by John Lydon
HOWARD THOMPSON: When I first saw the Sex Pistols at the Nashville Rooms, I remember coming away from the show with a million questions in my head. I’d just seen something unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
COOK: I quite liked the Nashville gigs, particularly the second one. We played the second night under the pretext of hiring the club for a private party. That was a good gig because we had our own sound system. It was so much better when we had control of the situation. We could set the gig up and use it for our own end. We would have monitors that worked. We were relaxed and playing well by this stage, and the crowd really liked us. The gigs we could organize ourselves—100 Club, the Nashville, or Screen on the Green—always turned out to be the best shows.
LYDON: Glen would say stuff to me like “The lyrics to ‘God Save the Queen’ have to be changed.” Because his mum didn’t like it! When somebody talks to me like that, I just don’t listen any longer. I won’t even debate the issue. Also in April of 1976, we played the El Paradise, a really dingy little place on Brewer Street in Soho. We had about ten people inside watching us gig. I burned myself really bad. I stumbled and fell on the lights that were normally anchored above but were on the ground. I couldn’t see what I was doing, and I stumbled and hit them on my side. I still have a huge welt from it.
STEVE JONES: The El Paradise strip club in Soho was a shady scene—fat, ugly chicks stripping. Malcolm put that together. There were strippers actually working before we went on, and then after we finished, they started stripping again.
COOK: It was a terrible place to play because it was so small and so loud. We ended up breaking up a few things. These Maltese blokes who ran the club turned up. It was such a shithole, they were worried we were going to wreck it.
LYDON: They were standing there at the front of the stage, looking at us, shouting, “Get that filth off!” And this place was basically a wanking shop. The funniest thing about the El Paradise was upstairs on the roof. They didn’t want us up there during the day. I managed to go up one day with Steve. We broke into a room they had way up in the back. It was bare brick with a thick wooden chair, like a throne, in the center. It had hand bands and straps attached to it. They had all these weird implements of torture hanging on the walls—whips, spikes, objects of cruelty—things that were designed to go places that weren’t designed to receive them. Odd things must have gone on up there. I grabbed some whips and stuff. That was the major reason for the moaning from those Maltese geezers. “Where’s our whips, you bastards?”
COOK: Before we’d go on stage, we would always have to go looking for Steve and find him in a cupboard with some disgusting girl. Steve was completely obsessed with sex, more so than any of the other band members.
LYDON: There would be no problems with support bands at those shows, either. The Screen on the Green gigs were excellent and very funny. The chap who promoted those gigs used to chuck on these mad Kenneth Anger movies before we got on. The whole night would be extremely hilarious. These films were originally supposed to be perverse, but in that environment they became laughable—deeply funny. I loved the aspect of taking all this decadence and laughing at it. We had this impression that in New York people wallowed in it and took it seriously. They would put it in an arty context. Any kind of porno flick or any of that stuff amused me greatly. I can’t see how people can find that kind of entertainment to be anything other than comedy.
COOK: Screen on the Green was this small cinema in North London we used to rent. Malcolm knew the manager who ran it, and they showed late night picture shows there. They agreed to put on our little get-togethers and all the chaos that went with it. The Slits played there with us at the second gig.
LYDON: I remember when Viv Albertine of the Slits lent me a wedding dress she had. I came out after to see what was going on—in a green wig and a wedding dress. “Oh, hello, John.” Everyone was so nonchalant. What the fuck! That’s gives you a fair idea of how liberal the attitudes were. There wasn’t any sense of posing at all. The only places I could ever go and relax were at other people’s houses. I couldn’t go out during the day. The only real club to go to was the Roxy or Louise’s before it became fashionable. Louise’s used to be a lesbian bar, and they wouldn’t give you any hassle. There were no other clubs we could go to at the time. That would be it for my social life—a few lunatics, prostitutes, and dykes. I moved around an awful lot, and I would live anywhere I could stay. Steve and Paul lived on Denmark Street at the time. I moved in for a short time with Linda Ashby later at the St. James. We loved the Houses of Parliament, and the parties she’d get us into were always good fun. I generally found the Tory MPs the worst. I remember a famous politician named John Stonehouse who gave a lot of parties. He threw a party one Friday night, and on a Monday morning he disappeared. I last saw him, or a body double, standing in the corner of a room in a suit, smoking a joint and asking where the coke was.
