by Lydon, John
Listen, I know I’m swinging left, right, and all over the place, but it’s all roots to dig into, and that’s the correct procedure, ultimately. I can’t do this all chronologically.
8
JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE PARANOID, IT DOESN’T MEAN THEY’RE NOT OUT TO GET YA
The title of this chapter comes from a poster that Poly Styrene, the singer from X-Ray Spex, gave me while I was living at Gunter Grove. They used to lock her up occasionally and take her off to the madhouse. She’d break out and always make a beeline for my house. They even came for her at Gunter one night, so she bought me that poster, because it was kind of relevant. Double negatives, I love ’em. Apparently, much later, Kurt Cobain turned that idea into a song lyric. Maybe he got it from a picture of my living room at the time.
The sentiment, coming from her, was really charming – wonderful, from a nutter! Nothing wrong with you, Poly! It’s the shitstem around her that was wrong. I thought she was borderline genius, really – the songs, everything about her was just hilarious! She may have been inwardly very depressed, but outwardly she was good company, a fun person. She was good fun until the ambulance turned up for her, with the police. And I had a house full of natty dreads at the time. Don Letts and some of his posse had come around too, so they were panicking. They thought it was a police raid. No, no, lads, it’s just the nutter squad.
John Gray’s mother was a nutter. I liked her, but he felt embarrassed about her. I thought that was a bad way to be, because people are what they are, and I’ve always found people who were slightly nutty to be highly entertaining and brilliant company. They view life a little bit differently. Two left shoes, maybe, but two left shoes are okay, if that’s what you’ve got. I’m totally inspired by people who come at things in different ways, so lunacy to me is not a thing to run away from. It’s enthralling to be in a lunatic’s company. If I had a job in a mental institution, it would be the best job ever, to me, the thrill of my life. I wouldn’t be able to tell whether I was the patient or the doctor. Sometimes the two are the same thing, you know? I loved that Pete Hammill song: ‘The Institute Of Mental Health Burning.’ Burning!
Life at Gunter Grove, however, was starting to get me down. I was bored and fed up with it. I felt entrapped – trapped in my own house. It didn’t feel like my house at all. It had become a common room for the flotsam and jetsam of London at that time. Very uncomfortable. I had no way of switching off, other than locking the door and moving out from time to time.
Martin Atkins, who’d joined us at the very end of Metal Box – I think he only played on one track and had been playing with us as our live drummer – realized very early on that all this was stifling me. It wasn’t claustrophobia. I was getting dungeoned by a situation of my own making. He said, ‘Look, I live in a really boring flat in Kensal Rise’ – or somewhere like that – ‘Why don’t you come and stay at my place for a night or two, just to clean your head of the constant pressure?’ But I rejected it. I wish I hadn’t, but I did. I was suspicious of doing that on so many levels.
I couldn’t give up the feeling that it was my place. Once I’d started accepting that my place was the problem, it was a hard thing to come to grips with. It was obvious that my house was a problem, and the people living in it – by which I mean other band members.
I’d liked the idea of all us PiL-ites living under one roof. I’ve always said that when recording a band should all – all! – stay together in a completely abstract universe, outside of your regular commute. The end result, though, was that I had no escape at all. I couldn’t escape the dilemmas. All the others could go off to wherever. I had nowhere to go to, because that was me, right there. That was everything I had, and I was very proud of the achievement of what I had. But what I had was turning bad.
I’d hardly ever see much of Levene. He’d lock himself in the basement. Weeks could go by. One time there was a really bad smell emanating from down there. I was half expecting a rotten carcass, but it transpired that it was just a garbage can he hadn’t taken out. He never bothered himself with domesticities like that. It was all beneath him. But I thought he was dead. An anxious moment, and I obviously over-worried it, so that created a huge row.
Then there was Dave Crowe down there too, beneath his hatch, with similar ‘lifestyle issues’, shall we call them. Maybe that house was haunted – he was in the same room where Jim Walker slept on newspaper with a moose-head and no furniture. Strange things came out of that room.
