Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

by Lydon, John

  So, obviously, in I went, and Rambo said, ‘Why don’t you drop your pants?’ and so I did, and 6,500 bites later, I was cursing him to death. That evening was pure hell on earth. When we got back to the hotel, there was a hurricane coming in, and I was screaming, ‘Medic!’ at top volume. The only thing we could find, when we walked down to a chemist, was something which was like porridge oats in a packet. So I sat in a bath full of porridge oats for six hours with a hurricane rocking the hotel.

  The next morning, I had a really bad earache – on top of all the usual moans, it was extremely painful – and a doctor finally came and told me I had a perforated eardrum. A mosquito had gone in there and perforated my eardrum and was still in there – dead by now, but in there, and he had to remove it.

  My immediate thought was, ‘Oh my God, I’ll never be able to sing again.’ Or – ‘I’ll be able to sing, without the privilege of having to hear myself.’ I thought I was doomed – what did I do that for? How stupid. I had a few bites up my nose as well, that wasn’t too much of a problem, and neither was the genitalia itching like mad. I liked the fact that it swelled up a bit because it looked well-proportioned for once. But the ear was serious pain, and it took a long while to heal itself.

  Hilariously, Rambo got his comeuppance when we were on this power boat driven by huge fans. It was midnight, it was dark, and a mullet jumped right out of the water and slapped him on the face. So he got mulletted as well as chimped!

  Another funny moment was when I foolishly turned up for filming in the Florida swampland in that black-and-white-striped penitentiary outfit. It’s actually the real McCoy, procured from a Southern prison by Rambo’s wife, Laura. The guides there were going, ‘I hope there’s not a Sheriff about, John!’

  We travelled all over the South filming this stuff. Believe me, the place is heaving with insects. Them swamps are really teeming with life, including a continual blizzard of mosquitoes. After being in that Food-R-Us-like net, it was suddenly of no consequence to me at all, because once you’ve had condensed mosquitoes, I found I could quite readily tolerate them in the small amounts that they appear naturally. I used to go mad trying to avoid being bitten by a mosquito, but now I couldn’t give a damn. Any insect phobia is all gone.

  It may surprise many readers to hear that my Megabugs series ended up being shown at universities in England. My brother Jimmy’s son Liam went to Leeds University, and he was thrilled to ring me up and tell me they were watching it on his course. What a reward! That’s a sense of achievement, that you’re now involved in an education process which you always thought your songwriting did.

  I very genuinely think of my music and my TV programmes as complementary. There’s a direct connection between ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and Megabugs, because they’re both equal opposites to corruption. Without meaning to be pretentious, they both work to the same basic poetic beat, a rhythm of life. There’s a rhythm in how things work when you just stop and listen to the wind whistle between the trees. It’s telling you something. Just open your mind and find out what that is, but don’t go out there thinking you’re Hiawatha. It doesn’t work like that – it’s not that corny or obvious. It’s just, do good and let your instincts take over for a while.

  14

  HISTORY AND GRIEF . . . AS A GIFT

  I’m not going to have the Sex Pistols rubbished. I can’t afford to have anyone doing that to my life. It required an awful lot of my energy and involvement to write them songs – I don’t want them to end up selling carpets or toilet cleaner. Here we are in the modern world, and record companies are getting involved in what they call ‘blanket agreements’, where said songs can be misappropriated, and it’s a constant battle. There’s big money to be earned toeing the line with advertising, but to me advertising has to be used properly.

  The bottom line is, you can’t damage the original product. That’s the term you end up having to use: the Sex Pistols are a product, a commodity, and everybody wants a piece of it. A few years back there was an opportunity of somehow connecting with a range of luxury cars. What Rambo does behind the scenes to maintain our integrity on things like this is quite phenomenal, much to the annoyance of Anita Camarata, who still represents the other three members on Sex Pistols matters.

  Anita’s interpretation of what is good and bad in the world is very different from mine. She’s not a Sex Pistol, she never will be. She doesn’t understand what we came from, what we’ve achieved, and who we are in the contemporary landscape. She just has a vague idea about how to sell and make money. And that can be a problem.

