Rotten

by John Lydon

  STEVE JONES: Everyone claims they had a say in the music. Malcolm didn’t have any say in the music. Everyone claims they did. John claims he did everything. But we all played our part, and that’s what made the Sex Pistols. Everyone and anyone can say they did everything, but it takes a team to make it happen. I also think it worked because we were all so diverse.

  Eventually a rehearsal was set up. I arranged to meet Steve, Paul, and Glen, and none of them turned, up—not even a phone call or anything. The next day I rang Malcolm and told him to fuck off. Then they rang me back and begged me for about a week to go back to another rehearsal. Two weeks later I had moved out of Finsbury Park again while they tried to get in contact with me through my father. Next time we met, it was accidentally in a pub, and they apologized. It was actually Malcolm who made all the efforts, while Steve and Paul were still remote. That made the early rehearsals very hard. Finally, out of sheer morbid curiosity, I suppose, I went. At that point I was intrigued, plus it was good for my ego to be asked so persistently. I took the subway in. At the studio it was even more awkward than the first encounter. Steve loathed me. We got together upstairs in a little pub in Chiswick. The barmen were constantly complaining about the noise. There was no soundproofing, just thin card-boardy walls and a stink of stale beer. That first day was hell, it was so embarrassing. There was no proper sound system, and to make a bad job worse, my voice was coming out of a guitar amp. I could not hold a note with my dreary, deadpan voice. I had no concept of a melody, tune, or anything. Even when I played records at home, I never sang along with them. I could never relate to Elvis Presley or the Beatles. Ever. The thought of being a singer had never occurred to me. I had few musical heroes at all, yet the idea of jumping in the deep end and leaving it up to sink or swim in this band intrigued me. So I was really pushing for it. We started to rehearse on a daily basis to see how we would progress after a week. Glen Matlock wanted to give up. Paul did give up and quit; he could see no hope in it at all. But Steve was coming around because I had written lyrics by then. By week’s end he said, “C’mon, give him longer than that!” None of them wrote any words, so they thought that was good.

  The difficulties arose when they tried to change me into a Bay City Roller sort—being nice and singing these daft old songs, which of course I would not do. But I stuck with it because when I get my teeth into something, I won’t let go. Even though it was a struggle, there seemed some point to it. I suppose spite was my major motivation. I decided not to let these fucks do this to me. I could prove I was better than them. I knew they couldn’t write songs, because when I asked to see what they had, they had nothing at all. Not even three lyrics strung together. It was sad when they told me they had been rehearsing for two years. So I started handing in my own lyrics. I mean, why not anarchy? It was probably something to do with what I was reading at the time, no other reason. The destructive element fit in quite well. A lot of people feel the Sex Pistols were just negative. I agree, and what the fuck is wrong with that? Sometimes the absolute most positive thing you can be in a boring society is completely negative. It helps. If you’re not, you show weakness, and you must never do that! You must always be totally committed.

  JULIEN TEMPLE: I was initially attracted by their ferocity and the originality of the Pistols. Not as musicians, but as a band, an attitude. You can’t just take one side in terms of the Sex Pistols’ importance. It was more than a band, it was a theatrical presence onstage. Shock theater that was beautifully designed. It had incredible anger and power that seemed rooted in things older than rock ’n’ roll.

  CAROLINE COON: What Johnny was doing with the Pistols was dramatizing rage. That was always misunderstood. I’ve always pegged the Pistols as the Theater of Rage, a very good place to put your violent feelings. What resulted was the mistaken notion that punk was violent. But the reason there was violence in the punk movement is another issue. It had nothing to do with the core of what punk was about. What Johnny may have liked to have seen was more the performance of rage as an articulation inside a rock ’n’ roll format.

  Apparently Nick Kent, the British journalist, used to jam with the band from time to time. That’s what Steve told me. They never made him a band member, although he considered himself as such. He’s never written a good word about me ever since. When I came along, I took one look at him and said, “No. That has to go.” They told me, “He’s not in the band anyway.” They had never written any songs together.

