by Lydon, John
I just thought, ‘What are Virgin now gonna make of this? Are they gonna come back at me and go, Told you so, that’s what you get working with those loonies?’ Actually, they helped tear that one down, and quite rightly so. And then it went into trying to get the reel masters, and they were all a mess, so I had to rerecord all the tracks for the album that became This Is What You Want . . . This Is What You Get. I felt I had to backtrack to get those songs back into the fold, and not let them be stolen away. I must agree, though, that we didn’t manage to grab the intensity of the original demos.
I did it with Martin Atkins and a few other people, mostly at Maison Rouge studio in January and February 1984. That place was virtually under the stands of the old Shed at Chelsea’s football ground, Stamford Bridge. I’d walk there from Gunter Grove, which I hadn’t sold off yet, but some nights there’d be a Chelsea game on, so in the back of your mind you’d be thinking, ‘Oh God, here we are walking down the streets with an assortment of bizarre instruments – in the middle of football crowds . . .’ And in them days there’d always be, ‘Rotten! You’re Arsenal, in’t ya!’ I never kept it quiet – you are what you are.
Some of the album was done at Pete Townshend’s Eel Pie studios. It was the closest we ever came to working together. He wanted to, certainly. The place was in Twickenham, right on the Thames, and it almost flooded out a couple of times, because the river was overflowing. Townshend wanted to be involved, but I kind of shy away from those things – it might distract me and set me on a pretentious course. When the moment’s there, if it’s right, then do it, but if that’s not the right moment, then don’t. Let your instincts guide you.
The problem was, Martin and I had learned how to have fun more than anything else. I loved working with his loops, but by strip-mining what we were recording, we left it threadbare almost. The empty spaces in that record are kind of where the action is. The correct use of emptiness taken to the ultimate extreme.
I wanted to go further into a drum-and-vocal universe, full-on. I had great respect for Martin’s drumming – he’s beat perfect, the fella – simple, to the point, and that left you lots of room. But he had doubts about himself as a drummer, and didn’t want to do it any more. ‘Well, what the hell are you gonna play? Flute?’ He’s like me, he’s not very studious when it comes to understanding the ins and outs and intricacies of instruments. We see instruments as accoutrements, not as guiding forces.
There were songs on there called ‘Where Are You?’ and ‘Solitaire’. I suppose it felt quite lonely out there in the wilderness. The album title, This Is What You Want . . .This Is What You Get, which comes up as a chant at various points, was an absolute tirade on what I saw was now going on in the ’80s. People were being force-fed a diet of vacuous pop rather than content, and you couldn’t get content out there at all. If you had anything poignant in your lyrics, MTV would find a reason to cancel you out.
It was a world of amazing isolation. The relationship with Virgin at that point was one where we didn’t give a flying fuck about each other. Very hard times. Hello, I’m Johnny – I’m a nurse by nature, and I’m nursing you into the future, and I’ve never said a word that’s wrong, really. I predict well and accurately. I had to dig deep to keep my batteries running, in order for PiL to maintain or sustain any goodness that was in us, because it was a world of, ‘Boo, screw you. Here’s the latest video by . . .’ – then you’d watch Simon Le Bon on a yacht. And no digs to Simon, he’s really an all right fella, but at that time the whole game was about the finances of video backing, and the more money spent on a video seemed to mean the more attention. So, out the window went cause or point or purpose, and in crept, ‘Look what I’m wearing!’
I might have pushed it too far. But guess what? Here comes a hell of a lot more pushing. I don’t do this for chart positions, I do this to make the world a better place. I’m arrogant enough to believe that whatever it is I do is actually to the benefit of mankind. I don’t really view it any other way. Every decision I make is always based on these principles and values. Am I an anachronism? I definitely began to get the idea that my approach to life was a dinosaur in the mid-’80s because nobody wanted to think about anybody but themselves. What a great pity, to see punk unravel in that way. And pop music to accept any old palaver as long as a big-arsed name producer was attached.