  On a similar thread, we collectively had to deal with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. We were completely blindsided by our nomination, apart from the odd hint from friends in the business, that, ‘You know, it would be good if you were in the Hall of Fame.’ I remember saying when the Ramones were in there before us – and, God help us, the Clash! – that they’d already snubbed us, and we shouldn’t have anything to do with it thereafter. The Sex Pistols, third in the line of punk? Ludicrous!

  Then in came the nomination, and so many bells and whistles and fire alarms went off in my head about it. You are nominated by unknowns, it’s a secret ballot, but it’s record-industry-sponsored, the same industry that kept both my bands, the Pistols and PiL, in debt for so many years. Why on earth would I be grateful for such a thing?

  There was also a money issue about it, in that it would cost a small fortune just to get to this event. There’s lots of little angles and dangles in it. We worked out that the band would be at a loss of something like $10,000, and if we wanted to bring friends or family it would be $25,000 a table, and that’s just a no-no. That’s how unrealistic an issue it was. It really shouldn’t cost you a penny. They all want to nominate you and want a piece of the Pistols, but none of them are offering to help us out as a band.

  Anita, of course, was well up for it but, right off the bat, I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t want the name of the Pistols to be sucked up into the industry in that way. I viewed the nomination as a finalizing of your career, a pat on the back – ‘Well done, now shut up and go away.’ Particularly in my case. Just because you’re paranoid . . . Thank you, again, Poly Styrene.

  I got really annoyed with the notes the Hall people were sending us upfront, all completely gleaned off bullshit websites, and they weren’t really up for correcting their misinformation, which just added more fuel to it. I was wondering what on earth they were nominating us for, because they completely didn’t understand our true history.

  For instance, the museum guide book they sent us claimed that when the Ramones played their first ever UK show on 4 July 1976, the Sex Pistols asked them how to form a band. Well, that very night we were actually playing a live gig in Sheffield. The Sex Pistols had already been up and at it for the best part of a year.

  Through Anita, I heard that Steve Jones wanted to go but, slowly but surely, they came round to my way of thinking – apart from Glen Matlock. That’s the kind of thing that can be a point of friction in a band. Some wouldn’t see that as a challenge to our reputation, because indeed they never were following the same agenda as me. So my line was, ‘Well, if you want to go, fine, but you ain’t having me there,’ and that kind of put the mockers on it.

  In the end, I lost my rag with the whole thing, and wrote the legendary ‘urine in wine’ note, in which I declared us to be ‘outside the shitstem’, and refused their invitation. Turning them down was a major coup de grâce. No one had done it up to that point. Now, every year there’s one little arse out there, going, ‘Well, Johnny Rotten did it, so can I.’

  They’ve since put my note up as a museum piece – it’s a prize part of the architecture at the Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Uuuurgh! It’s just like the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, with its Elvis jackets and what-have-you. I hate to see living legends collecting dust behind glass cages. It’s creepy to me. I love museums, but I don’t want to be an actual exhibit in one. For me, history is something way back �
�� you know, give me a couple of hundred years, but I don’t want to be museumed off in my own lifetime.

  I got my own back a couple of years later, when I did a TV series called Bodog Battle of the Bands, and we used the Hall of Fame as one of the audition venues. I’ve never been comfortable with competition in music, but this was not the usual talent show, with people doing karaoke of other people’s songs. Here, the bands would write their own songs, and I was one of the judges. And for the first televised round, we auditioned sixteen bands in the actual museum. I viewed it as bringing life into that dead-hole.

  Oddly enough, the whole Hall of Fame fiasco didn’t do us any harm internally. We were eventually all on the same page. It’s an ugly feeling to be co-opted in at the backside of a thing. We hadn’t played any gigs together since September ’03, the touring had all sort of ground to a halt, but through the ensuing months, the idea came up to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Never Mind The Bollocks with some live events.