  I know a lot has been said about Glen being the melodious one, and that without him we would never have had hit singles. For God’s sake, who gave a damn about a hit single? Irrelevant and, apart from that, a lie. For all of Glen’s melodiousness, he didn’t exactly do very much when he left us, did he? I don’t think people realized that it takes all members to fit that together.

  STEVE JONES: Matlock could definitely play. Musically it was easier to have Matlock in the band, but I didn’t like his personality. He was such a good boy; he was so clean and had that look, like he had never gone without a meal. He was always fed and looked after, which is all right. Each to his own, but when you’re in a band with someone like that, it gets annoying. He had this pompous face you wanted to slap. Glen was always trying to show me these complicated chords, which aggravated me even more. I wasn’t interested in his Beatle-type chords. I couldn’t play the chords he tried to show me. If we had played those chords, we would have sounded like Dr. Feel-good or one of those pub rock bands.

  The first song I wrote with the band was nothing that ever got used. It was a song about a girl called Mandy who wanted to kill her parents. It was such a boring name, it was irresistible. I can hardly remember the lyrics. It went something like “There’s blood on the carpet, blood on the stairs, And dear old Mandy’s got blood in her hair.”

  It was so silly. Glen couldn’t cope with it. “Why does it have to be so negative?” So then we started doing other people’s songs—things like “Whatcha Gonna Do About It.” I would change—more like mutilate—the lyrics.

  I was absolutely embarrassed as all hell. Once I had heard my voice come out of that speaker, it was the kiss of death to me. I thought I was doomed. I had to really work. Yet I was actually pleased that they considered carrying on. Maybe I didn’t realize they were so desperate. They must have been, to put up with me. It was like trying to teach a deaf man to talk.

  Steve was playing badly because he was only learning himself. He was constantly out of time and out of tune. But I didn’t mind that at all. I thought it was great fun. I loved it. I had never been that close to an electric guitar before. The sheer power coming out of the amps filled me. The more awful the noise, the better it sounded to me.

  STEVE JONES: I didn’t know how to play, but once we got John in the band I had to learn guitar seriously. I’d wake up in the morning at our studio on Denmark Street, take a black beauty, and play along with an Iggy Pop record and the New York Dolls’ first album. I would listen to them over and over again and play guitar to them. I would learn those bits along with what we were rehearsing the previous night. I barely got my barre chords together to play songs. I threw a little bit of Chuck Berry in the lead and that was it.

  “Funhouse” by Iggy and the Stooges was my kind of music. Our sound was pretty damn close to that. Behind all that we had Glen’s soppy bass line, playing something rinky-dink. Really twee. Paul has played the same way from the first day I heard him, right up until now. He has not changed. It’s complete Charlie Watts—boom, tat, boom, tat. He never varies, and that’s not a complaint. He was so solid that we could rely on that. So the chaos can fall very neatly into place. I don’t think it would have ever happened if Paul wasn’t there. In the early days, I decided right from the start that if Paul and Steve weren’t there, there wouldn’t be much point to it. I wouldn’t have wanted to do it with any other people. As I said, it was sink or swim. I didn’t feel like a front man. Actually, I felt more like the back man. I was still working myself out on stage.
When you don’t know who you are, it takes a lot to get to the point where you throw yourself into the fire in front of other people. I had gotten over my shyness. The next step was failure. The idea of failing utterly appalls me. I don’t give people an easy time. I don’t make liking me very easy at all. Why should I? I test people. I find out what they’re up to and where they come from. I don’t like people who readily accept things. If it was easy joining the Sex Pistols, then I wouldn’t have been too interested. But it wasn’t. It was very difficult. I made them dislike me all the more. Then it was worth fighting to get into.

  Malcolm convinced them that I looked the part, although they were still somewhat doubtful.

  CHRISSIE HYNDE: Malcolm recognized the poet in John Rotten. What Malcolm would do was put people in motion. He tried to do it with me with a couple of different bands. His idea, and what he tried to put together, would never be the obvious, and it wouldn’t be what anyone else would try.