That album cover was a similar thing: the label had lined up this famous photographer – called Norman Seeff, who was living in LA – to shoot me and I don’t understand how the photos went so wrong. ‘Oh, you’re gonna look great, if this fella takes your picture . . .’ Then I go to these sessions and I’m not enjoying them, I don’t connect with the fella at all, and the results show that.
In America at that time, we didn’t have a label. I had close contacts with a couple of people at Atlantic, and they seemed like great fun to me. One of the sticking points was that they didn’t have much of a liking for poor old Martin Atkins, so yet again I was facing a record company that didn’t mind me, but they just couldn’t bear the people I was working with, for whatever reason. But that’s not why me and Martin went separate ways – I never let anybody influence me like that. I don’t abandon people, but I do seem to be quite good at losing them. It was a continual revolving door.
By summer 1984 I’d had enough of New York. I’d been there for three years and it was time to move on. So why did I not move back to London? It’s difficult to explain, but it’s the lack of get-up-and-go. The lack of wanting to change a thing. The acceptance and the general malaise-y attitude of ‘Why bother? Yaaawn. It’s not going to make any difference in the long run.’ ‘Arrgh! Yes, it will!’
But then I get the flipside: ‘Erm, why did you leave? Why don’t you come back?’ My response is: ‘What?! What are you yourself doing, to be saying this to me?’
I’d stood up and been counted and noted for being rebellious, and yet I was resented for it, for making people have to think. The media was not protecting me, instead flirting me off as the bad boy that deserves his come-uppance, and that’s a very dangerous universe. Quite frankly, I knew that if I didn’t get out of Britain, I was going to end up with a very long prison sentence. The endless police raids on Gunter Grove weren’t funny. There’s no humour in that. They’re out to get you, and sooner or later they will get you. Back to Poly Styrene’s poster: you can’t just keep putting your head on the chopping block all the time. I had no allies to back me up. I was well aware that evidence could be tampered with, or faked – so: move on, get out of there.
Plus, there’s always the gyppo in me. I’ve got that gypsy attitude: get up and move. When the facilities have run out, find a new space, recharge the batteries.
Brits tend to go to New York because it’s nearest, and it’s like another London. It’s very exciting when you first live there, but after a while, it wears you down. Everybody’s agitated, everything’s a drama conducted at a ridiculously high tempo. I’d spent all my early life rushing to everything and if I wasn’t careful, I would’ve rushed to my own grave. And of course, it was a drug-fuelled atmosphere in them days. You were practically led by the nose to it, so to speak. New York is a town where it’s usually overcast. The days, if you’re in the music world, you tend to resent. You live for the night. Well, I’m not a vampire. I enjoyed the lifestyle for a little bit, but not too much, thank you. It was ultimately, for me, soul-destroying.
Bob Tulipan, who’d been helping us on the business and management side had left the previous year, and by this time we had brought in a new manager, Larry White, who was really instrumental in moving the band to Los Angeles. Larry was a sweetheart. He managed a lot of surfers, who can be a suspicious lot, I discovered. He had a lot of problems representing them, and they didn’t understand what the hell he was doing with an outrageous ass like me. But courtesy of Larry, our road crew had soon all become surfers. When we played at the Cornwall Coliseum in St Austell in November 1983, we were staying in this couple’s guesthouse, which had a pan
oramic view of this Cornish bay – and the waves were about one inch high. The derision these fellas laid on us was hilarious.
At Larry’s insistence, everything soon focused on building ourselves a really good office in LA. In June ’84, we got a really cheap rent space way up in the hills, twenty minutes’ drive from Pasadena. It was a great little facility called La Granada – a wooden structure with stucco walls, plastic windows, aluminum frames, screens, and an overhanging roof so that the rain didn’t wear the walls down – whenever it does rain in LA. The whole thing was basically on a very dangerous precipice so, like many places up there, whenever there is some rain, the mud falls from beneath the house, and slowly but surely the concrete structure is eroded, cracks up, and you fall down the mountain.
