by Lydon, John
It was about dealing with different human emotions, the ones that normally get pushed aside. If it be Pandora’s Box I’m opening, I’m doing it with a hammer and a chisel. I broke that padlock, I broke that fear of the unknown.
‘The Suit’, on the other hand, was about my mate Paul Young who went and borrowed my suit without telling me for some date he had with a girl from Totteridge Park. He put it back afterwards and of course it was all smelled-up. And I loved that suit! I don’t mind sharing clothes, but it’s a bit much when it’s your best suit that you’re saving for the right moment, and it’s got stains on it – and not all beer stains – and there you are like you’ve been rolling in the hay. He could have dry-cleaned it, you know! Cheeky monkey, haha.
‘No Birds Do Sing’ is a reference to that Keats poem, La Belle Dame Sans Merci – ‘O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,/Alone and palely loitering?’ etc etc. It’s a haunting, ghostly kind of a poem, so I thought I’d apply that love-forlorn thing to life in suburbia. It’s quite an irritating song, but you try living in Tring.
I don’t think anybody, up to that point, had attacked synths quite the way we did, to create these tense atmospheres. ‘Careering’ is about the troubles in the North of Ireland. The ethnic divides across the nonsense of religion, which later translated into gang warfare. I can’t support any group that believes that, by the killing of another, it improves their cause. For me, once you’ve murdered someone, you have no cause at all.
Musically it had to be so stark to achieve its aim, which is to make the listener aware. In all that Catholic–Protestant nonsense, for me, there’s ‘bacteria’ on ‘both sides of the river’ – I’m not gonna pick one load over another. I’m not going to be arguing with people over which ‘bacteria’ is better than the other. Indeed, all religiously fuelled or politically fuelled situations are contaminants. There’s a manipulation that goes on there that the followers aren’t quite aware of, and they should be. You’ve got to know when you’re being used.
That song caused me a lot of problems in Ireland, particularly in the South, where they thought I had no right to be dissing the IRA. Great shame. It’s the same with the song ‘Religion’: I was put down for making a direct attack on the Catholic Church, but I think you need to. There can’t be any subjects in life that are sacrosanct and untouchable, because these are the very things that lead to all the troubles. Armed gangs of murderers will never ever get my vote. And they’ll never ever lead to a world of peace and happiness.
On ‘Radio 4’, though, I couldn’t fit in vocally, so I didn’t sing at all. I cut my bit out, to give the band some space. I was more than happy and pleased to break away from the demand that you’ve got to be singing on everything. I’m doing lots of other different things, not just singing. There’s all kinds of recording decisions and producer stuff and adding little bits myself here and there and whatever, so it’s a jolly good mix-and-match.
We wanted to break every rule, every discipline. It was like opening up a toy store to four toy-starved children. We wanted the deepest growl from the bass end, so it would almost shatter your ears. Other places, what you might think is some kind of electronic gadgetry, is actually just the TV recorded onto a two-track, and sped up and down. It’s all fairly abstract, but there’s always an underpinning of danceability – although, as many of my friends told me, ‘You need three legs to dance to that one, John!’
Every track was just, work it out quickly and bang it down. Often one of us would have to muck in on drums – Keith stood in on ‘Poptones’, and Wobble on ‘Careering’. I loved all that. I loved the fear. It was like a runaway truck speeding down a hill with no brakes. We were just hoping that there was a rise at the end.
Not long after the Pistols broke up in 1978, I did an audition for the Who’s movie Quadrophenia, because Pete Townshend asked me to. He wanted me to try out for the lead role, the one that the English actor, that ratty character with the black hair, Phil Daniels, eventually landed. Come the time, the Who’s manager didn’t like me, and they didn’t think that I’d be able to carry it through a movie. They were probably, frankly, dead right, because I’d have needed some coaching or education as to how a film was put together at that point, and I just wasn’t prepared to listen to anyone about anything.