  I was emaciated—very thin with spiky hair. I was wearing what later became full punk garb—ripped shirts and safety pins. The band didn’t know where such a look came from since it didn’t come from anything that they’d recognized. It was me rehashing all those awful pop star images, taking bits and putting it together. Bits like taking a Pink Floyd T-shirt. Once you add the words I hate, you’ve made it something completely different. Everyone was wearing flares at the time. There was no way you’d get me into a pair of flares. I wore my trousers preferably baggy, tight at the bottom. Remember all those World War II old men’s suits that they had at the secondhand clothes stores? I loved all that. The baggier and bigger, the better. But when you buy these old tatty things, they do tend to fall apart. So the safety pins were not decoration, but necessity. It was either that or the sleeve falls off.

  BOB GRUEN: Coming from New York, I first noticed differences directly related to fashion. The New York scene was very severe. Richard Hell had started wearing ripped-up T-shirts. From what I understand, some ex-girlfriend … to whom Richard owed money got pissed off and ripped up his clothes. Out of desperation for something to wear, Richard put them back together with safety pins, and that became the style. But the funniest thing Richard Hell ever wore—that I saw, anyway—was something he had on while walking on the Lower East Side. It was a T-shirt with a target painted in the middle that read “Please Kill Me.”

  At the time I was rehearsing with the Pistols I moved about a hell of a lot. I moved back to the old man’s house for a short period of time—on and off for as long as my old man and I could bear each other. He asked me back because he’d seen the Hampstead squat.

  “No son of mine will live like that!”

  I had run into him on the street, so he and my mother wanted to see what I was living in. So I invited them over. This was long after I had dropped out of school. I showed them all right. They were none too impressed. They came over one night and nearly died. The place was a real tip with a collection of very dirty people sitting around with candles bemoaning their lot.

  “We’re doomed. Life’s dismal.”

  Sid lived there, and they knew him from before. He used to come around their house during college practically every day. My old man said he was as daft as a brush. He’d be dolled up in some new fashion victim outfit, making himself look bloody ridiculous. They didn’t like the girlies we were keeping company with, either, some real fucking freaks. I showed them everything.

  “This is my room.”

  “Where’s the bed?”

  “There isn’t one. I sleep on the floor.”

  That was a lie of course. I had moved the mattress next door. I love sympathy. My father gave in and had me back until I could sort myself out. I had no qualms about going back. That’s where my record player was, the only thing I owned at the time. I had precious little to play on it, though. “Tago Mago” by Can. It’s stunning, my fave. “Bitches Brew” by Miles Davis. I loved that album. Captain Beefheart. When I had the money, I would go to the record store and pick out something and see what I thought. I liked the luck of the draw. Now it’s all so predictable, the way they file everything. Because of the soppy pictures of the bands on the front, you already knew what the music was like.

  I couldn’t stand living at home. It didn’t go too well. I wrote “God Save the Queen” at the kitchen table that’s still there to this day. I wrote it one morning waiting for my baked beans to cook. I wrote the lyrics in one sitting and went straight to the rehearsal studio. I handed them over to the other guys. The tune was already worked out, and I just put those lyrics over it. It did not amuse Glen at all. He could not cope. He thought it was evil.

  “You can’t do that! We’ll get killed.”

  It was worth the risk. Nobody had openly declared any anti-opinions of the royal family in ever such a long time in our ridiculous feudal Great Britain. I thought it was about time somebody stood up and said something—and I was more than pleased that it be me. I’d been thinking about it for a long time. This is how I write most of my songs. There is no set format, I tend to think a long time before I put pen to paper. When I’m ready, I’ll sit down and write it out in one long piece, more like an open letter than a song. It becomes valid confrontation. There’s an element of glory to it. The record, of course, took off. It was bound to because so many people felt the same way. It was utterly pointless trying to convince Glen that “God Save the Queen” was not fascism, that it actually was against fascism. Maybe he thought I really meant to save the queen and her fascist regime. Well, for shit sure, the queen didn’t appreciate it none.

  I couldn’t have enjoyed myself much more if I had sat down and thought, How can I annoy them today? What a pain in the ass I must have been. I wish I had done it deliberately, but it wasn’t quite like that. Looking back on it now, I’d like to think that was what I was doing, but it isn’t true.