When Dave stopped looking after the administrative side, that created even uglier situations. Jeannette Lee was floating around, through the Don Letts connection, even though they’d now broken up, so it was, ‘Can you help us out here, because we do need some administration occasionally.’ That worked fine for a very short time, but then she’d start clique-ing with Keith and we’d not see the pair of them for days on end, and nothing got done.
I don’t know if you can ever say what Jeannette’s role was. I’m sure she’d be mystified by it too. That’s the joy and the difficulty of being in PiL, it’s a puzzlement as to what your actual role is, because there are no allocated specific technologies. Whoever’s available at any particular point to handle a situation must be capable of doing so. Jeannette offered a kind of clarity to us. We couldn’t be handling the business side or some of them bloody boring financial meetings, because you were trying to write songs and you just can’t cope with it on that level. I went a bit nuts there, trying to run an office and write songs, you can’t do it. Answering the phone all day long gives you no time to think outside of that. Structure can be the antithesis to creativity. You need the structure in order to be able to create, but you can’t be creating the structure as well.
Jeannette and Keith had a dark relationship, but they were very close to each other, for whatever reason. Who knows? Jeannette could be a real distraction in the workplace. Fellas were mad for her! Some of those fellas were ones we were working with, like Dave Crowe, who fell madly in love with her but kept it all to himself and expected her to know that. He put himself in a world of ridiculous misery there for quite some time. Also, Joe Strummer would be lurking around. It was obvious that a lot of fellas were coming over because they fancied her. That’s how life really is, you realize: everybody’s after somebody else all the time. It’s human nature. It’s just sometimes, if the situations in a working relationship get too intrigued, it has to be stopped because then cliques form and separations open up.
Dealing with Keith was a nightmare at the best of times. He insisted that he be on the front cover of Second Edition, for instance, but then he didn’t like that picture – appropriately enough, they were like distorted mirror images, but he didn’t get the fun of it. He wasn’t on the same page on the art side at all. He’s just not happy with any visual representation of himself. I get that, but you’ve got to move on and get over your big bad self, and be able to laugh at your own silliness.
I put together the cover for our Paris Au Printemps live album, and I put one of my own paintings on the front. If you look at it, that’s me at the top, old honky donkey, and Keith and Jeannette underneath, as a pair of poodles. The cover was seen as great fun by everybody except Keith, who absolutely resented his cartoon portrayal. He shouldn’t have, I thought it grasped his character rather well.
His heroin problem was becoming a real problem. There was a selfishness in the way he went about things, compounded by the drug of choice. There was one particular incident where I tried to get him to go cold turkey, obviously hoping to get him off the stuff. Ever since then, he held a resentment towards me. It seems to be that when you help out an addict in those situations, they don’t blame themselves for the position they’re in, they blame you. It’s deeply unpleasant for the self-made ‘victim’, of course – i.e. Keith – but it’s incredibly hard on the helpers – that is, me. When the addict comes out of it, they’re just sneering at you. Oh, business as usual. I suppose with a character like Keith, you couldn’t really blame
it all on the drugs. He’s just genuinely nasty, anyway.
We’d do our best – all of us, Jeannette, Dave, everybody that was around in the house – trying to help him out with it, but you wouldn’t get much joy out of him.
The world beyond our front door felt no more welcoming to me. Everyone seemed to know that I lived at the house. I still had the tabloid reporters on my back, horribly so. There was always someone flirting about outside Gunter Grove with a camera. To an odd extent, I’d go out and have a chat, and I got to know a lot of them. It kind of became all right then, because they’d be like, ‘You’re just a regular bloke, we all know that, and we’re not out to scupper you.’ And so I could continue my lifestyle somewhat unabated. Fair play, because Gunter weren’t no nun’s convent.