I shared the house with Martin Atkins, for the last six months that he was in PiL. We were beginning to have problems with each other, and then my brother Martin came over and stayed, and that caused even more problems. Martin Atkins didn’t like Martin. And that worked both ways, by the way. Martin started getting a bit of an attitude about who I was having around. I wanted my younger brother Martin to learn everything he could about how to set things up – he loves the technical side of music, backline, etc. – but it caused a friction. I understood Atkins’ point of view, but at the same time, it’s my young brother – come on, he’s hardly here to replace you.
Instead, my brother ended up working with that famous Swedish guitarist, Yngwie Malmsteen, who I used to call Manigwee – the joke’s long lost. It was very good for Martin too, because he was on his own two feet, and he wasn’t a problem in the house all the time.
One very major positive of living there was that KROQ, the influential Anglophile radio station, was based in Pasadena, and because of that proximity it was very hard for them not to be playing PiL records on the radio. Yippee, that was a first! From there, PiL got very involved with the LA indie band scene, and gigs for us around LA and the various surrounding counties soon became very big affairs. No small attendance, full-on packed events.
The concept of Los Angeles is inexplicable to the English psyche. Everyone who comes here for the first time can’t figure it at all. It’s huge, enormous and low, and it just goes on and on forever. People describe it as not so much a town or a city, but a loose consortium of villages spread over seventy miles – and that’s bang-on right. What’s that line in the Dionne Warwick song? ‘LA is a great big freeway.’ The only way of getting anywhere is via some serious freeways that interconnect the different areas. It’s quite nutty. To do anything here requires forty-five minutes in your car.
The place just didn’t seem to have anything going for it. It seemed the furthest reach, it seemed impossible, it seemed ludicrous – it seemed like the place where the Eagles come from. Here I am in LA and I’m on the beach where Neil Young would walk barefoot with his acoustic guitar in his heyday.
Very quickly, it became ‘Why not?’ What’s wrong with that? At least these people don’t seem to want to hate, kill and despise each other. They’re less combative with each other as musical entities. Maybe a bit of peace and love in the world, when it’s actually truly meant, might not be a bad thing. After New York, it was like, ‘You know, what’s the rush?’ It was a mentality that I only gradually learned to absorb, but in the short term I realized there was a lot of fun things to do in a completely different way, in a different universe. This wasn’t the big city, this wasn’t full of nightclubs; everything involved travel and sunshine and getting up early – just finding other ways of exploring life.
People like Rod Stewart and Tom Jones apparently came here to disappear, to be a little fish in a bigger pond, which I kind of understand. It’s definitely a ‘start all over again’ vibe, getting away from the contaminations that you felt were somehow dragging you down from previous situations. It’s exploratory. But Rodney did it with an enormous amount of money. I didn’t, and I certainly never came here to be near the Hollywood acting scene. No connection, no interest.
I must stress, this was not escapism – it was to take risks, spread your wings and go to pastures new, take on new challenges. Believe me, it’s a dramatic challenge to uproot like that, and it’s not done for comfort.
At the beginning, I went, ‘I hate the sun, urgh!’ But I soon noted that I wasn’t ill all the time, like I usually was, from head colds and sinus infections and ongoing spinal pains from the meningitis. The weather was actually better for me, smog included. It took time to adjust to the lifestyle: it really is all about getting up early and enjoying sunrise and sunset, and that being more thrilling than anything a squalid disco in Sheffield can offer me.
While we were holed up in Pasadena, Atkins started the ball rolling on getting a new band, by placing an ad in the Musicians Wanted section of LA Weekly. It said something like, ‘If you love PiL, and hate heavy metal’, which kind of gave the game away, but was a complete lie, in the nicest possible way. In the past, I actually have said, ‘I hate heavy metal,’ but as you already know, sometimes I will say one thing to get a result, when I actually mean the opposite.
I was astounded when Flea turned up for the auditions at Perkins Palace, and he was fabulous. He tended to play bass in that ‘slap-bass’ style, which wasn’t great for what I wanted, but . . . ‘Yes! You’ll do!’ But then he said: ‘Well, I can’t . . .’ It turned out he was having problems with his own band, his fellow cohorts in the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who were really just starting out at the time. I think he just wanted to remind them that he could’ve moved on to pastures new, but fair play to the fella, he stuck with them, and the Chili Peppers are still on tour. I would’ve loved to have worked with him.