Throughout my career, Pete Townshend has always shown a favourable, helpful point of view. Our paths first crossed in the early days of the Pistols, when we were demoing at the Who’s studio. Mr Townshend found out who was using it and said, ‘We won’t charge you.’ So I’ve got nothing but complete respect for him. He also did some favours for my brother Jimmy’s band, 4" Be 2".
He’s one of those characters who’s not understood completely, but in the music/band side of things, many people, if they bothered to step forward, would tell you that he’s done everything he can to help you, while keeping his name out of it. He’ll make studios available, he’ll talk to you, he’ll run through songs with you, and he’ll tell you what’s missing in there. When he tells you Who stories, you get the feeling that you’re actually in the band. It’s not, ‘And then I . . .’ – he’s talking as a band to you. So, meeting Roger Daltrey years later, that was the first thing we had in common. ‘Oh, you’ve been with Pete? Oh, blah blah blah blah.’ So we had a root-canal conversation.
It’s impossible to catalogue it, other than you feel there’s a protective spirit when Pete’s around. It’s always favourable and open-minded, and if he doesn’t understand what your ideas are, he will not tell you different. He will back you even on that, and that’s kind of father-like. I know he’s someone I could call if I wanted to, but I’m an independent spirit and I don’t want to run it that way. But he would be absolutely without doubt available for anything. He’s just that kind of person.
Anyway, while I was auditioning for the movie, I’d get my moments on film, my sketches, delivered to Gunter Grove, and they’d arrive in these great big film canisters. It turned out that Dave Crowe, who was still living at Gunter at that time, knew the company who made these canisters in Britain, because their factory was out in Borehamwood, where he’d lived when he was younger. So, one thing led to another, and we had a ground-breaking new way to present our ground-breaking new music – literally, in a metal box.
It was a great idea to present all these expansive tracks across three 45rpm 12-inch records, but almost our entire budget for Metal Box was frittered away on this extravagant packaging. We spent more than we did on recording, and Virgin didn’t pay for it – we did.
How the boxes themselves turned out was awkward in the extreme. What we ended up with was like two round sweetie trays put together. They were hard to prise apart, and it was impossible to get the records out. It was appropriate, though, because what you were about to listen to could’ve been construed as distinctly unpleasant – it was made for those consumers who were prepared to put in a bit of effort. Then, once you were inside, the bass was so deep, it’d kick the needle clean off the record. We were slightly in advance of the hi-fi gear of the era.
When Metal Box came out, in November ’79, it got good reviews, but I trust those even less than the bad ones. It sold out of its first pressing straight off, but its influence just grew and grew over the years. In interviews, I’d describe it as ‘mood music’ – I knew that one would hurt.
Going out to play gigs around this time was impossible. In September ’79, we’d headlined an indoor festival in Leeds called Futurama – a catastrophe of a gig. It was so badly organized, and it made us really angry. Outside the venue, as you drove up, was a bunch of blokes dressed in Nazi outfits, sieg-heiling and handing out National Front publications. What? That’s unacceptable. There was no security of any kind, the exact opposite of overbearing security, so there were people just wandering around and unplugging whatever equipment they fancied. While you were up there, you knew stuff was getting nicked out of the dressing room, so you’d constantly have one eye on the back of the hall. Just silly, stupid, unnecessary
chaos. Thank God for friends like Rambo, who turned up and paid attention and stopped people doing all that.
Unplugging equipment was a very big and popular thing in them days, people would get onstage and go straight for a lead or whatever, just to try to unplug something and see that as an achievement. These weren’t what you would call fans or people that were into the music; these would be football-y type gangs that would go to venues and deliberately try to wreck them. Particularly if you were touring up north and you were from down south. Whoa – getcha! That was their mentality. It required a lot of bravery to stand there and fight back, to take that on without resorting to violence. You have to understand the psyche of the audience and control what you do in those situations.
