by Lydon, John
So I got on with it by making drum loops with Martin Atkins. He’d already committed himself to an American tour with his band, Brian Brain, however, so I only had him for a short while. Once he’d gone off, I had to garner what I could out of those tapes, and formulate patterns which I then put vocals to. I had a great time doing that with Nick Launay, a trainee engineer/tape-operator at Townhouse studios in Shepherd’s Bush. He was all that was available late at night, and thank God for him, a happy coincidence.
When Keith finally came down, oh God, was he snooty about it. He played a little bit and then would just vanish again, so I got on and finished it with Nick. We put together a sound based on drum loops and vocals, and then I started adding things like bits of piano, bass and saxophone. That’s what we had to do to get the thing done. I could hardly call myself a saxophone player, yet there it is on Flowers Of Romance. You turn the pressure into a useful tool.
I’m playing just about everything on the album. Keith came in for a very little bit and behaved like a sour pussy. For me, it was at that point my proudest moment, because, for the first time ever in music, I’d done it all without any backing. I’d put things together completely on my own, without having to share the workload. I showed that I could do it. I found my way instinctively around various different instruments, and ashtrays on pianos, and all of these things were firing left, right and centre.
I was so full of ideas, because I was free! The prospect of spending six months in Mountjoy – that was a bit of a harsh reality. If the charges were proved, that’s what I would’ve gone down for. And, dare I say, falsely accused. All of that trauma is definitely inside the music, somewhere.
There’s a song that particularly refers to the situation called ‘Francis Massacre’. It’s about notes that were being sent down to me from prisoners on the higher level, who were asking me to pass them on to people on the outside. But that was impossible, as I was told I would have been searched, so I had to flush them. I wasn’t taking any chances. One note from a guy called Francis Moran I made a song about – ‘Go down for life, Mountjoy is fun’. The song was inspired by a combination of all those notes.
‘Francis Massacre’, in my mind, is directly related to ‘The Cowboy Song’, the B-side to ‘Public Image’, in that it’s another yippee-aye-oh clippy-cloppy bunch of noise. I find those things to this day refreshing to play, because I’m aware of the situations I was involved with at the time, and that to me was the best interpretation – screaming angst and cacophonic jagged edges.
‘Flowers Of Romance’, the song, is at the opposite extreme. I loved that song as much as I love ‘Sun’, which is a thing I did more or less on my own too, for my solo album, Psycho’s Path. They’re my anthems, they’re in a happy-go-lucky pop format, but to my mind they fit into the same context as, say, T. Rex’s ‘Life’s A Gas’, which will be forever a guiding light to me. Those are my versions of anthemic festival music, and this all goes back to seeing the Who live at the Oval cricket ground in 1971, with the Faces and Mott the Hoople supporting. Aynsley Dunbar was the DJ between bands – I loved his stuff, he was a great DJ – and he put on ‘Life’s A Gas’. This audience thought of themselves as hardcore rockers and, you know, ‘Boooo!’ to anything T. Rex, which they viewed as pop trash and a sell-out, but it cut through them. Glorious to hear it over a PA system! It’s just an open, happy thing, as is ‘Flowers’. Other people may hear a darkness in there. Well, musically, I’m something of a gypsy, I’ve got to travel.
‘Four Enclosed Walls’ has a very Muslim call-to-prayer vibe. What I was doing lyrically was understanding that anything you’re blaming on these latterday martyrs for the Muslim cause, you have somehow to trace back to what the Christian crusaders did centuries before, invading their country with a religious nonsense belief, to explain away the fact that they were out for filthy fucking destruction and thievery. So it’s a long, ongoing process. This is how far back terrorism goes, how the crusades can lead to a tragic conclusion. The lines, ‘I take heed, arise in the West, the new Crusade’, are against all religion, because, praise be to Allah, He would be horrified with what the contemporary followers are doing with his message. Listen, Allah’s me mate, so’s Jesus. Seriously, I won’t be swayed from that, because that’s what these religions were supposedly offering you, a world of friendship. They’ve misappropriated it to a world of warfare and abuse and, like all religious wars, that’s mutual destruction.
