by John Lydon
It still pisses me off and pissed off all the people I hung around with as a kid. I still know all these people, and they’re all out there doing good work, changing things and not going along with the norm. They still don’t fit into little brackets. Some of them are artists and teachers. Wobble has gone on to do his own music and is doing quite well. Wobble never went for the money, either. He’s much more interested in the head work. Important.
Wobble and I rented a four-bedroom house in Tottenham in 1977 for six quid a week. Wow! What a deal! We decided not to pay the rent, so the landlord came around with two bouncers. When they turned up we told them to come in. They wouldn’t. We told them we wouldn’t pay the rent unless they came in. The rent money was in the kitchen. They still wouldn’t come in. I tend not to believe these kinds of stories, either, but the doors in this house used to open and close in the middle of the night. I’d be sitting in the room and I’d see some old woman in the corridor. The door between the corridor and the front room was glass and you’d just see the shadow of someone walking by. You’d open the door, look around, and there would be no one there. It was very annoying when you would hear someone on the staircase and you knew no one was upstairs. The neighbors wouldn’t go near the place. Wobble wouldn’t go in on his own. We used to ring each other up and wait outside. Out of four bedrooms, we’d all sleep in this one room.
We moved out after two months into a house on Burton Street in King’s Cross. It was owned by a bunch of Muslim Indians. They couldn’t take the massive crates of lager arriving nightly. We had a deal with the local off-license to buy six or seven crates a day. They would deliver them, and the Muslims would go mad. “No alcohol in our house!” Our friend Paul Young (not the singer) threw our television set out the front window. The walls were so thin, Wobble’s foot went straight through and into the next flat.
The Pistols played a concert inside Chelmsford Maximum Security Prison. We insisted Malcolm do something and book a gig. That was all he could come up with, so we drove up and played to these long-term to life jailbirds. It wasn’t quite as severe as American prisons, but the inmates looked pretty damned psychopathic. It turned out great. The warders just said, “Get on with it!” The guards left and literally locked the doors behind them and waited outside while we played to these crazies. We got the vibe that the warders wanted them to do us over. There was no security and no barbed-wire fences to play behind. I was five feet away from the first row—five or six hundred inmates were sitting there, gritting their teeth. We had really good fun—another receptive audience whose tastes weren’t ruined by the press.
“Ouch! I’m going to die! But I might as well die … fashionably!”
We just went for it and did our best. What else could we have done? Huddled in the corner? We earned a lot of respect that day. Some of the prisoners came up to us after the gig.
“Thanks for coming,” they said as they filed back to their cells.
“Great!” I answered back, strangely moved. No one had ever thanked us for anything before, much less for playing.
Malcolm opened an office off Oxford Street. It was in a slum dwelling with scabby peeling paint on the walls. The windows were painted closed. He didn’t like us showing up, which I found strange, so I would show up as often as I could. You would walk in and there would be a bunch of bored people hanging out, not doing anything, people like Simon Barker, Jamie Reid, Berlin, and Sophie Richmond. There would be oddball people milling from one office to another. Inside the same building was the offices for Sniffing Glue magazine. It seemed totally inept. There was only one godforsaken band that was being managed, the Sex Pistols. Malcolm wouldn’t even tell Sophie, the secretary—who ran the office—what he was doing. Nobody would answer the phones when I was there. There were empty filing cabinets, and the only filing I saw was nailfiling.
Before we had this office, Malcolm took the Pistols over to Chris Spedding’s place. We did a demo with Spedding, who was a respected guitarist. He was the first “musician” who publicly said he didn’t understand why we were put down all the time. He thought we were damn fine.
There were virtually no independent labels when the Pistols started. All that came after as an outgrowth of the so-called punk movement. One of the only independent labels was Chiswick—and that was someone’s front room in Chiswick. It’s really not what you want for a band. You set yourself bigger than that; you want to be heard by as many people as possible. Unless you have distribution, there’s no point. When you sign with these independents—as they call themselves—they go and lease the contract to the big labels. Again you’ve defeated the point, you’re now twice removed. Some independents think they’ve broken the backs of the monopoly. Bollocks! They still need to go through the major labels to get the bloody records pressed, distributed, and paid for. If the major stores don’t recognize your label and won’t take your record, you’re doomed.
