arguing that you can’t have that much bass on a record. Ridiculous. ‘Yes, you can. This is how. This – is – how!’ The man kept on arguing, so I got up on the desk and walked across it in my steel toe-capped shoes and broke every button. ‘I’m not here for you to tell me what to do!’