My voice on this record had an amazing hollow sound that came from the stone rooms at the Townhouse and the Manor. The sounds could be so crisp, particularly with drums. I’ve always had an appreciation for the Led Zeppelin drum sound, so when it came to Flowers, that was a yippee and a half, to be able to move into that area. I remember reading somewhere that Zeppelin would record everything separately, and John Bonham would do his drums in his stone cottage. Fantastic. Sometimes the putting together of a song is not necessarily all in the same room at the same time, or even in the same continent.
I suppose I could’ve just broken up the band at that point, but I thought, ‘That’s all right, I’ve got tolerance for that – because I’ve just got out of jail!’ My energy zone was way rampant. I thought it was a great record. To this day, it thrills me to pieces when I play it. How bright and fresh sounding it was. Nothing like that had been recorded in that way.
On the album cover, we introduced Jeannette as a member of the band, with the best picture of her. She looks like a girl having a cheeky party in Spain, with a rose stuck between her teeth. It’s like an English-abroad kind of thing.
As a band, however, we weren’t able to go anywhere to publicize the record, which eventually came out in spring 1981. The ‘hard to get gigs’ side to PiL’s existence had reached a total stalemate in England. So we started to think about looking much further afield to play, just to get away from this ridiculousness of promoters not wanting to back us because they were fearful of riots. We felt like we were being cut out, being written off as unwanted. So, in order to survive, we had to think outside the box, and keep PiL a thoroughly mobile artillery unit.
We were also trying to develop the idea of PiL as an umbrella organization for multi-media activities, but this was met with resentment whenever we mentioned it publicly. Keith and I had talked about it on a couple of TV interviews in New York the previous summer, with Michael Rose, and then Tom Snyder. These people really gave us some gyp. We were talking about living outside of the chart system, in a world of creativity that didn’t have to come cap-in-hand to any of the corporations or institutions, and how we didn’t give a tuppenny fuck about not getting a Grammy. The Tom Snyder interview was particularly frosty.
Years later, up came a chance to do Tom Snyder again. I sat down with him and had a really bloody good talk, during the interview and after. I’d call him a definite friend. I really liked him. He started to send me all his old interviews and stuff, and also some really wacky music things, and then a couple of years later he died. So that was a terrible thing, because there were plans to do things with Tom. He actually really ‘got’ the umbrella thing. It’s chaps like that, when you have conversations with them, you realize that age is irrelevant; it’s the ideas that count. Sometimes you have to have an awful lot of patience until the situation is there for you. Tough tits when you’re young, though, the opportunities aren’t there.
Keith’s understanding of our broadening company ethos was typically selfish: his sister was getting into knitting, and Keith wanted to introduce her into the umbrella of PiL as someone who would manufacture knitted jumpers. ‘O-o-oh, GOD! Just, no!’
I mean, all of us baulked at the prices Vivienne Westwood charged for her mohair jumpers back in the SEX shop days. They were great, everybody wanted one of them, but financially they were beyond most people’s reach. My mum made me one once, but without the holes. ‘You know, Mum, this I couldn’t wear in Alaska, it’d be too hot’ – really heavily made. She went, ‘Dem holes ar’ silly, who wants a jomper wit’ h
oles?’ ‘Me, Mum!’
But still – ‘No, Keith, we’re not taking up a knitting division . . .’ That’s where nepotism creeps in, trying to get your family involved. That won’t ever work because it causes all kinds of problems. I didn’t see us as trying to make cheap imitations of something that somebody was already doing. It’s all right if my mum makes me a jumper, but I’m not gonna set up a commercial line. This would be Keith all the time. He’d consistently come out with these wack ideas. That’s all well and good, but in the end it gets you feeling like, ‘Oh my God, not again. Could – you – just – stop – talking!’