It was through those auditions that we found Mark Schulz (guitar, 20), Jebin Bruni (keyboards, 18) and Bret Helm (bass, a bit older!), and by October we’d got ourselves rehearsed and were able to tour the East and West coasts.
Atkins and I, however, were not seeing eye to eye. I like Martin a lot. Every now and again we’d have a yelling session on the phone, and he always took it on the chin. He could be a bad bunny. I couldn’t trust him, because he’d do anything for a fiver. But still I tried to be mates with him.
We fell apart because he pulled an issue the night before we went off to tour Australia and Japan over New Year 1985 – the night before, he wanted more money and that was like, ‘That’s not gonna happen, Martin. You’ve made your commitment.’ He didn’t want to be an equal player in this any more, he wanted extra, knowing I had no alternative at that late stage. But when it comes to them situations – and I’ve had it with quite a few different band members – they turn around and say, ‘Well, I never signed anything.’ That’s a risky business when you try to work with someone like me. As soon as I think this is about greed – goodbye! We tried to make it up on the tour, but there was no bond there at that point. I practically isolated him from me.
Another thing was his misunderstanding of the idea of PiL as an umbrella covering other things as well as music. Every single person who’s created a problem in PiL has always said they wanted to stop the music and do something else, but still draw the wages off PiL. And that something else was usually because they had their own band ideas, which is very disrespectful. Atkins was another one of those.
I’ll never make that mistake again of allowing an openness with people in that particular way, because they then presume that the cash cabinet is theirs to plunder. I have to be able to keep enough cash in that chest of drawers for future operations, but I’m not a fool, and I’m not going to advance people on what I ultimately see as a deceit. It’s where the line has been drawn every single time.
Before we set off on that Far East tour, Nora came out to visit. Almost by accident, she spotted this beautiful house up for sale in Venice Beach. It turned out that the bank had owned it – probably the previous owners had defaulted on their loan payments or whatever. Nora just grabbed it, for silly money. We hardly even knew what the house looked like – we just made this impulsi
ve move. We walked in and we loved it. It’s small, but look, we’re not the kind of people that require twenty-two rooms. We don’t run dinner parties, we’re not like that. Three odd plates and two sets of knives and forks, we’re happy.
We moved in, and cut all links with Larry White and Martin Atkins. From there on in, life here in LA was fantastic!
My youngest brother Martin is like a flag for people to rally around. When he was young, he used to be very loud and – aaaww! – a real troublemaker. As an adult, he’s a very open, gregarious fella; he just seems to make friends wherever he is. He does all the things that I can’t seem to get to grips with. He’s open to contact. Maybe it’s because of the position I’m in. I’m very wary when people want to talk to me. I’m very wary of what it is they’re really looking for. Are they looking at Johnny Rotten showbiz personality, or Johnny as a human?
Martin came to live with us in Venice Beach, because the place came with a little out-house. He became like our neighbour, sharing the place with our guitarist Mark Schulz, and from time to time Jebin Bruni the keyboard player and Bret Helm the bass player – so that became the LA band scene. In a weird way it was really very like The Young Ones. They were the nippers next door. I really loved Jebin, such a little character. He had huge pointy hair, black spiky hair – he reminded me of a hedgehog. I saw great potential in him on the keyboards – in fact he dragged in an accordion because I foolishly said my dad was an accordion player and he presumed I could play it. Wrong!
We’d always be saying, ‘Let’s go down into the basement’ – because this place has a basement. We’d put together the loose ends of a tiny little idea for a song and bash it around down there. We’d have to guess what the drums would be, until we procured some drum machines. And then of course you’re limited by what the drum machines can do, because a proper drummer cannot be replaced. So these were approximations of songs. Great times. It was like just having fun, but great things came from that – great songs like ‘Fishing, ‘Round’ and ‘Ease’.
