by John Lydon
As for our relationship with EMI, it ended soon after we sold fifty-five thousand copies of our first single, “Anarchy in the U.K.” We parted company after Malcolm collected about fifty thousand pounds total in record and publishing advances. EMI—Every Mistake Imaginable, and they’re still making them.
SEGMENT 09:
HAND ON EYES
“Hey, you! You look suspicious. Empty out your pockets,” they yelled.
And that was it.
On January 12, 1977, I was busted for nothing more serious than crushed slimming pills, illegal at the time. In America they call them diet pills. I only had a tiny amount, 138 milligrams—you could only see the particles under a microscope. I was arrested during rehearsals in Soho when I took a break and went out for something to eat. I got done in between the studio and the sandwich shop. There was a wagonload of policemen with little python emblems on their helmets. They were the killer squad—the serious boys. I don’t know if they were a special drug squad, but they were certainly hooligans. I can’t recall which station I was taken to. I was too bloody terrified.
At the station, I was strip-searched in front of a female police officer. They went through everything—my shoelaces, my belts, even the safety pins I had holding my shirt together. They went through my shirt seams. Everything. Then I was locked in a cell, and I didn’t get out until later that evening. That was the first time bail was arranged for me. It was minimal, and Malcolm actually fronted it. The judge ordered me to stay with my parents until I appeared in court, which put me in Daddy’s custody. Another nightmare, huh? The time they gave me to go back into court for my hearing was not the same time they had on their records. Theirs showed my appearance scheduled for a week earlier, so I was watching television at about six-thirty one evening when the police came to the door. Bang bang bang.
“It’s the police! God, what have I done now?” I ran upstairs and was going to jump out the second-floor window, but that’s where the officers were waiting. My old man was at the door, trying to hold them back, but they came in with their dogs. They brought me down to Hornsey Road station, the local one in Finsbury Park. This time Malcolm wouldn’t come and sort out the bail, so my old man had to come up with it by midnight. My parents were ringing Malcolm’s office all the way through the evening, but he couldn’t be fucking bothered.
There were two holding cells in the station near Finsbury Park. On the wall of my cell was a list of the Lydons who had done time in it. Jimmy and Bobby had written their names there. We had all been through that same cell. I wrote my name underneath and joined the list—a good club. In London, people used to get pulled up all the time. They had a law called suspicion that allowed the police to hold you as long as they liked. Usually they would keep you for a couple of hours and then throw you out. It was designed to annoy you more than anything else.
I was alone in my small eight-by-ten-foot cell. It had big steel bars, white tiles, and an overflowing toilet—a bit like a mental hospital. It absolutely stank. My parents bailed me out that night, and another court appearance was set for a couple of days later, when they sentenced me to pay a forty-pound fine. Malcolm, the man holding our purse strings, showed up and said, “Oh, I don’t have any money on me.” The judge, in his infinite wisdom, sent me back to the slammer. The police marched me downstairs and told my parents that if the fine wasn’t paid by three-thirty that afternoon—before the court sessions closed—they would upgrade the conviction. Malcolm probably went off and had lunch somewhere. He came back with ten minutes to spare and paid the fine. My father wanted to kill Malcolm for his scandalous behavior; I could have murdered him on the spot. By that time we all knew that he was never going to change; he was always going to be a skinflint. That was the constant problem. Malcolm was hardly showing much interest in his budding young stars.
The only way you could get money out of Malcolm was to threaten to quit. Suddenly the money would be there. It went on like that all the time. I don’t think Paul and Steve had that problem. Their attitude was, “Malcolm never did us any wrong.” And he probably didn’t. He knew them a lot longer, and they were more easygoing. It was so easy for them to just go with it all. “Malcolm wouldn’t lie. John’s just a moaner.”