I knew very little about the intricacies of the record contracts we signed. I kept way out of it. To be honest, the only interest the band and I had was, how much do we each get? Like true humanitarians. Quite frankly, you can’t tell an eighteen-year-old to think any other way. It’s impossible at that age, you don’t want to be bogged down reading fine print that you will not understand. It’s taken me a long time to decipher the words in record contracts, and that’s because I’ve had to. I surround myself with the people who know and the books that tell me otherwise. You’ll find that the two can differ. Advisers can be a nuisance. We would have signed anything that was shoved under our faces. In that respect, I was as dumb as everybody else. I was nowhere near capable of understanding what was going on. I realize now that the contracts were shockingly bad. Malcolm hadn’t the slightest idea what he was doing, either.
A lot of musicians in the United States don’t even enter the wonderful world of music until they are twenty to twenty-five. In England you start at about sixteen or seventeen, even earlier—a major tragedy because you’re absolutely open to the hawks. They’ll tear you apart, and there’s not a lot you can do. Your parents are as dumb as you are. The American record contract with Warner Bros. was signed in perpetuity, forever and ever.
I would have liked to have had more band meetings in the first few months. We’d have a monthly sit-down to say what we’re doing or ask Malcolm what was happening. “Where’s the money?” That soon fizzled out. Early signs of trouble.
Malcolm went to CBS, and he was physically thrown out of the building. We sat on the bench opposite a little park outside. We sat there and he said, “I’m going to get you a deal now.” Everyone was very naive. I thought it was hilarious.
Go on, impress me. I said, “I’ve got an appointment. I’ll be back shortly.” They wouldn’t let us in at first. That was the reason we waited outside. Malcolm went in and was quite literally, physically thrown out. CBS wasn’t interested at all, but Malcolm barged his way in. I suppose they found him and the whole idea offensive. That scummy, awful band. How dare you? God, he was so humiliated! It absolutely tore him apart. “Oh! I don’t know what happened!” He got so extremely pompous. “How dare they! I’ll call the police!” One of the secretaries shouted out, “No need. They’re on their way.” So then it was a quick runner. We would have all ended up in jail for riotous assembly, nothing more vicious than wanting a record deal. That happened more than a few times. Particularly with booking agents as well. It was hysterical, exactly what I wanted to see happen. When you get that kind of behavior, then you know you’re doing something right. You’re offending all the right people.
HOWARD THOMPSON: I would think about the ramifications of getting involved, which meant befriending this pack of unruly and completely reckless characters. They were doing things totally against the way music and business was normally done. How would I articulate this to the record company or, worse yet, to my social circles? They were in the papers, vilified daily in the national press. Plus there was something else that I’d never really told anyone before.
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br /> My father was a heavy and important figure in the music department at the Arts Council of Great Britain. One of his main responsibilities was to subsidize through government grants most of the big orchestras in England. He would also find soloists and give them grants. He had a huge influence in the classical world. So I had to come to terms with whether or not me and my old man would ever be able to speak to one another again. We’d already had a difficult few years at that time, and I was trying to patch things up with him. The Sex Pistols would have killed any chance of that happening. He would have been absolutely horrified if I had signed this band to a record contract.
We visited Mickie Most, the famous record producer of the sixties, when we were label hunting. He was quite pleasant, but, looking at me, he didn’t think we had the right cutie boy image. He wasn’t nasty or horrible toward us, and not many people at that time knew much about us. Mickie Most–type production was all that was really happening in pop rock apart from supergroup, dinosaur shit or the disco nonsense. It’s absolutely beyond me why we went there. We knew what the answer would be before we got there. At least I did. We were plumbing the depths.
