by Lydon, John
So we had the second one and the effects started to come on. At first you feel very alert, then on our way back to the hotel, there was a slight numb tingle on your lips and tongue and the back of your throat. Then, at 7 a.m., you’re wide awake, full of energy, almost ‘bouncing off the walls’. Outside, in the street, we ran into a demonstration rally of anti-foreigner sentiment. I’d never seen anything like that in Japan before. There was a surreal temple nearby, and some homeless people swept away under some bridges – very much like in Estonia where they swept the people away from you before the Wall came down. Japan has its shielded side, too.
In the temple, there was the unreal vision of lines of Japanese schoolgirls in their matchy-matchy tartan dress outfits, all very small and polite, being led by teachers in this direction and that direction. All of these visions put together was overwhelming, and all under these wonderful ornamental trees. Then back to the hotel, try to have a nap before I do a gig. If I’m to tell you anything at all about being on tour with the Pistols, those were the finest moments. Not necessarily the gigs themselves.
‘Go fuck the Queen!’ and ‘Argentina, Argentina,’ chanted the seething mass before us in Buenos Aires. Always a lively anti-English sentiment in Argentina! I made sure I shouted down ‘el Presidente’ and ‘down with the monarchy’ in return. ‘Good to see you back, Argentina!’ In the name of diplomacy, Rambo had put a sign outside his room saying, ‘Stay out of my room – Johnny Rambo, God Save The Falkland Islands’.
This South American leg of ‘Filthy Lucre’ was to be the final one, and it wasn’t long before all the Argentinians were screaming along to ‘God Save The Queen’ – a shared moment, from what could have been a whole pile of trouble. There was a huge football element in there, but we had a very good connection with each other, and kept it going with friendly insults and anything else you’d care to mention. Language barriers aside, and political barriers aside, dating back to that stupid, useless, pointless Falklands War, we found common ground there, the audience and us. It was a delicious experience, one I’ll never forget.
The final night in Santiago, Chile, however, really took the biscuit. You could feel the tension in the air there. Looking down on this massive square, you could see the armed police lining up, and every hour they’d come out in their uniforms and guns and do a goose step, march around the square, blare trumpets and wave flags, and then go back in and firmly close the gate.
Our worry was, ‘Will anybody turn up? Is there any interest in us in Chile?’ Well, there was a serious interest. It took a really long time even to get near the block the venue was on, and then even longer to get into the place, there was such a mass of people and so many of the maddest punks I’ve seen anywhere in my life. These were ‘full-ons’, Chileans with mohawks, really into it, challenging the police, water cannons going off up and down the block. It felt like civil war was about to break out but, oddly enough, in a funster way. Like, I’m an observer in a scene of chaos that I’m partially responsible for creating!
There was a cold hour or two in the dressing room, but then – onstage, wow! The roar, the roar! These were committed fellas, and girls, and such a menagerie of all kinds. In one corner to my right, the ferocity, the heat of the yelling and screaming, was SUPERB! It was literally like being in a wind tunnel, but very hot and humid. Thank God, nobody had halitosis. To the right was a whole bunch of people who had decided to strip naked. So there were nudists and, up top, disco-dancing dolly birds, all in the big hair and the over-done mascara, and tank-tops and very short skirties and high heels, and these full-on punks and mad football-y kinds, very young kids just screaming in tears of happiness – I LOVED IT!
And there I was dressed in this Dolce & Gabbana set of hotpants and a black tight little plasticated waistcoat, the Aladdin slippers . . . and my hair looking like an orange and blue cockatoo. Rambo called me Johnny Cuckoo.
People want Johnny Rotten in punk regalia, but what they’ve got to know is: it’s all punk regalia, if I’M wearing it. So I bowled out in this outfit that Miley Cyrus would be ashamed of wearing. I felt really fucking hard in that outfit, I was delivering the songs in a venomous, detailed way, wearing that. Love me, not what I’m wearing. Geddit?