For fun, sometimes we would go to transvestite clubs. I’ve always found them and the gay clubs to be a hoot, much looser than other places. Without gays, there wouldn’t be much of a nightclub scene anywhere, giving a city like London a lot of its vibe. If you leave it to the regulars, it merely becomes a beer hall for the locals. There were loads of transvestite clubs in London. I met Linda in one club off Oxford Street. The red lights there used to drive me crazy, but it was free drinks and something to do. I put up with it. That was my sunglasses period. Again people thought I was posing because I was wearing a blind man’s pair of glasses. I was shielding myself from bloody red light! My aversion to red light is probably psychological. Most of my problems are. I have weak eyes that relates to the meningitis.
CHRISSIE HYNDE: I’d seen Sid pull a long link of chain out of his jacket and spin it around to clear an entire dance floor. If anyone got caught in the chain, it was tough shit. He definitely could be violent.
Sid never fought. He was worse than I was. But he used to love carrying weapons—like chains and things. He thought it made him look tough. We had a particularly bad night once when we got pulled up on Tottenham Court Road. Sid was waving his chain, and the cops come over. “Right. You’re nicked. Possession of a dangerous weapon.” We invented this awful, elaborate lie. Knowing how racist the British police were, they were so easy to manipulate. Here’s the story: “Yes, Officer, we stole it off this black man. He’s in a huge gang, and there’s at least twenty of them. They chased us for miles, and they’re just around the corner. One of them has got a gun.” The police loved it. “Really?” They spun off up the road to get them. They took the chain. Maybe now, looking back, they thought, What a pair of tossers, man. Don’t you just feel sorry for them?
All these incidents were more laughable than anything else. When the press gets hold of things, they can escalate them into some kind of frenzy. We let the press have a free hand. They could say whatever they liked. Malcolm said it right from the start: The press will just make it up anyway, so just go with it. I could see that would be true. And, lo and behold, it was. Deny nothing.
CAROLINE COON: The whole stance of journalists, white macho journalists, was anti-intellectual. Their conceit was that working-class rock ’n’ roll had to be stupid.
HOWARD THOMPSON: As exciting as it was, it was also immensely frustrating and aggravating and fantastic and completely new! Who knew? It was one of those situations where you saw something going on and there were a few people in the audience who got it as well as a handful of journalists writing about it. I remember Caroline Coon, Jonh Ingham, and Giovanni Dadomo, all part of the early scene writing about this music in a very enthusiastic and sensationalistic fashion.
I was rushed to hospital after a gig in Walthamstow supporting Kilburn and the High Roads because I foolishly walked on stage in a rubber T-shirt. Three songs in, I collapsed, and then it was oxygen tent time. I ended up selling what was left of that same shirt to Sid, and precisely the same thing happened to him. Midsummer madness. The fool walked outside, and it was eighty-five degrees. Fashion-first Sid. He collapsed.
Nobody really looked like us at all. A whole punk audience imitating us slavishly came a long time later. We changed our looks frequently. For instance, one week I looked like a complete Teddy boy. I used to enjoy quiffing my hair up. Teddy boys were the enemy. Therefore, they interested me. So I’d go to the Teddy boy gigs. They’d know who I was, but they would think it was funny that this horrible king of the punks was sitting there among them with a better quiff.
We used to cross the line all the time. That’s what it was all about when we’d go to that soul boy club, the Lacey Lady. The boot boys there never gave us any trouble. They thought if we had the guts to look like th
at and stand in the middle of the floor bouncing around like yo-yos, good luck.
It’s amazing what you can get away with if you push hard enough. There was a lot of violence in the streets between punks and Teddy boys during the late seventies. But if you went smack into the middle of the enemy’s camp, they’d back off because they couldn’t believe you’d have the cheek to do it. If you act like you feel out of place, somebody will suggest you leave. If you’re comfortable in your new surroundings, then there is not a lot people can say. So what. If they’re going to beat me up, they’ll beat me up anyway. Meanwhile, it gives them a mental block and they can’t figure it out. By having that devil-may-care attitude, I made some friends in the Teddy boy movement. One of them was a Millwall football hooligan. He was at the Speakeasy, and he absolutely pummeled Joe Strummer one night. A big fat motherfucker he was, real hard. He didn’t like Joe, and he thought what the Clash stood for was all lies—working-class fakes. Soon after, Joe was going on about being beaten up by gangs of Teds. It was only one in the toilet at the Speakeasy. Later when I went to America, this guy moved in and squatted my place to look after it while I was away.