HOWARD THOMPSON: I didn’t feel with their modus operandi that they could last. I wasn’t about to invest a lot of Island’s money in something that was going to self-destruct. Now my only regret in eighteen-plus years of doing A&R is that I didn’t sign the Sex Pistols.
It was an achievment rather than a detriment when EMI signed and—three months later—dropped us. I honestly didn’t care. The check landed. EMI struck me as a lame label. Guys in suits; that’s all I remember about EMI. They had one A&R chap with vaguely longish hair, and he’d be allowed to wear jeans and a nice shirt. He was the token jester to make out how jolly rock ’n’ roll they all were. But when you visited the EMI offices, there was nothing but guys in suits at every table and secretaries all dolled up from nine to five. They seemed bourgeois for me, a lack of looseness. EMI at first mentioned transferring us to Harvest Records, but that never came about. Malcolm didn’t even know what Harvest was. I did and promptly told EMI what to do with themselves. That was not for me. I suppose EMI thought they could push us off to one side. We wanted it to say EMI on the record.
EMI didn’t like us, either. Other artists sent in complaints and didn’t wish to continue with EMI if they had the likes of us on board—or on bored. There goes the old school tie, from the likes of public school boys and upwardly mobile sorts like Rick Wakeman, Steve Harley, and various others. It was the same old shit again, the class system coming down on us.
BOB GRUEN: I went over to EMI with them. We’d all been drinking beer, so we were feeling pretty good. I remember it was late in the day, six or seven o’clock. Most of the EMI offices were empty, except for one guy who was waiting for the Sex Pistols. Eventually a few more people, mostly lawyers and A&R men, trickled in. The band signed the papers as we took photos. Then the EMI guys broke out the champagne to celebrate. Now we’d been drinking good English beer all day, so after a cup or two of champagne everybody was pretty sick. I remember Steve throwing up in the parking lot. The next day it was in all the papers that the Sex Pistols had thrown up at their record company.
The punk explosion had all the record companies quaking in their boots. That’s why they ran out and signed up anything that remotely looked like punk. They wanted to absorb it into the system and make it mainstream. They weren’t going to initiate punk, merely jump on it once it’s happening. The record companies say, “Go away and make yourself incredibly famous. Then come back and we’ll sign you.” I don’t give a damn about the name punk. I never did. It’s a label that was assigned to us by the journalist Caroline Coon. It’s an American word for a male prostitute in prison. I don’t want to be no king of that! You can shove that one. There was something about the Pistols the record companies could not grasp. They didn’t know what the threat was. They wanted the poncey little tarts that most groups are made up of. They were disturbed with the real McCoy.
“Oh, God, they’re not acting.”
The Sex Pistols were always disastrous. Every bloody day, something would go completely wrong, backfire, and put us in the shit. I never knew life to be any different, so it was perfectly fine. Lo and behold, here I am many years later and nothing’s changed really.
It would have been easy to turn the Sex Pistols into the new Rolling Stones, but that was something I never wanted. To his credit, Malcolm never wanted it that way, either. He needed the band to conform to his vision, rather than sharing. In the days before the Pistols, new bands had to become part of the industry machine. But the Sex Pistols proved that it need not be the case. It’s a shame few have learned that lesson, because music has since gone back to the old ways.
HOWARD THOMPSON: All of a sudden bands weren’t being told what to do by record companies. Record companies weren’t in the position to demand that bands do this or that. Artistic control went back to the creators themselves. Musicians found vehicles, whether it was through a small independent label or a deal with a larger label who understood what it was they were trying to do. Bands were putting their own artistry through in an uncompromisable and radical fashion. In fact, the bands began to dictate the terms as record companies began to scramble to sign anything new that moved.
The Pistols were never in with all those musical insiders, writers, any of them. We did “Top of the Pops” once and some of those chart shows, but usually we’d be thrown off for bad behavior. That became repetitive in itself. Oh, dear, banned from another show—and for the most inoffensive things. People believed the myths, therefore the slightest infringement of the rule would be magnified. It was good fun to know you were annoying the powers that be to the point where they got hysterical and lost control.