  We actually got back together first in unexpected and frankly preposterous circumstances. ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and ‘Pretty Vacant’ were due to be used in the video game Guitar Hero 3. The plan, of course, was to use the original masters, but at the time Virgin couldn’t find them. We’d already signed the deal, rightly thinking there shouldn’t be a problem handing over the tapes. Lo and behold, ‘No!’ So, whatever advance we got, we had to spend re-recording the two songs. Glen was doing some solo manoeuvres, so Steve, Paul and I went into a studio in LA and got Chris Thomas to fly over, and we rerecorded them in a few days. Fantastic fun.

  We were already planning to play some gigs in London, so we sort of used that as a rehearsal. Initially, we thought it’d be just a night or two at Brixton Academy, but it turned into five in the end, and we added Manchester and Glasgow, for good measure.

  Brixton, in November ’07, worked out an absolute treat. More than a few people came, and the sound was incredible. There was a huge sense of fun in it. We even tried out something theatrical – hilariously so, looking back. Rather than just walk onstage from the wings as normal, I thought it would be a great entrance if we came in through the fire doors in the wall at the back of the stage, where the crew load in the equipment. You can usually see the buses and cars go by on Brixton Road, so it might look like we’d just got off a bus!

  After all my work on TV, it was great to get the chance to play live again. It felt really good. I knew in my mind that I wasn’t going to run into what people might perceive as classic Johnny Rotten mannerisms, just standing there and sneering, and becoming a cartoon of myself. I wanted to show that the songs had another level to them – vaudeville, the evil burlesque, British music hall – a very working-classy sing-a-long thing, where you can say really saucy, challenging things, but with a smile, instead of a snarl.

  We Pistols really found each other onstage and we were bang on the money – proper Pistols, all there to enjoy it. It wasn’t about the money, that was the thing. There wasn’t enough being made there for it just to be that. My thing is to play with the crowd and make sure a good time will be had by all, because I’m here to enjoy myself. I’m up for the cup – that must not be forgotten.

  Playing to the slope there was like playing to the North Bank at Highbury. There was that great swaying in the crowd, like the terracing used to have – hands in the air, and a great deal of colour. It looked fantastic to see groups of hundreds swaying one way, and another thousand swaying the other. The great swirliness of the crowd was pretty impressive. And the roar – quite amazing. I’ve never seen English audiences go off quite that way. It was a joy to behold.

  If I remember back to the early Pistols days when all you could hear was someone yelling, ‘Get off!’ – imagine going from that to this. From my point of view onstage it was absolutely magnificent, and for all the ups and downs of being in the Pistols, there’s your reward. It’s not the money – it’s the enjoyment of having written the songs, then performing them and seeing the audience become such an important feature in the song.

  So it was worth going back and working through them Pistols issues and actually using what could be construed as a negative energy in a positive way.

  Unfortunately, the fall-outs began when there were gaps in the touring schedule, waiting for new offers to come in. There were six months till the next batch of gigs in summer 2008, which killed the vibe. Knifing and sniping became a pastime. I don’t mind insults at all, I’m very happy with them, but I won’t take a lie. If somebody says I don’t turn up at rehearsals and puts that out in a newspaper article, I’m going to jump down their throats. Those kinds of issues bother me.

  Come the summer, we had gigs here, there and everywhere – Vegas, all over Europe, Japan, back to Europe. We called it the Combine Harvester tour. On the ‘Pretty Vacant’ sleeve, it used to be two buses, saying ‘Nowhere’ and ‘Boredom’. So why not two combine harvesters, separating the wheat from the chaff?

  Early on, we headlined the Isle of Wight Festival, which was a real challenge. The promoter John Giddings made a big promise to us: ‘This’ll be what it’s all about – you’ve finally made it into the big time.’ In rehearsals the week before, we’d messed about with the idea of starting the set with a country and western version of ‘Pretty Vacant’, which to my mind would be a delicious crowd tease – and, eventually a crowd-pleaser. But onstage that night Steve Jones and the band wouldn’t go along with it properly and at the end left me there stranded, like a rodeo clown.

