by Lydon, John
How I got into Hundertwasser goes back to the job that Sid got me working at Heal’s on Tottenham Court Road, when we had to clean up the vegetarian restaurant. Often we’d be bored and have an hour to spare – because you had to be there for a certain length of time, but you’d clean up that place in a minute flat – so then we’d wander round the store. I noticed the Hundertwasser books in the store’s library section and procured some, shall we say.
His art to me is People Art, always about making creative and friendly environments that people live in. His paintings are always happy city scenarios where everything is brightly coloured. Absolutely inspiring.
When we went out to tour the album, we used the multi-coloured-building idea onstage, with adventure playgrounds and runways, all in very bright, vivid, bold colours – greens, yellows, reds, oranges – and there we were, running around in it like happy children.
Through March 1988, we ended up on a US arena tour, supporting INXS. Oddly enough, I loved their first album – honestly! I liked the emptiness in the production. I didn’t realize they had a bass player till they played live. But there’s something always exciting about Australian music; it’s a really interesting place in the world. They’re on the other side of everything and so their approach is different.
That tour got competitive. We were playing in 20,000-seater arenas, but only 5,000 were there when we were playing. It was very strange. Maybe that was the MTV apathy kicking in. In my early days, the audience would be in the auditorium right from the start and wanted to hear every single band and get their money’s worth, but the MTV video world created a different environment, and the auditorium would be empty until the main band came on.
It all went horribly wrong in New Orleans when Michael Hutchence invited me after a gig to his ‘apartments’ in the same hotel. What great rooms he had! Wow, I loved that. It had an upstairs, a downstairs, and a sound system. It turned out he just wanted to play me this version of ‘rave beat’ that he’d been making. I just had no time for it. Because, hello, I like me rave, but I don’t like it analyzed and interpreted and copied, and that’s what it sounded like to me. And I had to say so. ‘Oh, I can do that,’ was the vibe, and we fell out. We never really spoke after that. And then he went and asphyxiated himself . . . Sometime later, I might add, nothing to do with me!
When people invite you over and want you to listen to their latest record, it’s never going to turn out well. It creates an ugly, uncomfortable environment, and I’m not ever going to be the kind of fella that’s going to give you false accolades. My attitude is, ‘You’ve made me feel uncomfortable. I might’ve liked this in a different time-space continuum, but that’s a wrong move!’ At the same time I understand that they’re trying to share their sense of achievement. There’s that going on, but at that moment that’s not what you’re feeling. You’ve just come offstage, you’ve done your gig, and you don’t need to be impressed.
One good thing about Mr Hutchence: he knew my voice was a bit raspy because I was overworked – and they toured with their own doctor! I got some really bloody good advice, and some medical hoo-hahs, which every now and again you need. Namely, a Vitamin B12 shot. There are many doctors that will say that’s as useless as a placebo, but I don’t find it to be so. I find it gives me the energy that I require up there onstage. It makes you very tired; you take it in the morning, up ‘le chuff’. So, you’ve got a sore bottom, then you fall asleep for four or five hours and you feel very tired and you don’t feel like you’ve got the energy, but the second you hit the mic – bing! It kicks in! Thanks for that one, Mr Hutchence.
That summer, we played at a massive free festival in Tallinn in Estonia. I understood at the time there were 175,000 people in the crowd, but I’ve been told since it was more like 125,000. I trust two things here: other people’s statistics, hee-haw, and I trust my emotions. I know what my emotions told me when I walked out on that stage. I lost my voice with the huge vastness and expanse. The sea of faces was endless, endless, just going on for ever into the cloudy distance. And there were tanks each side of the stage, thank you very much, with the turrets pointed not at the riotous assemblers, who weren’t rioting, but at us.
You got to bear in mind that this was just before the iron curtain lifted, when they were still a part of the Soviet Union, so it was a very tense period in Estonian history – and, I suppose, world history. And it was such a great audience. It was a free gig, so everybody had a reason to be there, and they’d travelled from miles around to be there. Yet we all knew the brutality of the Soviet regime could inflict horrors upon all of us at any moment. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that; it became instead something incredibly special – and eventually it came to Estonia’s independence.