Take, for instance, Bill Grundy.
The whole Bill Grundy incident was lovely. It was heaven. He ruined his own career. It wasn’t me. At the time we were asked to appear, we were rehearsing on Craven Park Road in Harlesden for our upcoming Anarchy Tour. EMI arranged an interview on the “Today” program. “Today” was a show with idle banter and chat that was programmed throughout the nation. We did not even know we were going to be on live TV that very day. ITV sent a limo over to pick us up. Yippee. There were drinks available in the car, then more drinks available in the hospitality area. The TV station had a reception room, which was just an excuse to get shit-faced. That’s where we met Bill Grundy.
Grundy was filthy dead, pissed drunk when we got there. We also had Siouxsie and the Bromley contingent with us. We were there for at least an hour before the show. Grundy started coming on to the girlies, particularly Sioux. He behaved like a filthy, dirty old man, and that’s what came out in the interview. He more or less told us we were all filthy scum. The only decent thing there were the tarts—and they were just about worth fucking and that was it. That attitude came out in the interview, and we were not amused by him. When he was behaving antagonistically from sentence one, it was just let rip. I started that by saying something under my breath. He asked, “What was that?” Steve jumped in with whatever he said. Then Grundy just went off. They had no idea what they were letting themselves in for. Or maybe they did. Bill Grundy was a professional alcoholic. His behavior was bad before the interview in this so-called hospitality room. We were made to feel like dirt. The producer and director must have known. They must have watched and wanted it, but they weren’t quite prepared for what they got. They thought we would crumble. They got every single obscenity known to mankind. “You fucking rotter. You dirty fucking bastard.” That kind of stuff. That’s all very well and good for broadcast at six-thirty, right after the news. It was so wonderful to read in the newspaper the next morning that a man in Liverpool kicked in his TV in disgust and was suing the TV station! The press loved it. I think they were meaning to fire Bill Grundy anyway, which they did not long after. Before he died, Grundy did these walkabout TV shows in places like Yorkshire and Lancashire called pub routes. He walked through
the moors in search of pubs.
STEVE JONES: I definitely started the fracas on the Grundy show. We were down in Camden rehearsing for the “Anarchy in the U.K.” tour with the Clash and the Heartbreakers. We were fucking about on this big stage when the people from EMI came down with a big limo and said, “You better come down to the TV station now because Queen was going to do it, but they couldn’t make it. We have to fit you in.” The BBC put us in this little hospitality room that had a fridge filled with booze. I was nervous and downed three bottles of Blue Nun. The next thing I knew we were walking out onto the set and I was drunk and pissed off. I thought Grundy was going to talk about our upcoming album tour, but I could see straight away he just wanted to make us look stupid. Siouxsie told Grundy she had always wanted to meet him, and I think she was sincere. He said to her, “We’ll meet after the show.” He was being an old sleazy bastard, so I started swearing at him. Actually John said “shit” and nobody heard it. Then I started saying “fuck this” and “fuck that.” I thought they bleeped stuff on TV. It’s common practice, and I can’t work out why they didn’t that day. Maybe somebody deliberately let it go out. It was amazing. But I had no qualms about telling this guy where to go. Straight afterward we rushed into the limo and zoomed off. I remember someone saying, “The phones are going crazy! Everyone is calling up and going crazy!” It felt really exciting.
HOWARD THOMPSON: When the Pistols did that to EMI and A&M, I’m sure it was devastating to the labels involved, but for all of us, it was a gas. It was hysterically funny and completely expected. I think it was Rick Wakeman who went public after the Sex Pistols signed with A&M for one week. He didn’t like being on the same label as these scruffy Herberts who couldn’t play their instruments, so he talked to Derek Greene, the managing editor. So they were off the label. It was like, bang bang, who’s next?