Our interest in politics at the time was zero. I’ve changed since. I follow politics closely now because I find it all very thrilling. But during the Pistols, I was too young. I couldn’t even vote. I just knew they were all corrupt—like the people who would run off with the money and fake their own deaths.
COOK: Then there were the gigs in France and the Scandinavian tours.
LYDON: Siouxsie Sioux was a nightmare when we went down to Paris. Silly girl, she wore practically nothing except swastikas and a see-through titless bra—in a former Nazi-occupied country. The stage at the club we played at was brand new, and we were the first band in there. I almost broke my neck because the stage was lit from underneath, and as you trotted out you couldn’t see anything. When you’re lit like that, it really affects your eyes. It was visually painful, and they had this ridiculous gay disco flashing thing happening where the lights would run through a fast circuit pattern. Now I’m prone to epileptic fits in that kind of situation, especially if the flashing lights are on a certain frequency. That kind of stuff fucks me up. The Club de Chalet du Lac in Paris was awful for me, and the French audience weren’t too happening, either. They’ve always had an attitude there, although it has been changing over the last eight years. Before that, it was always, “Entertain me. I dare you!”—worse than any London crowd because they were so into being French. So Billy Idol and Siouxsie drove down. Billy told me years later that they would come visit us with some girls. They’d be left behind, and the girls would disappear, only to come back an hour later looking shagged out. Wonder why? I always had good memories of playing in Scandinavia. We used to have a mad, crazy crowd around there. We’d get followed around by these biker chaps. Really wild audiences who understood right from the start. Even though they were a little older, they were into the music. They had a good time and never posed. There was no problem of a glass being thrown into someone’s face from across a room. They knew what real violence was. It’s always the pretenders who do that kind of stuff. Real yobs don’t. They don’t need to prove themselves. It’s funny, but most of the trouble created at the punk festival at the 100 Club was on nights we weren’t playing. It was the other incidents blown out of proportion, practically none of it turned out to be true. The Sid and Nick Kent incident was a personal battle and had nothing to do with the audience.
COOK: Nick Kent came down for a rehearsal where we had our equipment set up. He just came down and played a few songs. Frustrated musician.
LYDON: I remember when Sid and Wobble got into a row with Nick Kent at the 100 Club. They were probably being very protective because Nick Kent had a snobby attitude at the time. Nick Kent has never had anything to do with me. He apparently rehearsed with the band sometime before and told people I shouldn’t be up there. Then Nick Kent would constantly slag me off in the press, so when he turned up at our gigs, I would have something to say to him along those lines. Maybe the discussion continued and was pursued by Wobble and Sid. You know you were doing well when you get the likes of Mick Jagger slagging you off in the press—the so-called rock star untouchables.