The Teds were different from the punks in that there were many ages—there was the older lot, all the dads, along with the younger kids. The punk thing was very young. It was like going out and fighting old men, kind of ridiculous, really.
I like Steve Jones very, very much. He’s honestly dishonest. He’ll steal anything. He’ll steal your fucking shoelaces, but if you confront him, he’ll admit it. He’ll tell you yes straight out. He doesn’t deny it, and I like that. Is that childlike? I think it’s an admirable quality in itself. Not the stealing, the admitting it. He’s compulsive, and a lot of that has to do with his upbringing. He had a terrible fucking childhood. He felt his mother hated him. I remember walking the streets with him. We were really broke, and he needed something at his mother’s house. We walked to Battersea from the King’s Road, a fucking long walk. We got there and Steve’s mum wouldn’t let him in. So he pushed his way in. We waited until she went out, and in went Steve. I never forgot her malevolence toward him—it was astounding. I never saw her while I waited downstairs, I heard her scream, “You fucking bastard!” Maybe Steve was a bad son, but c’mon, Mummy, lighten up.
Steve Jones used to despise going home for as long as I knew him. He’s always had extreme communication problems. If you sat him down and tried to discuss a situation, he couldn’t deal with issues and would rather get up and run away. It’s only been the last few years that he and I see eye to eye, instead of being sarcastic with each other. We can have real conversations now. I think if Steve ever lost his childishness, I probably would stop liking him. That’s the very thing that makes him such a good chap to know. The stealing was all part of seeking attention. Although he used to be very aggressive with his sexual drives, it was a ridiculing thing because Steve never had any time for women at all other than wham-bam-thank-you and that’s it.
Steve never saw much of me outside of rehearsals. He knew little about my background and where I came from. Paul used to hang around with me much more than Steve. The only time Steve and I spent time together was when I literally had nowhere to live. Then I’d stay with him on Denmark Street. Even then we didn’t really speak, we’d just sit there across the room. There wasn’t any animosity between us. It was just much better when we didn’t talk than when we did. Steve always had this thing that I was too arty. He assumed I came from that background until I took him to my family’s house. In fact, I brought Malcolm and the whole band up to the old man’s in Finsbury Park. We had picked up the very first test pressing of “Anarchy in the U.K.” and brought it to the house to listen to. Nobody else had a record player at the time. My old man freaked when he saw Malcolm in a black lace outfit.
Steve was shocked to see my extreme working-class family environment. He was angry because there was both a mother and a father. Even though my parents kicked me out, they still showed love, something Steve never had. I know that upset him.
STEVE JONES: I had a fucked-up childhood. I came from west London—Hammersmith or Shepherd’s Bush, same thing. The first thing I remember is being in Hammersmith with my nan, my grandad, and my mum. We lived there until I was about twelve, and then we moved to Benbow Road in Shepherd’s Bush. I lived in a basement with my mom and stepfather. It was a one-bedroom flat, and my bed was at the end of my parents’. We had a tin bath you had to fill up with hot water. We were very poor, and my mum was very young. My stepfather was an asshole, and I was just extra baggage—you know what I mean? I had a distant youth, one outside of the family. I never had any meaningful conversations about anything with my parents when I was young. I didn’t have any plans for work, but I always had an interest in music. My subconscious was telling me music was a way to get out of the shit hole I was in.
For a time, I lived at Linda’s. Linda was a good friend who had lots of cash. I was not living with her—rather, living off her. I had no money, and she was such a laugh. A lot of her attentions worked in the Houses of Parliament, so there was major, lovely filth going on. I’d be sitting there, having to answer the door when they came to our flat at the St. James Park Hotel, which overlooks Buckingham Palace. Many an MP I’ve shaken hands with. What goes on in the Houses of Parliament, particularly in that late night bar—they have a twenty-four-hour bar in the Parliament—is shameful. You could bring down a government on what we knew about those people. We’re not just talking dirty old conservative MPs either, we’re talking about a lot of them. It was Linda and a couple of other girlies in action, and I’d open the door and let the boys in.