It was amazing, terrific, but very odd. When we wanted to walk around the town, we couldn’t do so without official escorts, and we’d see people being ushered away in the corners of the square. We weren’t allowed to go up and talk to anyone. The secret police were not very secret.
We did actually get to meet some people, just before we got the ferry away from there. This is where Lu is such a great ambassador; he can break through any police cordon, just because they presume he’s one of the vagrant locals, I suppose. These people had travelled not just tens of miles, but hundreds, from all the neighbouring countries. When we left, I must’ve had 200 bloody vinyl records given to me. I love and treasure every one of them – not so much for the music, but for the actual thought and energy that went into giving me something that was shady and illegal, according to the authorities at the time. That’s heart-warming stuff – fuel for my fires.
The reason I’d had tinnitus in New York at the time ‘Seattle’ was written was because John McGeoch would love his amps to be so full-on, onstage. He was very into his heavy-metal amp stacks. It created real problems for all of us, it was just too overpowering. I wouldn’t blame John for it, I’d blame us. We should’ve just yelled at him. We’ve since learned: Bruce and Lu are consistently onstage saying, ‘Turn it down.’ It gives you so much more freedom in the song, but we all come from that period – and heavy metal is always gonna be there, in our early-day psyches, that preconception that louder and louder is better and better. It’s not. Lu Edmonds got it very, very bad. I recovered, but Lu didn’t.
Lu was involved in the writing stage of our next album, 9, but he literally had to pack in amplified music altogether for a while. He went all acoustic and travelled in the nether regions of Muslim and former Soviet territories – places like Kurdistan. He was gone from us for years, and it was a bitter loss.
With hindsight, we were beginning to fall into the treadmill of album-tour-album-tour. We initially started recording 9 in New York, with Bill Laswell. It wasn’t at the record company’s instigation, although they’d doubtless have loved an Album Part Two at that point. This was very much Bill volunteering his services. After a couple of days in the studio he said the band couldn’t play and he hated all our songs. He said he’d written songs and I should sack everyone and use his people, and come out with a U2-type product. I told him to fuck off and we packed our bags and left. I was fully committed to the band.
The more I think about this, the more my memory grows about poor old Bill and what he had to endure with me. In his head, I was the lead singer he always knew I could be, but I wouldn’t do it because I’ve got my own way. I’ve got my own learning curve. There is a point where I can take influence but I can’t take teaching. It goes back to school really. Don’t tell me what to do, tell me how to do it. That’s how it works with me.
There were always personality quagmires with Bill, but my only serious problem with him was that, whenever I’d go over to his apartment, he’d be trying to show me his guns. I just find that to be all too ugly. These were early days for me in the American culture, and so I wasn’t aware that when people are showing you guns, they’re not threatening you, it’s like they’re showing you their art collection. For me, at that point, what he was
presenting to me was very challenging.
Now I understand America very well, I think, and I do appreciate the fact that, yes, you should have the right to own a gun. Yes! To my mind, this lot could be a far more serious pack of killers, in proportion to the firearm potential they’re wielding. In many ways I think Americans show an enormous amount of restraint, and of course, there definitely isn’t anyone invading this country; they’re too well armed for that. And what fun it is to go out into the hills, as I found out years later, to shoot things. It’s not about wanting to kill people or animals, it’s just the element of control. It gives you a great sense of achievement to be able to hit a melon at 50 yards, that you’ve got the power and the control to take aim correctly. It’s skilful, and I like it.
People might be a little scared to hear about Mr Rotten tooled up, but John ain’t no killer. As I keep telling the world, I’m a pacifist until you stretch over the line and try to hurt or damage any of those I love. Then you’ve got a prob. Me you can slag off all day long. Not a prob.
So, it wasn’t going to work out with Bill, and we ended up recording with Stephen Hague, who had been working with New Order.