They would see us once on the telly, then they would say, “They can’t play.” It was deeply ridiculous for Mick Jagger to say the Sex Pistols couldn’t play. Now the Rolling Stones are hardly cultivated, are they? In fact, they made a career out of being the exact opposite. We were banned from the Marquee. We banned ourselves from the Nashville by sheer choice. That was a back-to-the-pubs thing. You could get a lot of people in, but it was still a stinky pub with a damned beer-sodden carpet. The Nashville and the Marquee stunk of the old rock ’n’ roll cliché. We spent a lot of the money we made from gigs mostly on demos. We once did a July 4 gig with the future Clash supporting us. Strummer and the rest of them had a horrible attitude at that gig. Keith Levene was in the band, and he was the only one who could actually hold a decent conversation with us. Bernie Rhodes, Malcolm’s ex-partner, was managing them and it was their first public gig. Malcolm and Bernie were competing, so Bernie was revving this band to take a very anti-Pistols stance—as if they were the real kings of punk. I’ve never liked the Clash. They weren’t good songwriters. They would run out of steam halfway through their gigs because they would go so mad at the beginning. The Sex Pistols learned dynamics on stage. I would credit Paul for that. He could break the tempo down. Strummer would start everything off and from there on in, it was just full-on speed. That’s not good enough because you’re not saying anything just by being fast. You can’t dance to it, and you can hardly listen to it. It’s unpleasant after half an hour. To me the Clash looked and sounded like they were yelling at themselves about nothing in particular—a few trendy slogans stolen here and there from Karl Marx. The Clash introduced the competitive element that dragged everything down a little. It was never about that for us. We were just the Pistols. We never saw ourselves as being in a punk movement. We saw ourselves as just the Pistols, and what the rest of them were up to was neither here nor there. Quite frankly, they weren’t there in the beginning. They laid none of the groundwork. They just came in and sat on our coattails. Rat Scabies and the Damned, he used to say, “My band is better than yours!” Yes, Rat. He used to roadie for us. There you go. It was made very clear that we weren’t distant superstars you saw on a huge stage four hundred miles away from your seat. Yet a lot of bands that came after jumped on the superstar, ego shitwagon.
HOWARD THOMPSON: After the first four or five months of the Sex Pistols’ short history, suddenly all these bands started cropping up—Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Clash, the Damned, and the Adverts. The Pistols had changed the whole musical scene. Everybody started doing it the way the Pistols did it.
LYDON: Audiences fell for it and walked straight back into the same old traps. I think there’s something basically wrong with the general public that they do need their icons. I’m an icon breaker, therefore that makes me unbearable. They want you to become godlike, and if you won’t, you’re a problem. They want you to carry their ideological load for them. That’s nonsense. I always hoped I made it completely clear that I was as deeply confused as the next person. That’s why I’m doing this. In fact, more so. I wouldn’t be up there on a stage night after night unless I was deeply confused, too. If I had all the answers, I wouldn’t be involved in something like this at all.
COOK: I think the press fueled these rivalries among the bands. The press was jealous of the Pistols, too. “Wow! Here’s the Clash. They’re much better than the Sex Pistols, blah, blah.” They took to the Clash a lot easier than they did to us because the Clash were more accessible. That’s what started the rivalry, though it really wasn’t much of one after all. We only socialized or saw each other now and again. A band like the Damned was just jumping on the bandwagon. The other punk bands would play three minutes of thrash with no break in it at all. You could say that about the Clash as well. Although they were a bit better than your usual mainstream punk bands, the Clash went on like that, and that’s why they always seemed knackered halfway through their set.
CAROLINE COON: Three bands represent the three different prongs of the punk movement. There was the personal politics of the Sex Pistols, the serious politics of the Clash, and the theater, camp, and good fun of the Damned.
LYDON: I think the audiences gobbing on stage came from me. Because of my sinuses, I do gob a lot on stage, but never out toward the crowd. Maybe off to the side. But the press will jump on that, and the next week you get an audience thinking that’s part of the fashion and everybody has to be in on it. There’s not much you can do to stop it after that.
STEVE SEVERIN: Siouxsie got gobbed in the eye one night, and she had to wear an eye patch at the next gig because she got conjunctivitis. I don’t know who started it, but it was probably that arsehole Rat Scabies from the Damned. Maybe it was a nightmare. We’d be covered in it; it was so disgusting! The funny thing was that nobody’d say anything about it. That’s what we couldn’t understand. Siouxsie would always say after the first song, “If you don’t stop gobbing at me, I’m gonna come down there and black you one.”
COOK: I was always at the back, so I could try to get out of the way of it. Some of the spit would come past me and, bang, take the paint off the wall. It’s disgusting when you think about it. John still gets it when he plays live.
BOB GRUEN: It seemed disgusting to have to stand on stage while people spit on you, and to take it or you didn’t get paid. The bands told me their fans were communicating with them by sharing the experience; that the only way they could reach them or touch them was by spitting.