Nancy Spungen came over to England with Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, who were remnants of the New York Dolls. We knew what the Heartbreakers were into.
BOB GRUEN: The one thing Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan liked about England was that it was easier to be a junkie there. In America it was a hustle, whereas in England you could get certified and receive a prescription supply. You could buy fresh needles, all kinds of codeine and cough syrups with opium in them—all over the counter.
CAROLINE COON: Up until then I hadn’t seen heroin around. Of course, the English bands are very vulnerable, being as noticed as they were, and they needed the biggest painkiller of all.
Nancy stayed with Linda because she’d been thrown out of the Heartbreak Hotel. She turned up at the door, dumping Nancy onto Linda and her girlfriend. Nancy was a real pain in the arse, all over me.
BOB GRUEN: When Johnny and the Heartbreakers went over to England, Nancy lost her playmates, so naturally she followed them over.
Sid got thrown out of his place and came over one night. So I fobbed Nancy off on Sid. Initially I thought of her as a filthy cunt, which of course appealed to Sid. To be hated, loathed, and despised so much by me, he naturally went for her. She, being a woman of loose inclinations, reciprocated. That was it. From that moment on that was the end of both of them. So, yes, I fobbered Nancy off on Sid, which got her off my back. I thought he’d do the same. I thought he’d see through her. Everybody else did. I’m not very good at handling stupid people, I must admit. I think that’s what it was. Sidney was basically stupid, so easily led into anything. You could tell him anything and he’d suck it up like a sponge and believe it.
Sid was drinking at the time, so at least you could control him. He was very easy to maneuver. You just pointed him in a direction, and he’d go for it. Impressionable. Did I manipulate him? Yes, but not in a bad way. I got him in a band—not a bad thing for me to do—if that’s manipulation. And I got him a girlfriend. Nancy. Very bad.
As far as I know, that was his first girlfriend. Sid never had girlfriends. He loved himself too much. I think he was a virgin. In fact, I know so. What a way to be introduced into the wonderful world of sex. Linda and I left them in a room together, and that was it. We did what we wanted with him off my back for a night. I don’t feel guilty about it. Linda’s girlfriend was a reason she and I
fell apart because Linda found me with her one night. They tried to set Nancy up with an escort agency because, in Nancy’s words, she wanted to “do some tricks, man.” The chap who hired her was so offended, she got sacked after one night because of her behavior.
BOB GRUEN: One day David Johansen was at my place and Nancy was telling us about this brothel she was working in. She would tie guys up and beat them with whips. David and I were fascinated. Guys pay you to tie them up and hit them with whips? We couldn’t believe it. “Who does that?” we asked. According to Nancy, mostly bankers, lawyers, and German guys. I remember her offering, “You guys can come up anytime and we’ll show you what it’s like—on the house.”
Years later, David and I used to joke about it. We’d be driving around at three or four in the morning. “You wanna go to Max’s?” we’d say. “The Mud Club? What do you wanna do?”
“We can always go over to Nancy’s and get beat up for free.”
We never took her up on it.
People make their own decisions. Introducing Sid around was good for him. He made serious efforts to learn to play da-da-da on the bass, but the minute Nancy got her hooks on him—and I should have seen it—he bought the whole New York decadence trip. And that was it. It was all over. Can you imagine them living at Sid’s mother’s place? The three of them? Can you imagine what on earth they were up to? Sid’s mother had a council flat by then. Very strange scenes, I’m afraid.
BOB GRUEN: The first time I’d met Sid he was badgering Malcolm for money. He wanted another seventy pounds. He was screaming and stomping around the place. Sid finally left. A year later, while riding on the bus, we talked about it and Sid admitted that he was putting on a little show. He thought I was some big-shot journalist from America, so he decided to lay it on a little heavier than usual.