The police raids at Gunter Grove were getting ridiculous. In spring ’81 there were three in a three-week period, every Friday, and that was just too much to take. They’d dismantle the place, smash the front door in, tear everything apart, then go, ‘All right, thanks for that!’ and leave. Or drag me down to the station for one reason or another, and then let me go. They’d be dragging me in my pyjamas, barefoot. No lift home. Of course, not being fully dressed, I’d have no money on me, so I had to walk back down Fulham Road in my bare feet, pyjamas, and red dressing gown. Many thought I was copying Bob Geldof’s band’s keyboards player, Johnny Fingers, wandering around in me jim-jams. Very embarrassing. It was shouted out, ‘Oi, Fingers!’ Oh, for shame!
Then I’d get back, and of course the front door is off its hinges. It got to the point where I had to leave a hammer and a fresh set of screws, latches and nails by the door, ready for the next one. In modern times, you’d have a complaints department to ring up, and get the damage taken care of. In them days, you had to fork out yourself. Luckily, I still had Paul Young living with me. He was a carpenter on the building sites, and would just bang it back up into place.
The only explanation given for the intrusions was that it was a drugs raid. Suspicion of illegal activity. What would be the evidence? ‘An IRA flag in the back window.’ ‘Er, actually, that’s the Italian flag.’ My neighbours had given that to me – the ones that asked me not to play the reggae too loud after midnight – because I had no curtain on the back window. ‘We can see what you’re doing, and we don’t want to!’ These days, of course, it would be cameras akimbo. Life was different, then, people tended to help each other out, so you had a respect. You’d say, ‘Ouch, sorry, I won’t play it like that at 3 a.m. again.’ Or, in this case, ‘Yes, I’ll put up your flag, so you can’t see my botty.’ I’d be perfectly happy with that. You won’t find neighbours bitching bad things about me, because I look out for them and they look out for me. To me, that’s a very important part of life.
The police unfortunately had a different attitude. It got to the point where I started to know them. I knew them from hanging around the pubs I’d be in. They’d be there, supposedly under cover – I don’t know, maybe waiting for a gun or drug deal to go down. Oh, for God’s sake. Let’s put it this way: the police in them days had a vicious intent and a suspicious attitude for anybody that was outside of the norm and was an easy target and unprotected by the alleged society at the time – which I definitely was, at least according to the scandal-mongering of the newspapers.
The very last, raid, the ‘Johnny Fingers’ one, actually happened on a Monday morning, but that was the worst of the lot. Barking angry Alsatians, the whole thing. And do you know what they pulled me on? When they burst the front door open, I came down brandishing one of them antique swords, and I came at them. I didn’t see their uniforms. However, that was viewed as an assault on a police officer. So that was the scam, that time. The laws are somewhat different these days and they’re more protective of the house owner, and indeed they always should be. To my mind, whatever you do behind your own front door is entirely your own business. Entirely. I could never agree to or justify those kinds of raids. Ever.
This was very early Monday morning, at the crack of dawn, absolutely exhausted, tired, but we had nothing incriminating in the house, save for a teapot full of herbal – which they never found, which was bizarre because they even kicked a speaker over that was behind it. They never twigged! This has a lot to do with Satan, the cat. Satan bopped about, terrified of all the barking, and one of the dogs went for him, knocked the pot of pot over, but didn’t really notice it because it only had eyes for the kitten. How odd: they don’t even know how to do this stuff properly! Poor old Satan was so terrified of the dogs that he ran away and never returned.
The police attention was too much; it was overwhelming. It meant, for instance, that I couldn’t go up to Finsbury Park and hang out with friends, because there’d be that following me. They’d be there making everybody feel uncomfortable, and therefore I’d be at fault for bringing that into the manor. It destroys you socially, and for what result? I can’t imagine how much money they were spending on putting together a police raid. Surely it doesn’t come cheap? And a lot of time wasted, and a lot of this pertaining back to the fact that I had a £40 fine for possession of amphetamine sulphate.