LYDON: Only in Britain, and it’s usually one asshole who will walk to the front and thinks he knows it all. It’s some New Age traveler Mohawk—some Johnny-come-lately who has read a few things but hasn’t read enough to know better.
What I remember most about the Lyceum gig—our biggest gig—was a famous groupie turned up from America. She came into the dressing room and announced, “I must add you to my collection. I must have you.” I said, “Oh, really? Fuck right off.” That was my impression of Americans at the time. They were like vultures.
COOK: We didn’t go on until about three o’clock. I wasn’t able to wake up. It was dead late. It was ridiculous idea to do a gig at three in the morning.
LYDON: Malcolm once bussed up some Americans for a gig we did at the Circus in Manchester. Seymour Stein and Lisa Robinson were there. It was a bit more organized and together than the previous Lesser Free Trade Hall gig. It was a lovely hall, and we liked playing in Manchester. We liked the crowds—way back then they were very good. They were obviously on to it because there were all these bands coming out at the time. Slaughter and the Dogs supported us. They had a very young guitarist who was astounding. He looked like he could have been a star, but egos got in the way. They didn’t have the prejudices in Manchester, and they liked us for what we were. They hooked on to the energy instead of the NME, Sounds, and Melody Maker gossip angle. Those papers weren’t really treated with any kind of respect at all up north, were they? Somebody once wrote that we debuted “Anarchy in the U.K.” at that gig. We never debuted anything! It wasn’t seen as that. If there was another song ready, it would be chucked in at any particular order, rather than “And now we’re going to feature our latest, greatest hit!”—then into a three-minute introduction. We also taped a guest spot on a show there called “And So It Goes” with Tony Wilson—our first television appearance. Clive James worked on the show as the sidekick who warms up the crowd during the show. He would stand in the middle of the place and try to be funny. He threw a few insults our way, and I threw a few back.
COOK: It wasn’t anything outrageous. John said something back, and things went all right after. Peter Cook was on the show with us. He had a new Derek and Clive album out. It had some abusive language on it that coincided with our appearance on “The Bill Grundy Show.”
LYDON: Clive James is a funny man, but he was out of his depth. Between Peter Cook and me, he was stoned fucking dead. Again, we had no monitors on stage, but we did our best. There was very poor sound, and we couldn’t hear what we were d
oing. It was almost like guesswork, but because we had done so many gigs, we somehow stumbled through the song. It was like the early “Top of the Pops,” when bands would mime, which is as bad as playing live and not hearing yourself properly. All I could hear on the show was the drums behind me. The guitar and bass were so low, they seemed nonexistent. Everything relied on counting. We were tough and did what we had to do. We looked great—with no Vivienne Westwood gear on any of us.
COOK: The Vivienne gear at the time was lots of parachute tops, lots of straps and bondage trousers, Karl Marx shirts. John would come in and make up his own clothes. Three weeks later Vivienne would have them in her shop. That’s what Vivienne and Malcolm did. They got ideas from anywhere they could. It wasn’t as if we were decked out in their clothes all the time.
LYDON: A lot of the northern press would say we were just clothes horses and models for Malcolm’s shop. Of course, Malcolm would not deny anything—even though Malcolm’s shop was run by Vivienne and everything in it was done by her, the same way Malcolm thought he wrote Pistols songs. There was a lot of Viv selling stuff that she took from everything and everyone, particularly me. I was angry about that. I would put things together, and she’d have it in the fucking shop a couple of weeks later—mass produced. There wouldn’t be the slightest blinking or guilt about it. While a lot of her clothes were brilliant, Vivienne’s designs struck me as sexless. She would create these little blouses for men. I remember these small round-collared shirts, but the patterns were great. I liked clothes that annoyed people, but not just silly for the sake of it. Unfortunately, I think Vivienne is now just silly for the sake of it. She has no inspiration, apart from royalty. She makes clothes for the disco crowd and the terminally fashionable and rich.