People wanted me to be the bad boy, but they also wanted to pull me down for it. It was just walls of animosity. It was a problem, because every time you stepped out, you had all these prehistoric monsters who wanted to drag you back to the past. It’s always going to be that way when you deliberately put yourself out there on the cutting edge of learning. I could take that kind of situation quite happily, though, because sooner or later, those people who are at first against you for being oh-so-different, eventually get it. It took years for the first PiL album and Metal Box to be understood. By that time I was two or three albums down the road and, of course, those were then the albums they weren’t understanding, so I’m always three, four or five albums ahead of the learning curve.
There was trouble at these shows, but for my mind there were always mitigating circumstances, which were not considered. Britain was in a steady situation of catastrophe there at the turn of the 1980s, with endless strikes, riots, football violence and everything. It was a very violent time, and all bands faced this agenda when you did a gig. But it was very convenient for certain newspapers to hang that firmly on me, and that did a lot of damage. A lot of promoters wouldn’t touch us because they thought the exaggerated press reports of those incidents would create even further trouble down the line.
It’s always down to promoters, because they’re the ones that raise the money, but only if they feel your record company’s properly behind you. It affects gigs quite seriously. If your record company backs up whatever it is you’re up to, those economic problems that promoters can bring in wouldn’t arise. Suddenly we had to sign these insurance clauses before we walked onstage, making ridiculous guarantees that somehow if you agree to them you’re implicating yourself as the creator of any riot that may happen – by signing that you’ll try your best not to inspire a riot, it’s an implication that it’s in your framework. You know, Jesus, I’m not responsible for what a mass of people do, I’m responsible for what I do.
Very quickly, we were more or less cancelled out of Britain. The impossibility of getting gigs – again! – was taking away our lifeblood. It leads to all kinds of powerfully antagonistic internal confrontations, usually focused – again! – on ‘I want more money!’ What else do you want, when you’ve got nothing else to do? It’s an understandable human reaction to frustration, and that then becomes your maypole and your bone of contention. And trouble comes from that, it’s very hard to control. It caused fractionalisms.
So we were in a pretty bad way by the time we went to do PiL’s first American tour in April ’80. I had virtually nothing to wear, but I heard Wobble had used my mate Kenny MacDonald to make some suits for himself, that I found out PiL had paid for. By chance, as we were leaving for the airport, I’d talked to Kenny. So we got to the hotel, and Wobble opened his suitcase, and my first thing was, ‘Right, I’m having that, because I paid for it!’ I was always mix-and-match, anyway: my suitcase was equally open to anyone I was working with. Wobble never said anything, but I knew it created a real bitter agenda inside of him. He shouldn’t have been using my mates to make clothes without telling me, and having it put on my bill.
Regardless of such disagreements, our media profile was fairly confrontational. High Times put us on the cover, with Willie Nelson on one side, and Johnny Fucking Rotten on the other. Underneath, it said something like, ‘The two sides of music’, or at least that was the implication. Fantastic! I was thinking, ‘Willie Nelson isn’t the enemy, you’re kind of getting this wrong, fellas!’ I’ve always had a keen listen to Willie’s lyrics. He’s a rebel in his way: he doesn’t want anybody telling him how he should or shouldn’t be living.
In another interview, I declared, ‘Rock ‘n’ roll is shit, it’s got to be cancelled.’ From that point onwards, honestly, America declared war on us. ‘Whoargh, how can you say such a thing?’ Well, I was right. Rock ‘n’ roll had become a very lame duck. Expecting anything new in music to fit into that established genre was repulsive to me. It had become a ball and chain. Think outside the box.
Metal Box was being repackaged on both sides of the Atlantic as a ‘conventional’ double album called Second Edition. We did a radio ad for the release proclaiming it as ‘twelve tracks of utter rubbish from Public Image Ltd’. Complete and utter rubbish, for your dubious pleasure! I hoped the humour would be picked up on. It was an attempt at friendliness and openness, using irony, which is something that’s possibly not understood in America.