It was very intimidating, and the clear implication to me was that they were trying to run me out of the country. There’d been the three raids in a row, and a couple before that. It became apparent that they were bored with what they were doing. They made it clear to me that they were just following orders – ‘Don’t take it personal, John.’ We were on first name terms – as I said, a couple of the officers that came in had been following me when I’d go to pubs in Notting Hill. Keith Burton, who was working at Virgin at the time, and actually a few years later became my manager, recognized the police straight off one time I went to a pub near the label’s offices. He went, ‘Oh my God, look, your shadows are here!’
It just felt futile staying in this unprotected environment. There’s nothing in the media to back me up, or save me, or declare this to be unjust detention, or unwarranted. The tabloid press only wanted to report bad things about me – and so, time to go.
It was Keith who went to New York first, around that time. It was all to do with this idea that we’d be an umbrella of thoughts. Well, maybe the umbrella was a fish-net. With hindsight, he was obviously following a similar route to Sid – the availability of heroin in New York being famous at the time. Anyway, he’d allegedly gone there on a jolly, and once he was out there he’d found out about this new system of cameras and screens that were being installed at a nightclub called the Ritz. The end result was that we all went out there to work on that too, and we never came back. We lived there for about three years, all told.
The months before I left London for New York almost felt like a holiday. I was trying to gather my thoughts and work out my next move. To that end, I hooked up with Rambo and was going to stay at his place. He’d said, ‘Gunter Grove is killing you. My parents are away and I’m staying at their house, come over and you can get your head together.’ He was going to sort me out, because he was aware of the pressure I was under, so we were going to have a laugh together. We had been to Margate on a coach beano with a few of the lads that day. On the way home we’d bought crates of booze and were going to party until the following week. First night, a phone call comes in. I still don’t know how they got Rambo’s number and I don’t know who transferred the call – it must have been someone at Gunter. It’s Keith, all bouncy on the line: ‘Come to New York, we’ve got a chance to do a live camera display at the Ritz.’ I went, ‘I’m round at Rambo’s, I can’t book a ticket.’ ‘Don’t worry, it’s waiting for you at the airport.’ So I let John down, because we were gonna have a hoot together, but off I went the next morning.
We still couldn’t get gigs anywhere, remember, but the people at this place the Ritz were going to put us on for two nights, as some kind of live music-slash-video production. The idea was to project multiple camera shots live onto one big screen. It was an interesting concept that I thought had heaps of potential, particularly bearing in mind that Jeannette used to carry a camera around in a violin case, and how we were thinking, ‘Film, film, film!’ We realized how important filming was to the Pistols,
and yet how little footage there was of the actual events. We wanted everything to be catalogued, but also to think outside the box when it came to live performance with the band – not just us playing in the standard format, but creating other kinds of situations. It could be many other things going on at the same time. Open-mindedness really, and . . . Bingo! A riot started. Or it didn’t. It wasn’t a riot, it was a fiasco, but an enjoyable one.
The idea was that we’d stand behind the screens with a record playing. We’d make a few noises over the top, with some live drums to bolster the sound. We got a drummer from a music store, a very old fella called Sam Ulano, who had a jazzy sensibility. His kind of music was Frank Sinatra. We could have picked any record to put on that turntable but I was insistent on it being Flowers Of Romance. I knew that would annoy Keith no end, because of his dismissive and withdrawn attitude during its actual recording. ‘You get what you deserve in this band, mate. What – you don’t know the guitar parts? That’s because there aren’t any – you weren’t there, you were upstairs playing Space Invaders. Here it is now, deal with it!’
So the album’s on the turntable, and Keith’s there with his guitar, going, ‘Brrr twang bang’, deliberately being awkward, and the old fella’s playing drums to it, and it’s fitting in quite nicely, and everybody’s got a camera and they’re moving around the place, and all this is being projected on a screen in front of us. We’re on the stage, so people are seeing the screen rather than us – a screen of loads of different images of each of us simultaneously, split-screen, multiscreen, every combination of cameras you could imagine.
The control boards of the cameras were being manipulated by a very fun American chap called Ed Caraballo. He was converting all these images live for the screen, with flashes of audience and-or whatever. Because I was behind the screen and seeing it all in reverse and up close – and my eyesight is not good – it all looked to me like a Tangerine Dream album cover.