There was also a guy involved at the production level called Eric ‘ET’ Thorngren. Let’s just say, at the time, that didn’t seem like the better half of it. It always comes down to personality. Eric, nothing wrong with the fella, but I liked Steve Hague and his quiet, wispy personality, and his technical precision. It was a completely different approach, which is what producers can create. They’re people you have to know how to pay attention to, and you have to know their weaknesses. Steve was a gentle kind of fella and his soft touch on top of our huge uproar made for an excellent result.
We were perhaps getting a bit too deeply involved with the new MIDI computer technology. The trouble with that is it takes away from the analogue, the sense of live. But again, I think the songs were very strong and emotional.
‘Happy’, the song, is really an answer to the question that was posed on the previous album title, Happy? I felt like some deep well of integrity was being tapped by us around this whole period. ‘Happy’ is reflective, it’s a look back, it’s a self-analysis – the upshot being, yes, I’m happy – God, it is possible!
One of my favourite songs I’ve written is ‘Disappointed’. It’s a spectacular, dramatic and very forgiving song. If I could ever call a song a friend, ‘Disappointed’ is one of them. As the lyrics say, it’s truly ‘what friends are for’. It’s me talking to me on the lesson of em-pa-thy. It’s one those songs that somehow creeps into a PiL audience’s psyche, and wow, do they ‘get it’. It’s overwhelming, sometimes, the tears and smiles and hugging out there. There’s many reasons to cry – joy, usually, I hope, but there’s sadness in the verses, the betrayals that lead to the forgiveness. You can see in people’s faces, they truly know what you’re saying because they’ve been through similar. You take on all the bad, you analyze it, and then you reach the better conclusion.
‘Warrior’, meanwhile, is a song of standing up, when you have to take a stand. I love Native American art. I truly loved exploring around the Arizona desert and seeing the Native American Indian paintings – they really seriously struck a chord inside me. It’s very hard to explain but I finally found a way of expressing that feeling in ‘Warrior’. If you talk about your Native American, you’re talking of conflict, you’re talking of treachery – you know, like, ‘Here’s a turkey, now take my land and kill me.’ That’s what the pilgrims did – genocide, extermination – and there comes a time when you have to take a stand. Me, I’m a pacifist, but I can see that in the face of genocide and extermination, for all the values I believe in, I would have to stop that fate.
Native American art captures all that. It’s a symbol of identity, of individuality. I understand fully Chief Sitting Bull’s amazing line, ‘It is a good day to die’ – that’s powerful. No man is another man’s farmyard animal. And so, in this respect, ‘I man a warrior.’ So our song is an appraisal of resistance. It’s applicable to all similar situations.
It has lines like, ‘I’ll take no quarter, this is my land, I’ll never surrender.’ It’s about defending yourself and what you truly believe in, rather than just leftie flag-waving. I back no political party, with very good reason. Never am I going to put all my eggs in the one basket of a politician, because the fucker will crush them. It’s tough out there, baby, but that’s the way the world runs. Some of the ‘Warrior’ remixes we had done were very big dance hits in the clubs. When we tour anywhere, Timbuktu or Japan, you’ll often hear it playing in the background in shops and record stores.
‘USLS1’ is a PiL fer-de-lance, a deadly snake. It tells a story about the presidential plane, Air Force One, and a terrorist bomb on board, and the uselessness of that murder over a beautiful desert landscape, under a full moon. The pointlessness of it all and the sadness. Hear it, and you feel your mind exploring rather than just listening. Close your eyes and explore inside the textures. I thought it might be too up its own bottom to play live but in fact it really does motivate people. I watch their faces as we’re performing it, they get well inside it and understand it, comprehend it. It’s ‘Why are we murdering each other, for what?’ For what? If you’re going to murder anyone, then murder yourself first and let the rest of us off.