  I got the name Rotten because I had green teeth. It was Steve’s nickname for me: “You’re fucking Rotten!” That’s what he used to say. It was, and it wasn’t an affectionate nickname, pushing it on both ends. I never had any violent confrontations with Steve, ever. I’d like to think there was some kind of respect because I definitely baffled him.

  STEVE JONES: I didn’t like knowing I was going to have to work with this guy. At that time I was into Rod Stewart and the Faces, and John was totally not that way at all. He made me uncomfortable, and I thought his attitude was fucked.

  We were rehearsing in Chiswick. After that we used a place called Tin Pan Alley on Tottenham Court Road. There was a group who split up called Badfinger, and they had a two-room rehearsal studio. Malcolm rented and eventually bought it. I know he got it dirt cheap. There was no toilet, so he wasn’t exactly breaking the bank.

  BOB GRUEN: When I first met Johnny Rotten he’d been nursing a sore throat for a couple of days. Still, Malcolm wanted me to do a photo session of the band rehearsing. They seemed to respect me, which was odd given that they seemed to have no respect for anybody. But they liked the fact that I worked for Creem and Rock Scene, the only music magazines that seemed to have a sense of humor. Both tended to be irreverent, and they poked fun at everybody.

  I don’t think anything about the Pistols was nihilistic. We certainly weren’t on a death trip. Maybe it was wreck-and-destroy stupidity, but I would hardly think that’s nihilistic. Quite the opposite. It’s very constructive because we were offering an alternative. Not just anarchy for the sake of it. This was a very antistar band.

  There was a thing about the band and a glamour about Malcolm and Vivienne’s Sex shop that made me stick it out. It was the most radical place in London, a wacky shop. It didn’t do much business because it appealed to perverts, freaks, oddballs, and people with disturbed personalities. I fit in somehow. There was nothing else going on in my life. I chucked out of college, home, jobs, everywhere. What else? You can only hate Pink Floyd for so long.

  RAMBO: We used to wear Pringles, and all of a sudden Paul Young turned into a punk. He still looked sm
art as a punk. He and Anthony English wore bondage trousers. Sometimes John would look like a Ted. He would wear his hair like a Ted, but it wasn’t really. It was more of a piss take of a Ted.

  Early on, Vivienne Westwood was someone I wanted to like but could never come to grips with. She never liked me and always made it completely clear because I was too smart. I could not be manipulated. I would not wear what she wanted me to wear. Her vision of a rock ’n’ roll star was not mine. I wouldn’t be what she wanted me to be. She resented me for not going along, and that made life with her an impasse. I didn’t like her friends or her attitude.

  I remember very odd things about Vivienne. We once went to a pizza restaurant together. I lied and told Vivienne that I never had pizza before, and she absolutely took it as a fact. Fine, I thought. I’ll go with this. She ordered the weirdest pizza on the menu—capers, green olives, and anchovies.

  “Gosh, what’s that?” I let on. “How do you eat it?”

  She proceeded to cut the segments and handed me a piece and said, “By the way, these are olives, an acquired taste. You might not like them at first.” For such a put-on it was great, telling me everything I wanted to know about why I should dislike her. Vivienne carried it on and never got it. When I watch her doing interviews on TV, I get that same feeling I had in the pizza parlor; she doesn’t get it, she doesn’t realize that people are laughing at her. She’s deeply silly. Wacky shit. Ingenious, but not bright—much like a dotty college professor. In fact, that’s how Malcolm met her. She was a teacher.

  When I bought a rubber polo-neck sweater from her, just because we were Sex Pistols did not mean we didn’t have to pay full price. We certainly did, and this rubber sweater cost forty pounds, quite a lot of money then. When I hacked up the polo neck, Vivienne became furious. “You don’t get it, do you? It’s not worn that way!” I paid full whack for the sweater, so I did what I wanted with it. I eventually wore it on stage at one gig, supporting Ian Dury and the Blockheads. I passed out from dehydration after our third number because it was so hot. I couldn’t manage it. How foolish and easily worth it. Ian Dury was more than impressed. Worst thing he’d ever seen, oozing style without affectation.