The fans were a different matter. They’d be carving lyrics into the front door, and scribbling all over the exterior walls. It got weirdly continental. The fan base changed from local punks, to UK punks, to kids from Italy who would demand that they be let in. It’s just too much at a certain point. With the SEX shop around the corner – now called Seditionaries – I was obviously on the punk tourist trail.
I actually used to let fans in all the time. ‘Hello!’ ‘Oh hello, in you come!’ But it got nutty because the emphasis shifted into psychotics, clingers, and just out-and-out intolerable selfish weirdos. That’s what happens. All the open-mindedness in the world really doesn’t work the second that one evil cunt who wants to kill you comes in. You let them in and they turn nasty in a heartbeat for no good reason. Unbelievably hard for me to accept and tolerate. Trying to find some passive way of kicking them out of the door is never easy, but you learn from it.
Another worry at Gunter Grove was a warfare that was going on with Jock McDonald, who was a friend of my brother Jimmy’s. They had a band together called the 4" Be 2", which was very much an Arsenal hooligan mayhem kind of approach. There were a lot of football firms that started to put records out – the Pistols opened a lot of doors.
Jimmy and Jock just wanted to have a band, and Rambo and Paul Young were in it too. I was very vaguely involved, when I sussed that it wasn’t a nasty joke. They were trying at one point to take themselves seriously, and that’s when I’ll offer any help I can. My dad even got in on it – well, they used his name, saying, ‘Produced by John Lydon’. My dad went, ‘Well, that was my name before you started using it.’ ‘Okay, Dad, that one’s yours.’ Otherwise, I’ve not much idea what they were up to; I just know that when the taxman came a-knocking, it weren’t me what did it.
However, I soon got embroiled with Jock and his nonsense, because he’d fallen out with Paul Young, who was still at Gunter. Jock’s brothers were friends of mine, and Jock would turn up with them to try and intimidate me, and they’d go, ‘No, Jock, we’ll beat you up first – John’s our mate!’ This kind of silly nonsense.
My brother Jimmy is a year younger than me, and we’re very close. We’re incredibly different, and that’s probably what makes us so close. I’m the quiet one, the elder one, the responsible one. But I’m also Johnny Rotten! Jimmy’s a saucy fella, he’s non-stop comedy, like a stand-up. Everything in life, he finds a laugh in it. I suppose we both do, so it must be a Lydon thing, even though both our parents were so quiet. Maybe we just grew up learning to use words to entertain ourselves, because Mum and Dad hardly spoke. We’d just bugger off and get up to all kinds of hell, and even though I’m the eldest, any troublesome situation we ever found ourselves in was Jimmy’s fault. I’m not saying that spitefully, I’m just saying Jimmy has a knack of finding, you know, catastrophe. He can’t help it. And big brother was there to try and sort it out.
Dublin was a good example – a classic case of, ‘Another fine mess you’ve got me into, Stanley!’ I was out there in October with the 4" Be 2" and their travelling army of friends and family, all out for the beano.
I got myself into a whole heap of trouble when me and a friend went for a quiet drink in the afternoon. We were in a pub called the Horse and Tram down there by the river next to our hotel. I’d just bought a drink when the landlord seemed to take offence to me. I don’t think he liked the way I looked or sounded. I guess I stood out like a sore thumb. Something was said and someone snatched the pint out of my hand. A few of the locals – at least one of whom it later turned out was off-duty Garda – decided to make themselves busy and join in. They were definitely playing a bully game on me – they thought I was some kind of English eejit. One thing led to another, and a bit of a scuffle ensued. There was a lot of shouting and fists began flying. Just not mine! I’ve said before, I attacked two policemen’s fists with my face. That’s pretty much the truth of it.
I went back to the hotel to change me clothes and was followed by one of the off-duty coppers, who promptly arrested me for assault. It looked like I was only going to get a slap on the wrist, as I was let out pending charges. But that all changed later. I went off and met the 4" Be 2" at Trinity College and then went back to the hotel for a drink, when the police arrived and took me away. There had been a radio show with my brother Jimmy and the gig in between. Perhaps somebody in the authorities had listened to the radio and had me arrested again after realizing who I was. I don’t know. The whole thing was a farce.