We’d signed back with Warners for America, but we’d had problems with them again. They didn’t like the first album very much, and passed on releasing it altogether. They didn’t know what to expect. I suppose they were hoping for ‘That great rock ‘n’ roll band the Sex Pistols Part Two’, but this is the same lot that couldn’t accept the Sex Pistols Part One. This meant I was one step further away from being caught up on.
We played about ten dates, mostly in theatres in key cities including New York and LA, as well as a legendary TV appearance on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. It all got off on the wrong foot when we arrived and they suddenly informed us that it would be a mimed thing. Our equipment hadn’t arrived in time, apparently, but we soon got even more upset when they said, ‘Oh no, you couldn’t play it live anyway, just mime to the record.’
They’d made up some edited versions of ‘Poptones’ and ‘Careering’, and gave us a cassette to check out beforehand. ‘Oh my God, they’ve cut it down to that? I don’t know where the vocals are going to drop. What are we supposed to do?’ None of us knew. Just thinking about trying to sing it like the record was . . . aarghh! You can fake it with an instrument but you can’t as the singer. ‘Okay, so you’ve cut out the point and purpose, it’s like removing the chorus from the National Anthem, just because it makes for an allotted time slot on a TV show. That’s arse-backways!’
Just before we went on I said, ‘Right, let’s just freeform it – basically as a cover for me, please!’ I started the ball rolling. I made no attempt to mime, moved around the place, and dragged all the audience up on the stage to dance. For all of the problems that caused – such spontaneous behaviour didn’t fit with their usual cosy format – Dick Clark, the host of the show, who was a massive star of US network TV, became really friendly afterwards – even though Wobble had messed around with his wigs. We found Dick’s room backstage in the make-up department, and hanging on hooks were all of these different hairpieces which, you know, got assaulted. But in the end it played out really well because when Dick Clark did a rundown of the greatest ever performances on American Bandstand, Public Image were up there in the Top Ten. And he’d been running that show for decades – almost half a century.
I knew that in that world they were all sycophantically grovelling and arse-kissing each other and cliqueing it up, and expecting anybody new that comes in to fit into place. That’s what music wanted from me, that’s what everything has wanted from me, and it’s not going to happen. Not ever. I don’t need to find a niche in that kind of society. The more they annoy themselves about my kind of personality the better it is for me, because I honestly don’t think I’m doing anything wrong here.
On the plane home from the tour, Levene had a massive withdrawal. I don’t remember too much about it, but I wasn’t very sor
ry for him. My attitude was, it serves you fucking right. Keith kept saying he wasn’t going there, but it was clear he was. Having to deal with liars really upsets me. I’m very forgiving with friends when they lie, I try and understand what made them do it, but a bit too much of it – when it becomes a public display – and I’m furious.
Wobble at that point had gone beyond the point of endurance. His bullying behaviour towards the drummer was just not acceptable. With his animosity towards Keith, he was causing too many personal situations. He was involved in too many of these issues all at once to be just merely a coincidence. His girlfriend would turn up at the house and ask where he was, and insist on coming in, in case he was in the house and hiding from her.
He’d become very mercenary. He’d cultivated this aura of Jack-the-Lad, coasting just for the money. That was the vibe he was projecting, and unfortunately a little too loud and proud, and so he got what he asked for. As long as he’d been in the band, he’d never offered anything like a resolve or an answer to anything. Just sit back and snigger and never actually contribute, never. Never wanted to make a commitment that he might be judged on later, if it be right or wrong. Believe me, that wouldn’t be a problem in PiL. But no involvement at all is a problem in PiL.
Making wrong judgements is not a problem. Making mistakes is not a problem. These are things we can deal with and move on from, but lack of commitment is a serious error. Knowing that he made himself somehow seem above it all, that was unbearable. You cannot be in a band that works like PiL, and disassociate yourself from the problems, and from the writing situations, and hold your hand out at the end of the month expecting a cheque. That’s gonna come up against a brick wall.