Every song had to have a point, a purpose, a direction, a meaning and a humanity. We were utterly indifferent to the shenanigans of others, and it certainly wasn’t hard to ignore what the rest of the bands were doing in that era. We might’ve done better commercially if we had – but, no thanks!
Everything I was writing at that time was very wordy, but there was so much running in my head that it absolutely needed to be. Very over-complicated, even for me. Everything you do in music, if you really love it, is a clearance factory. You’re trying to get these emotions across, and out, and by doing so you’re stopping it building up inside. And at that point, the pressure was unreal to try and maintain an integrity here and keep things afloat.
Touring 9 was a happy experience, up to a point. Through the summer of 1989, we went around America with New Order and the Sugarcubes. It was fantastic fun, and great for the crowd getting three decent bands in one night, and all very friendly backstage – just a mass of people getting on with each other, and no pretension about who was headlining.
It became, oddly enough, by its openness, almost claustrophobic to me. It gave me precious little time to get ready for my bit – my moody moment where I have to find what it is I’m about to project onstage. I do need those moments of silence before I go on, otherwise I’m not grasping it, and I walk on there ‘au casual’ and then suddenly it hurts because I’m not bang-on from second one, and you have to be.
New Order’s singer, Bernard Sumner, was having problems emotionally and looked a bit the worse for wear. At one particular gig, they had to tape him to a luggage trolley, wheel him on, and prop him up in front of the microphone. When he came off, I went, ‘Bernie, you’re now a trolley dolly.’ Nice fella, but never really got to know him well.
We got very close with the Sugarcubes; that was a band I loved and adored. I used to go to their gigs, long before we ever worked on the same stages together. I think I’ve got just about every Sugarcubes record ever made. I’m not so much of a Björk fan now. I find it borderline classical pretension; it’s not interesting to me. Einar, their male singer, was a problem. Einar was a bit of an Einar, and he’d hit on me at every chance he got. I really liked him, but I couldn’t bear the – ‘John! You must hear my new poem!’ This was very difficult, backstage. Great fella, though – creative, bouncy, and sorely missing now in Björk’s work. She’s now left to wearing swans and making pretentious squeals and squeaks.
Also that year, I appeared at the ‘Hysteria 2’ Aids benefit at Sadler’s Wells alongside the likes of Tina Turner and Dave Gilmour. I was invited to attend, I think, by Stephen Fry, of all people.
I was supposed to do a skit with Ste
phen, but I said, ‘There’s no way I can learn lines,’ so when my time came, I went up and just made it up on the spot. I’ve no idea what I did, all I know is, when I came off, it was, ‘Wow! That was funny!’ Everything there was great, fun and wonderful – except that the snobbery backstage was appalling and really turned me off. My God, we’re here to raise money for good causes, but what I was getting was the likes of John Cleese going, ‘Who is that?’, pointing at me. What?! And a huge fuss was made for the arrival of Jerry Hall. Eh? That’s just someone Mick Jagger bonked. Give it up! My God, was she tall and horsey-like. Very Texan. She walked in with an enormous entourage, and I was shoved into a corner, and not many of those alleged celebrities had anything good or nice to say to me.
I brought Nora and it was really hard on us; she felt the cold of it backstage so we left early. We felt it was just wrong, and I decided from that day on that I wouldn’t get myself involved with these kinds of people, because they’re not genuine – well, not all of them, maybe 80 to 90 per cent. The few that are, like Stephen Fry, who’s a crazy fuck and absolutely hilarious, are very busy, trying to keep the whole thing together, so they’ve got no time for you and it’s incredibly unsociable backstage.
Through 1989, PiL became a proper, hard-touring band, but it went too far. We toured too much, waaaaay too much, to the point where we became distant from each other. Everybody ended up just getting up to whatever it is they wanted to do that particular night after the gig. Sometimes the touring doesn’t actually pull you together, it pulls you apart. And poor old Johnny, being the old fart I always have been, I’m not one for going out after a gig, I don’t have the energy to do that. Everything has been spent onstage and therefore you start not to hang out with each other and that widens the gap.