There were police on the left side with riot shields and truncheons, but the main problem was the local police-type security – I’m not exactly sure who or what they were – they were attacking the crowd with their mini-truncheons. Rambo had to clear the stage of this hooligan security before we came on. But this crowd weren’t having none of it. They would not show any back down, they were really admirable. Many times over I went to tell the police to stop it and finally they backed off. Rambo certainly had his work cut out with the crowd; they were constantly trying to get on stage all night.
We’d heard some of the fans who couldn’t get in had tried making a hole in the ceiling and attempted to abseil down into the crowd, absolutely brilliant! Some of them may even have made it. I really wouldn’t have put it past them. During the gig, I’m sure I saw little pieces of plaster tinkling down.
It was from start to finish an insane, mental, MENTAL gig – one of the best gigs I’ve ever done in my life. The songs just felt right. I was at my toughest best with this crowd – proper bloody Johnny Rotten stuff going on there! The band played bloody great, too, it was good ol’ rootsy stuff coming out of us.
Near the end of the set, Steve had a problem with his guitar and just walked off. Never said a word to any of us. Just stopped playing and walked off. Oooooo, what’s that all about? He just left us out there with thousands of screaming fans but, you know what, it didn’t matter anyway. The crowd just kept singing, so I got all a capella on it with them. We had a great sing-along. It was looking like Steve wasn’t going to come back on, but then I think he realized he wasn’t being missed and re-appeared.
Then we go off, as you do, and you wait for the encore, because you need your breath and your cigarette. So we asked Steve why he went off. ‘Uuunnh, I cut me finger.’ Unbelievable! Then up stepped Rambo, and showed him his own leg. The monitors were metal-framed and he had run into one while getting fans off the stage and torn the skin to the bone between his knee and his ankle – he lifted this huge flap of skin to expose the leg bone.
Fair play to Steve, he went, ‘Oh, my God, okay!’ Rambo got a roll of gaffer tape off Frankie the tour manager, and gaffer-taped his skin flap back down, and back on we went. And the encore was much more insane than anything we’d done prior. It was truly, truly an amazing experience.
The camaraderie I was feeling with the band and the audience was terrific – the whole point of doing this thing in the first place. It happened a few times on that tour. Let me tell you, there were many times when it didn’t, and you’d feel like the shutters had been put down on you. Just making you feel like an outsider in your own thing. But Chile was fantastic, and it’s just a shame that it was the last gig for some while.
The next morning, Steve, Paul and Glen were flying separately to me and Rambo, and they didn’t even say goodbye when they left. This left a real sour tone on me and that’s where it is with us. It shouldn’t be like that – especially after a gig like that, my God! Must you really all rush off to bed early and then leave without saying goodbye? Apparently, they must.
Rambo and I duly travelled as far as customs in Florida together, then I had a connecting flight to LA, and he had a connecting flight to Memphis. Because of his leg wound they had reluctantly put him in a wheelchair! I even got to wheel him a little, he hated it, but it meant he got whisked right through. When I finally got through, I ran into him. There he was, walking around the airport without the wheelchair, and we had a real laugh, and a proper goodbye.
And that’s a moment in time I should have been sharing with my band, but they don’t give you those opportunities. What can I say? It leaves a blemish.
WHO CENSORS THE CENSOR? #4
DO YOU WANT MY BODY?
I’ve always had bad teeth, from
my early youth onwards. The dentist’s was the very last place any of us in my family would go. It was where my mum and dad had all their teeth removed. They were given money by the state towards getting a set of dentures fitted, which they were told would solve all of their problems for the rest of their life.
This policy, which was obviously all about saving the government from paying for proper dental care, created nothing but trouble for the patients who took them up on it.
Come nine or ten on an ordinary night, they’d take their teeth out after dinner and soak ’em in this vile liquid, Steradent. Otherwise dental hygiene was unrequired. And it wasn’t just my mum and dad, it was my aunts, uncles, and everybody I knew.
Once the teeth had been extracted, however, the gums would recede and the dentures would require all manner of sticky-back plastic, shall we say, to keep them in, because the gums had dissolved to nothing. Every time they laughed, their teeth would fall out. It was an even bigger problem when Mum and Dad would throw a party at our house. They’d all lose their teeth from dancing, from all the jumping up and down. My job was not only playing the records, but finding the teeth and working out whose was whose.