I found myself in court the following morning on a charge of ‘Common Assault’. They refused me bail despite the fact one of my friends, Johnny Byrne, had offered to put up the £250 security. He also got me my lawyer. Jock McDonald helped too. £250 was a lot of money back then – thank you, Johnny, it’s not been forgotten – but they refused it point blank. Despite the fact that the guy in the dock before me had been given £50 bail for hitting someone with a hammer at the 4" Be 2" show the previous night. The prosecutors had tried to claim I’d called the bartender an ‘Irish pig’. My lawyer made a point of telling them I was Irish and both my parents were born in Ireland. My case was adjourned until the Monday and I was taken to Mountjoy – a notorious prison filled with IRA and UDA terrorists and all sorts of psychopaths.
On my arrival, the warders decided to make an example of me. They stripped me, threw me into the yard and hosed me down. But you know, you can strip me, cover me in flea powder and laugh at the size of my penis, it doesn’t matter. It – does – not – matter. Over the years I’ve noticed that when these institutions get hold of you, the one thing they’re trying to embarrass you about is your nakedness, and your penis. Let me tell you, Johnny’s got a perfect penis to laugh at, and he don’t care. That’s not ever going to be a problem.
Inside there, it was tough – really, really tough and hard – a punishing regime. I tried to have a routine but they made it impossible. The warders would wake me up all night long with their truncheons and make me stand by the bed. With hindsight, what you learn is, when the institution has got a hold of you, then you quickly have to learn to adapt and blend in and try to merge into the shadows. Which is, of course, impossible for me. So ignore my advice, and ultimately just be yourself. That’s all I was.
You were allowed an hour of telly, and who came up but yours truly on the news! Then there was a programme about the history of music and yours truly was on that, too, with all the other inmates surrounding me and looking at me. The embarrassment! I just wanted to crawl under the concrete. The prisoners were fine, though.
Just by being alive, the warders didn’t like me and that left some breathing space with my fellow inmates. ‘God, look what he’s got to go through.’ A lot of the prisoners felt if they stood next to me or chatted with me, that they’d come under the glaring eye of the warders that were trying to make life punishing for me. But I’m like, ‘Is that the best you’ve got to offer? You’re not gonna make me uncomfortable about being myself, I don’t care.’
I was back in court on the Monday where the judge sentenced me to three months in prison. Thankfully my lawyer got an appeal in, and this time I made bail. I immediately went back to England, and the very next day started work on the Flowers Of Romance album.
When the appeal finally came up, months later in Dublin, I knew my career was on the line. I had to go back. It really was squeaky-bum time. If I’d lost that appeal, my sentence would have been doubled to six months. As you can imagine, I was under massive stress at the time, but the case was thrown out of court in ten minutes. The judge saw right through the contradictions in the two witnesses’ statements. They didn’t even bother to turn up, at least not till after the case had been dismissed. I was acquitted but not before I was asked to make a £100 donation to the ‘poor box’. That’s Irish justice for you.
Through 1980, many people had found great entertainment in Metal Box’s claustrophobia. All well and good, but then comes the problem of a fan base that wants to hear that sound on everything you do, forever and a day. If that’s what you want, I’m not your fella. I don’t like doing that.
By now, with Wobble gone, I was into stripping the bass out completely and researching drum sounds, using a collection of loops. I was really angry at the time with Keith Levene’s despondency, his seeming unwillingness to put in any effort toward helping in the project, which was of course largely due to his predilections. Most of the time, he was upstairs playing video games. He’d just bought the model of Space Invaders, which came in a little black triangular box, and he’d become completely addicted to that. You couldn’t get him away from it. That would be it, morning, noon and night, just gawping at these dots moving up and down a screen. To my mind it showed a very compulsive behaviour. He can’t get out of things; he goes too far.