  It was a very good gig, but it was a strange audience. I felt that we were playing to old people on Brighton pier, because everybody was in deck chairs and floppy hats. I’ve been told since that people loved it, but that people weren’t yelling and screaming – they were stunned by us!

  Other gigs were more rowdy. In Greece, the New York Dolls were on supporting us, and this mob of so-called anarchists – or shall we call them ‘out-and-out cunts’ – ran through the crowd, all wearing scooter helmets, letting off CS gas, swinging baseball bats, and smashing the shit out of anybody in their way. ‘So this is anarchy for you lot, is it?’ I’ll say right now, I’m not an anarchist, because I’ve seen too many wrong moves from that sort. They’re usually just spoilt middle-class kids with an attitude – like the ‘meat is murder’ brigade. They hurt all the wrong people. Bullying and cruelty – I can’t be having it.

  Anyway, later on, I got slammed in the face by a missile, and got a great big cut from it. Rambo liked it – he said it was very visual. The rules are, nobody on stage except the band or our crew, so suddenly a 25-foot pole with a wet sponge on the end looms into my field of vision. I don’t know where that sponge has been, it looks like it’s got grease on it. Somebody shouted, ‘No, it’s Dettol!’ So I threw my arms out at the sides, like I was being crucified, and allowed myself to be dabbed, Christ-like. It was making a mockery of the whole thing, in an audience participation way. The crowd got it, but the band didn’t, sad to say. Some of the band were muttering, ‘We should fuck off, it might kick off here . . .’ I was like, ‘I ain’t going anywhere!’

  The problem with this tour was it went on too long, to the point where we got fed up and sick of the sight of each other. The really serious good that came out of it was the conclusion in my mind: ‘Never again!’ I’m actually always one to say ‘never say never’, but I really genuinely feel like I just don’t belong in that band any more. I might do a one-off, but I’m certainly not going off touring with them, and I ain’t writing new songs, which would be the only point of continuing any further. Any opportunity I get to write a new song, I just don’t think Pistols. The Pistols are an historical accuracy, and you can’t take that away. It was a truly magnificent achievement. I want it to be remembered as that. I don’t want to make Never Mind The Bollocks Part 2 because it would ruin that.

  Towards the end of the tour, there was one final terrific London gig at the Hammersmith Apollo. There was a homey vibe going on that night, because the venue is just down the roa
d from my place in Fulham. Also, it was Steve Jones’s birthday the following day, and he didn’t know I knew, and I got the crowd to sing ‘Happy Birthday Fatty’ to him. That was a good moment between us. He has goodness and fun in him, but he also has that other ‘festering boil’ side. Which I suppose we all do, because we’re human. That night, he played great, he totally became the Steve Jones who leaves hairs at the back of your head standing, who hits it dead bang-on right. He can be an exceptionally good guitarist.

  After that, there were a few vague promises from promoters going off into the future, but it all just fizzled out. Finally, I had a conversation with Paul Cook on the phone, and he said, ‘We reckon it’s time to knock it on the head, John, what do you think?’ And I said, ‘Yes, I agree.’ It just didn’t feel right any more. I was looking at the band and thinking, ‘It’s still in its own time zone. As Pistols, we’re not getting up to the twenty-first century’, and so it became a very dull prospect for me. And that was a view shared by Paul, and presumably the others, that we didn’t want to go back and do rip-offs of old stuff.

  It’d be nice to think that we can be friendly outside of that band but, when we’re together, we become, for some weird reason, mortal enemies. It’s hard to explain, but the pressures become too much, you become too tightly knit up in each other’s situations, and things get childish. What I always say about the music industry – it keeps you young – is particularly true of the Sex Pistols. It’s a world of wonderful kiddiness!

  I was in London over Christmas 2013, to see my brother Jimmy and the family, and I rang up Paul. He wasn’t in, so I talked to his missus and his daughter, and asked for Paul to ring, but he never rang back, so that’s where that is now. Everything tells you something.