So that was how it was presented to me: I needn’t bother brushing because when I grow up I’ll have a fresh set ready at the dentist and I could lose them on the dancefloor like everyone else. So I would naturally avoid the dentist. Also, because of the pain. Dentists were very brutal back then. Yes, it was free on the National Health Service, but the cost in trauma was incalculable.
When I was about thirteen, I had a very bad experience. At school I had this toothache, so bad that I was screaming with the pain, and school actually booked an appointment with my local dentist. She was Polish and insane, and she had a ‘Brünnhilde SS’ kind of vibe, with the hair pulled back tightly and a bun in the back done in a braid. Short, chubby, very blonde, very Germanic in her approach, and very, very volatile. She absolutely wouldn’t listen to you squeal in pain. She had no time at all for any of us children. She scared the living daylights out of everyone
Anyway, she immediately decided she had to pull this tooth, but when she ripped it out, she broke a blood vessel. She gave me a cotton swab to hold on the wound, but it just kept bleeding. The dentist’s was on the corner of Holloway Road and Seven Sisters, and I caught the bus to go home, but I actually passed out on the bus. They stopped the bus, and the conductor took me home – basically dragged me, all limp like a dead body. I’d lost a lot of blood, I was covered in it. Luckily, my dad was back from work, and he rushed me straight to the hospital, where they stitched up that side of my jaw.
From that day forth, on the upper left side, I had a huge gap between my teeth where she’d taken quite a lot of the gum with her. I could make dolphin noises, I discovered, by sucking air in through the gap. The budgie loved it. The hamster never responded too well, but the cats and dogs loved it too. So it became like a party trick of mine. I actually used it on the Sex Pistols song, ‘Submission’ – the ‘pffffmmmmwwwwp-p-p-p’ noise in the bridge section is all from that. I’ve since had it replaced, so I can’t do it any longer.
Understandably, that Brünnhilde experience left a really negative impression, and strengthened my aversion to oral hygiene. At the dentist’s, you always got either that dreadful gas mask, which would make you feel like you were being gassed to death, or the injections, or just the sheer violence of pulling teeth, which seemed to be their main ambition. After a while, fillings were more the fashion. They’d drill holes in every tooth, and fill ’em full of mercury . . . and then they’d pull the tooth anyway! Just more pain on pain.
So, I always had bad teeth. The concept of brushing them never occurred to me, and I can’t blame Mum and Dad for that. There were toothbrushes in the house, but I’d only ever seen Dad use one on his work boots. I suffered a lot of ill health because of it, and I was naive not to be aware of that. It took me forever to catch on that my teeth were one of the things making me feel so ill all the time.
By the time I was joining the Pistols, the second I smiled, it was like, ‘Oh my God, look at those teeth on him.’ It was Steve Jones who went, ‘Uuuuh-uuurrgh, you’re rotten! Look at you, your teeth are rotten!’ The front two had this green mould on them. It wasn’t just like I’d eaten some spinach or something. If it was, that stuff remained stuck there for a real long time. Between the gum and the tooth, there was a green line on the front two, like slime, and on every other one, there was that horrible yellow stuff that I never understood – plaque.
At the time I thought it was exceptional – a good thing. Nope. It wasn’t. There I was, you know – ‘Why don’t no one wanna give me a kiss?’
So I was known as Rotten, and the nickname stuck – for life! I know it’s a bizarre thing for me of all people to say, but, really – take care of your teeth! In this one respect, don’t do anything like what I did! Through all those years of ignorant behaviour, I was slowly but surely poisoning and killing myself.
Much later, once I was in California, I spent what ended up being a small fortune getting them fixed. You don’t even want to know the cost. I had to have a whole series of operations, because so much was going wrong up there. Eventually I started to listen to what the professionals were telling me, but it was mostly pain that guided me. It reached a point where I was really seriously ill. It became so painful that I’d rather deal with the pain of the dentist, than put up with the pain I had every single day.
I was poisoning myself with constant abscesses, and had near-permanent headaches. To remedy the situation, I’ve had everything – crowns, you name it. In 2012 I had titanium screw-ins, because there was so much damage going on up in the bone region, it all had to be rebuilt and replaced. I had to have all the bones realigned. I pretty much had my jaw realigned – major, major stuff.
I put it off for so long because I thought it might affect the way I sing, or the way my voice sounds. I took the risk, because I thought I’d rather live, and live without pain.
I’m really pleased I did it. I couldn’t imagine having anything like this done on the National Health in England. It should be possible. All I know is, I paid through the nose, so to speak – that’s where most of the injections came through, from the inside of the mouth, upwards! – and it was a great deal of agony.
It’s different now. I don’t get ill as much, I don’t get run down as much, and I notice the difference physically – very, very seriously. A lot of the perpetual illnesses just stopped overnight. I have a lot more stamina. A lot of that hunched-over-the-mic early Johnny Rotten posture was like, that boy was dying. And taking the long, painful, slow way about it.
You’re probably thinking, ‘Yeah, and everyone in California has a pretty smile.’ Well, I haven’t got one of them. That I would not allow. The replacements and screwins are all the same grey colour as the rest of them were, and there’s no sense of matchy-matchy about it. As Rambo said to me, ‘Your teeth are like Lego bricks.’ He’s full of the truisms of life.
I’m still not too used to the toothbrush, though. I know I should be, but I have to remind myself. The only times I really brush my teeth are when Nora catches me before I go to bed, or on tour when one of the band will go, ‘Jo-o-ohhn!’ So it’s not like there’s suddenly mouthwash on our rider. I generally always use brandy instead, particularly onstage, to clear my pipes for singing, but that’s a fallacy, too – apparently, it’s not helping in many respects.
Since I finished our last tour, and have been off the brandy bottle, I’ve lost a lot of weight. It’s a bugger, because that’s the only comfort and joy when you come offstage. So there I am going on about my mouthwash, but I was really just washing out my innards!
I know I let myself go for a bit there and I really spread out like a balloon on tour. I got so happy and content, I just ate everything in sight. And of course, most fatally of all, I gargled brandy onstage and then finished the bottle when I got off, and that put the calories on. So I’ve stopped all that, and th
e weight’s just dropped off me and I feel physically better for it.
I’m not the kind of person to do any kind of physical exercise. One, I get bored, and two, it’s bad for my heart. I’ve yet to discuss it with my doctor, but I’m sure they’d be in full agreement if I paid them well enough. That’s how it works. Gone are the good old days when you could get doctors to pump you full of narcotics at the drop of a hat. Now in this health-conscious universe we live in, it’s a nightmare. More so than ever here – it’s really strict. Or maybe I just know all the right people – depending on your point of view.
I wouldn’t go that way anyway. That’s like, ‘Urgh, authorized inebriation? No!’ I hate that idea. It takes the fun right out of it. As long as there’s that innuendo of contamination and naughtiness wrapped around it, it wards off lesser mortals who wouldn’t be capable of handling such chemical devices. Of course it attracts others, but those people are like iron to magnets, aren’t they? If it wasn’t drugs, it would be something else. It would be politics or religion, which is far worse.
I did once have a personal trainer. Bless him, the poor thing, he didn’t get on with me at all. I’m afraid that I have no motivation for developing muscles. Pffff, three of them tummy-tuck things and I go, ‘What’s the fucking point?’ I’m here to enjoy my life and not get trapped into somebody else’s impression of what my physical shape should be.
At the same time, there’s a lot to be said for the notion that if you maintain yourself somewhat healthily physically, your brain will work better. Because of the climate and the sheer dampness of everything in London, you eat in a comfort-food way, don’t you? You just stuff anything warm in you – missus! It’s the old joke, whenever I go back there: the English always look grey and sickly.
But praises be to Allah, Jesus, or any one of them fellas – here I can open the door and walk out and pick a lemon off a tree and have a delicious drink in three and a half minutes. I love that. And I loved that about Jamaica, too. There’s fruit just growing by the side of the road. Wonderful.
